I AM AMERICA Part 2

 

I Am America is back with two new books. 

The first is about the earthquake and fire in 1906 San Francisco. Like Lily's book from the Girls Survive series, this is told from the Chinese-American perspective. It digs a little deeper than Lily's though as Han struggles with his identity as both Chinese and American. And the action and drama are far more than in Lily's book. I definitely liked this a lot better. 

The book is written in a regular format. No letters or diaries or anything like that. 

Now this is something new. We've read plenty about prejudice and racism in the US during periods of war, but never has the perspective come from an Indian immigrant. I was really excited about this one, but it didn't turn out quite as I'd hoped. 

Margaret has an Indian (Sikh) father and a white mother. She struggles with being mixed race and with the fallout of her father having some involvement with a party trying to fight for India's independence from Britain. I wish the author had gone all out and just made her Indian. I'm guessing she wanted the mixed race aspect to stick her in a white school so she could have a white German friend who also struggled with prejudice? I'm not sure. 

The book covers a long time span and suffers for it. It's actually unfortunately boring. I hate to say that, but it needed to be at least twice as long and get into Margaret's head a lot better than it did. There are good bones here, but it needed a lot of fleshing out that never happened.

GIRLS SURVIVE Series: Part 4

My post for part 3 of this series got stuck back in January, even though I didn't finish it until much later:
http://redblackandwhitebookreviews.blogspot.com/2020/01/girls-survive-series-part-3.html

I also started writing this in July and got sidetracked. Again. I need to stop doing this.

These newest four Girls Survive just released. I think they were supposed to be August 1st, so once again, they came out early.

Amazon's shipping has been terrible. They've switched to UPS Mail Innovations for certain packages and they take eons to arrive. I get it, pandemic, yeah, but I'm a Prime member and that's not cheap, so I miss the method of shipment I'm used to my money paying for.

Long story short, I only have two of the four books so far. The other two are poking along verrrrrrrry slowly. So for the first time, my review is going out of chronological order.

We begin with Rebecca, whose story was based on the women who helped the Revolutionary War by being heroic messengers. This one was simple, but it was also enjoyable. I liked it a lot.

Maribel's book takes place during the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Maribel is a Hispanic girl with ADD. Back in those days, things like that weren't diagnosed, so it's not discussed in the book in plain language, but the signs are there, and the author addresses it at the end.

Maribel and her family are evacuated from their home and live with friends for three weeks, mostly not believing there's any danger from the volcano. Tired of her family being upset, Maribel decides to sneak back to her home and retrieve some possessions she thinks will help. Naturally, the volcano erupts while she's there and she has to fight her way to safety.

I really liked this one, because this is something I didn't know much about. It went by quickly, as this series tends to do, but it was well-written.

If you've never heard of the Great Molasses Flood, it's about exactly what it sounds like. In Boston in 1919, a giant tank of molasses exploded and the ensuing wave killed 21 people and injured many others. It sounds silly, but it was real and would have been pretty terrifying. 

The events of the book happen very fast. Leah is an orphan who lives with her uncle, who works for the company that owns the tank. Her dream is to go west. She goes to school, having a couple run-ins with a female classmate named Francesca, who's sort of a rival. Throughout the day, the girls become slightly friendlier, but they're outside when the tank explodes and that throws them into a life and death situation together. First they're in the wave itself, then they're trapped in a crawlspace with the level of molasses slowly rising. Both sustain injuries and struggle to find a way out. They end up being rescued and taken for medical assistance. The girls end up fine, but Leah learns later that her uncle was killed in the flood. When she goes home, she discovers that the can she thought held their vacation fund was money he had been saving for her future, so she can actually go west and live her dream. Francesca comes to find her and offers her a place to stay with her family until school ends and Leah can buy a train ticket west. 

This book originally had a different cover. This one here on the right. Leah had longer hair and the title was different. I guess they must have decided "Braves the Wave" sounded a little stupid. 

I liked this one, but the super fast pace made it less interesting than others. It was okay, but I felt like I didn't have time to get invested in the characters much, though I did like both girls. 

Oh, man. This one hit me hard. 

Tara and her mother are vacationing in Thailand, because her mother's parents were Thai immigrants. They're there on their third day when the tsunami hits. 

I'm not sure if the story was hard because Tara and her mother are close, just like I am with my mom, and they're separated. You spend a lot of the story wondering if her mom's okay. (She is. Whew.) It also might have been hard because we survived a hurricane together. Nothing as powerfully devastating as this tsunami, but it was terrifying regardless. Some of the incidents in the book brought things back. It ends on a bittersweet note, because Tara and her mom are safe and return home, but you never learn the fates of other characters in the book. Still, I think it's one of the strongest of this entire series. Very powerful. 

DRESS CODED

 
Man, I honestly can't believe I pulled this off, but I completed all 3 YA books in one day. It's been nice just reading and not worrying about anything else. 

I have liked all three of the ones I read today, but I've got to say Dress Coded was my favorite. It's got a more unusual format, which includes texting, podcast transcripts, lists and letters mixed between the chapters. It feels more realistic in its chaos. 

It's got an obvious theme: girls are being unfairly dress-coded at their middle school and one of them starts a podcast to tell their stories. 

There are a lot of disturbing elements here, but each one feels like it could be absolutely true. There's a girl who hides her period-stained pants with her sweatshirt around her waist and is in the hallway in a tank top to get her phone from her locker to call someone to bring her fresh pants. She gets in trouble with the principal and a completely sexist male teacher and even gets the class trip cancelled. This is utterly unreasonable, but definitely sounds like it could be real. There's a black girl with natural hair who gets detention for retaliating after a boy in her class pushes her hair down to get it "out of his way." Not exactly fitting with the dress code, but also definitely believable. And there are loads of other stories. 

Also wound through the book is the main character's bad relationship with her vape-addicted older brother and the trouble he brings their family, plus other friend drama. 

It's quite well-done and I recommend it. I do recommend all three I read today.

THE PRETTIEST

Next up in our YA lineup for the day is The Prettiest. 

This one has a pretty simple premise. Someone wrote a list ranking the Top 50 prettiest girls in the 8th grade and the book follows the fallout. 

Shy, book-obsessed poet Eve is shocked to find herself at #1, while most popular girl Sophie is equally shocked to find herself at #2. 

Eve endures attention she doesn't want from being hit on and pursued to nasty comments saying she wrote the list herself. She's painfully shy and awkward, so she has no idea how to handle any of this, especially in the wake of her having had some body developments over the summer. 

Sophie is obsessed with her looks. She comes from a lower-income, single-parent family and hides where she lives from her friends. She's afraid being second will topple her place at the top of the popularity food chain. 

Nessa is Eve's best friend, a theater star. Being plus-sized, she's not surprised she's not on the list at all, but she handles everything with more realism and self-confidence than the other two main characters. 

The girls end up teaming up to try to out the list writer, who they think is popular boy Brody. They try to exploit his current interest in Eve, but that backfires spectacularly. As more and more comes out and things change, the team grows to include more girls and one of Brody's former male friends. 

There's a lot going on in this book aside from just body positivity issues. There's a bit of anti-Semitism (Eve is Jewish) and racism (Nessa has a quick couple lines about prejudice her family has faced because her mother speaks Spanish) that's brushed aside maybe a little too quickly. There's the girls dealing with being the target of a popular boy after he feels rejected by them. He tried to pressure Sophie into kissing him and she refused, which led to fallout there. There's distance between family members for different reasons. Parents and siblings reacting to the list in different ways. Definitely a hell of a lot of sexual harassment in various forms. 

One of the main themes between all the characters is how we handle the wrong things we see. Eve is actually hard to like for a while, because she's such a mouse that she never speaks up to defend a friend or herself against abuse until she's pushed to extremes. Nessa isn't accepting of Eve's behavior in various ways and their eventual making up feels too easy. There's a lot more to this, but I'm keeping quiet to avoid spoilers. 

I enjoyed the book, but I felt like it could have been expanded in many places and been better for it. 

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.

PANDORA 2

 
The second book in the Pandora series finds our three young heroines (and Pandy's dog) on board a ship and on their way to Alexandria. They're now accompanied by Homer, a large "youth" (as the girls refer to boys around their age) who had once attended gladiator school but now worked for his father's shipping company. Against his will, because he wants to be a poet. Because of course he does. Homer's father sold the girls their passage with the condition that Homer accompany them for safety, so they've now got an oversized cute (according to Alcie) bodyguard. 

This book is almost non-stop action and excitement. 

First, a storm hits the ship. Then...a tornado. Both come from Aeolus at the bidding of Hera. They're saved from the tornado by a squadron of dolphins sent by Poseidon, but they end up far down the Nile and away from Alexandria. 

Then on land once again, Pandy falls through the ceiling of an underground burial chamber. She's forced to use her fire powers to keep the punishment system in the chamber from impaling her on stakes. When she melts a golden one, its explosion leaves her with the little golden teardrop she's drawn with on the covers from then on. With the help of an undead skeleton, they each gain power over language, which is quite convenient. 

After they emerge from the temple, they're confronted by a large group of mysterious people and eventually taken in by what's basically a travelling circus. It's run by a Chinese man and his ancient mother, and there are loads of interesting characters here from all over the world. 

During a performance given to their new guests, Wang Chun Lo, the leader, performs his trick, which involves actually travelling to different locations across the globe via large crystal panels. Pandy has the idea that they can use these to get to Alexandria faster. In a private discussion with Wang Chun Lo, he agrees to help her, but tells her about the price for travelling that way: fifteen years of your life. Pandy willingly takes on everyone's fifteen years without telling them. They use the crystals to contact the family of an acolyte in the Temple of Delphi they met in the first book, and he's able to point them to the palace, where young queen Cleopatra is unable to tear herself away from her mirror. Being that they're after Vanity, it seems logical that the mirror is it. After going through the panels, everyone else is shocked to see than Pandy is now 73. Iole gets very angry with her, but they've got bigger problems. Cleopatra is wasting away because she won't eat, but she's also developed super-strength, so she's killing and blinding servants who aren't pandering to her beauty needs enough. Through some clever trickery, they're able to get the mirror away from her and get Vanity back in the box, though not before Pandora gets bopped by one of its bubbles. 

In an interesting twist, Wang Chun Lo reappears and reveals he isn't Wang Chun Lo after all. He's...Osiris. I loved so quickly seeing a non-Greek god involved and Osiris was written pretty awesomely. Osiris cures Pandy of her vanity problem and offers to grant a wish basically for each of the others. They all say they want Pandy back to normal and that's what they get, despite Iole having a broken arm and Alcie still having two left feet. (Osiris does fix Alcie's feet though, in a surprise to her that she notices as they're leaving.) After using the map, everyone is disappointed their next location is so far away, until Apollo drops in and pretty much hands them the keys to his sun chariot. 

On the way to the chariot, Pandy notices Dido is missing and remembers seeing her dog surrounded by peacock-colored cats. Yep, Hera's got him. 

Also, Homer and Alcie like each other. Her crush on him is obvious at the beginning of the book, but his feelings about her come a little bit out of nowhere. They're cute though, so why not? 

PANDORA 1

 
 

I was instantly smitten with the Pandora series when it came out in 2008. 

Pandora, daughter of Prometheus, does what she's known for: opens the box containing all the world's evils. 

From there forth, she's on a quest to recapture them and she's only got 6 months to do it. (If you think that's a lot of time, try imagining travel in the ancient world and how time-consuming it was.)

Pandora is your standard awkward heroine. Brown hair she wishes was curly. Brown eyes she wishes were blue. An overbite she thinks makes her look like a horse. She feels like a loser and that's how she and her two best friends are treated. Beautiful redhead Alcie is descended from Medusa, so that's what makes her different. And Iole, who's a year younger than the other two, is very smart, but physically more delicate. She was sick as a child and would have died if not for Apollo's help. 

Pandora unleashes the evils after taunting by her mean girl bullies. She and her family are then whisked away to Mount Olympus where Zeus gives Pandora her task. Recapture the evils within 6 months without any help from her family. Not being family, Alcie and Iole get away with coming with her. 

The three girls do have assistance from the gods though. None of them want to see Hera use the world's evils to take control of everything. Artemis, who gave Pandy a talking wolfskin diary years ago, tells her to make sure to take the diary along. It also communicates with Pandora's dog, Dido. (My one real sticking point in the first book is this dog's name. Dido the dog is male, but Dido is a classically female name.) Athena gives her a small bust of herself which can answer questions, though the voice sticks a bit, so it's not always clear what it's saying. Hephaestus has crafted her a net to help with capturing the evils. Hermes brought Prometheus two shells that can be used as a phone so he can communicate with his daughter. There's also a magic map that tells where the next evil is, what it is and keeps track of how many days are left.

Pandora herself is a demigod with power over fire that she's just learning about. She's always used it to start up her fire in her bedroom, but she's far more powerful than that. 

Most of the book is the setup for the story and the capturing of Jealousy takes up far less time near the end. It takes place at the temple of Delphi and I liked the oracle characters. 

Almost every character in the book is likable, except those not meant to be. Even Hera is written as powerful and cunning, bent on revenge and world domination, yet also sympathetic at moments. I  honestly can't remember how this story ends, so it will be fun to read through it all again.