I’ve been reading a lot lately and I’ve been really enjoying what I’ve been reading lately. It’s been interesting though, as the more I’ve enjoyed books, the less I’ve wanted to sit down and write lengthy reviews of them. Instead, I’m eager to pick up the next book and cross my fingers it’ll be as good as the one before. Which isn’t to say I don’t want to review anymore nor do I want to quit talking loudly about really great books. Instead, it’s easier to talk about a pile of recent reads at once and make sure I talk about something relating to them before forgetting to mention them at all. More about this later in the week.  

Here’s a look at 3 recent contemporary/realistic YA titles I’ve read and what makes them solid and worthwhile.

Renee Watson’s This Side of Home is about twins Maya and Nikki — both named after the poets — and what it’s like to be living in their Portland neighborhood which has seen significant gentrification over the last few years. The story picks up when Maya’s best friend, who had lived across the street from her, moves to the other side of Portland, and in move a family that’s much different than she’s used to. They represent the changes going on in her community, and she doesn’t want anything to do with it. 

Maya is very reluctant to embrace her community’s changes, where her sister Nikki is more willing to try out new places to eat and shop, and she’s much more accommodating about educational and relationship changes going on around her. There isn’t a message here about whether gentrification is good or bad, and neither Maya nor Nikki are made out to be correct in their attitudes. Instead, this is a story about degrees of change and about sociopolitical and economic changes and how the impact individuals so differently. 

But it’s not all heavy. There’s also a story here about Maya, Nikki, and best friend Essences’s changing dreams. Maya, as readers won’t be surprised to discover, is frustrated when the dreams she and her best friend had to attend the same historically black college together aren’t shared forever. Where she thinks she knows the right thing for everyone, Maya learns that she can only ever control her own future and destiny, and that understanding she can’t push her dreams and expectations on those around her is how she grows her relationships even stronger. 

Maya is stubborn, hard headed, and it’s those things that drive her to be ambitious. This is an outstanding — and fairly quick — read about embracing one’s heritage while being open to change and new experiences. Readers who are seeking stories about race and class issues, especially in an urban setting, will want to pick This Side of Home up.

One side note: while I LOVE the cover, it’s not representative of either Maya nor Nikki. Watson is fairly explicit in how the girls wear their hair on numerous occasions in the story, and neither of them fit the image above. It’s a great cover, but this isn’t either girl in the story. 

This Side of Home is available now. Review copy received from the publisher.

I like a good military-themed YA book, in part because I don’t think there are a whole lot of them out there. Heather Demetrios offers up a fresh story in I’ll Meet You There, which follows Skylar Evans as she begins a relationship with a veteran named Josh who comes back from the Marines. 

This is a romance, which usually isn’t a thing I care about in a story, but it works really well here. Set in a lower class town in California, Skylar works to help keep a roof over the head of her and her mother. When Sky’s mom loses her job, the responsibility put upon her gets even heavier. It’s so heavy, in fact, that Skylar’s wondering if her dreams of getting out of town and going to college will be squashed. 

While working at Paradise, a local motel, Sky “meets” Josh — she knew him before, but it wasn’t until he was working at the same motel where she got to know more of who he is and why it is he’s back in town. His injuries from Afghanistan put him on leave, but as readers learn through the diary entries included in between Sky’s chapters, there’s much more going on with Josh internally. He’s suffering from PTSD and being back home is making him rethink what his future might look like on numerous levels. This isn’t romanticized at all, despite the fact there’s respect for his service. 

Sky isn’t exceptionally defined in this book, but that isn’t a huge mark against this book because there’s so much else going on that is really well fleshed out. The look at class and status here is rarely seen in YA — and interestingly, I read this book immediately after reading My Best Everything by Sarah Tomp which also features a lower socioeconomic class girl who might have to skip her college dreams because of a parent’s job loss — but more, the writing is smooth, breezy, and enjoyable. It could have done without some of the too-modern references, as it might date the book quickly, but readers who enjoyed Trish Doller’s Something Like Normal will enjoy this. 

Bonus points in this one for a very forthright consent scene between Josh and Skylar. What made it stand out wasn’t just that it was Josh seeking consent from Skylar. She seeks consent from him as well. This was a well-drawn look at trust, sexual exploration, and healthy conversation. 

I’ll Meet You There is available now. Review copy received from the publisher.

What is the significance of the middle finger? What does it mean when it’s thrown at you? What did you do to deserve that gesture? 

Jo Knowles explores the lives of ten characters in Read Between the Lines, tying them all together with the flipping of a middle finger. It begins when Nate, who is an unpopular kid at school, gets hurt in gym class. From there, we see that he lives in a not-so-friendly home environment with a father who is disappointed in him. He’s broken his middle finger and dad’s annoyed he has to take his son to the hospital to get it healed. 

Knowles then offers up nine more stories of people who attend this relatively small high school, ranging from the girl who feels like a complete outsider in her tight-knit group of friends, the girl who thinks she’s too fat to be a cheerleader (and experiences the small slights people toss at those who are overweight), to a gay couple who has to keep their relationship a secret from those around them, to a recent graduate of the high school who is counting down the days until he can pursue his dreams, to a teacher who encounters these students and what her experience is as a “replacement” teacher for one who killed himself. While it sounds complicated, it’s relatively straightforward; we get a snapshot into each of their lives at that moment, and in each of the stories — which are short — the character experiences a middle finger at some point, for some transgression they’ve committed. 

Like Siobhan Vivian does in The List, we’re forced to see a community from multiple sides of the story. We meet and re-meet these characters throughout the short glimpses, and because we’re given both their perspective, as well as the biased perspectives of their friends and peers, we are the ones left to make a decision on whether their actions were justified or out of line. 

All of the characters have distinct voices, though not all of their stories have the same resonance. That’s not a flaw of the book, but a feature. Different readers will connect in different ways, 
seeing bits of themselves in some places more than others. But ultimately, Read Between the Lines is about empathy and understanding the complex internal and external lives people are living beyond the setting they’re in currently. This is about how complexity itself is a complex idea. 

Readers who love connected short stories will love this, as will fans of Siobhan Vivian and Laurie Halse Anderson. Knowles sits in a sweet spot between those two voices. 

Read Between the Lines is available tomorrow, March 10. Review copy received from the publisher.