PIPPA PARK RAISES HER GAME

This is the first of what I'm hoping will be three young adult reviews today. 

I get books suggested to me on Amazon all the time and that's how I found the three of these. 

Pippa Park Raises Her Game came out in February. It's sort of a modernization of Great Expectations, but not really. The similarities are rather shallow. To the point that I honestly didn't even realize what it was going for until the notes afterward. Then I went "Oh, yeah, okay." But the book stands alone just fine. 

Pippa is a seventh grader who struggles with math and her family's expectations for her. She loves basketball and she's really good at it, but she's not allowed on the team until her math grades improve. 

One day, she's practicing by herself and has an encounter with a teenage boy, where she generously offers him a snack cake and some brief conversation. Not long after, she begins being tutored in math by a wealthy boy who goes to a private school. And not long after that, she's shocked to see she's been offered a basketball scholarship to the same private school her tutor attends. 

Pippa soon becomes wrapped up in her own deceit. Not that she planned anything malicious, but she feels she'll be judged for her family background. Her mother couldn't renew her work visa, so she lives in Korea, while Pippa lives with her older sister, who runs a laundromat. Her sister's husband works in a factory. Mina, the sister, is a hard character to like. She's not abusive toward Pippa, but her lack of support and encouragement is pretty awful. Her husband though is honestly one of the best male adult characters I've ever encountered in a young adult book though. Jung-Hwa is kind, generous and just amazing. I love him. 

On top of having to hide her public school background from her new classmates, Pippa finds herself in several types of drama. She has a crush on her older tutor, though he's very cold and he clearly has some bizarre family drama going on. She falls in with "The Royals," the popular girl clique, and then has to try to keep up with them, though thankfully that's handled in a pretty realistic manner. Their leader also has a crush on Eliot, Pippa's tutor, so that's an issue. Pippa runs into her old best friend and kind of blows him off because she's with her new wealthy female friends. And she's also being threatened by a cyberbully, who claims to know her secrets. Then her mother is in a car accident and Mina has to go to Korea to be with her, leaving Pippa to struggle with large laundry orders over Thanksgiving break when she's also supposed to be studying for a big math test. 

It's eventually revealed that Eliot has an older brother named Matthew, who turns out to be the older boy Pippa gave a snack cake to at the beginning of the book. It's Matthew that got Pippa the scholarship, not Eliot as she has thought. Then she gets involved in their family drama, which leads to her possible expulsion after a jealous classmate writes an expose on her and publishes it online.  

It's an enjoyable, but quite predictable book. It was clear to me from the beginning that the older boy got her the scholarship. It was never Eliot. It was also clear that Olive was the cyberbully the entire time. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be obvious to the reader and not to Pippa, but I'm hoping that's the case. I did like the resolution of the problems in the end and how certain friends stood by Pippa throughout her struggles. Helen is a really likeable character and so is Winona. (I do tend to love Winonas.) I also like that the cast is diverse but it's not an in your face thing. Pippa is Korean. Helen is black. Winona's last name isn't mentioned until the end, but it's Hussein. Another girl is Divya, who's likely Indian. 

All in all, I'd definitely read another book about Pippa or by the same author.