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In which I read a bunch of stuff my kids told me to read
E is at church camp and A just got the latest Percy Jackson: Senior Year Adventures from the library and has been reading it all evening, so I finally had time to write this up!
This is what I've actually been reading over the last six months/year and why I've been even slower than usual about reading everything else (although I did tell A. I had to take turns with the Hugo novels). For E this was mostly stuff she read for school that she wanted me to read so I could help her with her papers, while for A. this has been books he really likes and wants to... well, he doesn't want to talk to me about them really, he more wants to ask me questions about what parts I liked and whether I thought X was funny and so on.
- American Born Chinese (Yang) - a graphic novel with three separate threads (that all eventually come together). The first thread is about the legendary Monkey King and how the other gods laugh at him, and how he tries to become a non-monkey-like character. The second is about Jin Wang, a second-generation Asian-American kid (the eponymous American-Born Chinese) who struggles through fitting in at school where he is one of very few Asians. The third thread is about Danny, an "all-American" boy who has a Chinaman "cousin" who is basically a caricature of all the worst stereotypes about the Chinese. I liked this book a lot more than I was expecting to -- partially because I had an almost visceral reaction to some of Jin's issues (having also been a very small minority in my city until I went to school in a different city in 11th grade) -- partially because I enjoyed seeing the story come together. It was interesting to me that E has had such a very different experience growing up that Jin's issues in this book were somewhat alien to her.
- All American Boys (Reynolds / Kelly) - Rashad, a (well-behaved, artistic) Black boy, is accused of shoplifting and then beaten by a police officer. There is a witness: a white boy, Quinn Collins, who is a family friend of the police officer. How they and their community deal with what happened is the subject of the book. I didn't relate to this as much as the previous book for obvious reasons, but I thought it was a good book for both E and me to read. (She had a choice of several different YA novels to read, including Frankly in Love below.) Mostly avoided being too preachy, and had at least one interesting vignette that highlighted a little more complexity, although it was never in doubt where most of your sympathy was supposed to be.
- Frankly in Love (Yoon) - Frank Li, a second generation Korean-American, is in love with Brit Means, a white girl. His parents Do Not Approve, and so he hatches a fake dating scheme with another kid in their Korean-American community, Joy Song, who has a similar problem with her boyfriend. Because they are high school kids, it gets exponentially more messy. Meanwhile, life continues to happen, including both family angst and college applications/acceptances/rejections.
Actually, E did not read this for school, her best friend did, and then E also read it because one of the major characters in the book the same first name as one of their friends at school, and they both thought it was hilarious that the character in the book is not anything like their friend, and then I got curious, and then I got hooked. I must admit I did skip some of the messy adolescent love bits, though -- like, I don't really want to watch the inevitable collision.
And oh gosh. Being second-gen myself, the whole milieu of "our parents get together regularly because they are the same ethnicity/culture and for no other reason; and often don't even seem like they even like each other that much; but at the same time expect us, their kids, to all be best friends; but we're really not even though we called each other best friends when we were in, like, second grade" was, er, extremely relatable, although my parents went against the flow in being okay with my sister and me dating not just our own ethnicity but also white guys. (No additional ethnicities, though!) The only thing I thought really didn't work was the college acceptances, which seemed implausibly prestigious for the amount of work they weren't putting into them, but Yoon is probably remembering what it was like when he went to college, which is a bit different than the college landscape these days.
Content note: terminal illness of important minor character. (Which I was totally not expecting, hmph.)
- Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry) - A Black three-generation family living in an apartment in Chicago debates what to do with the life insurance check they are about to get. Somehow I'd got through my own high school experience without reading this play, although it was considered a classic then too. Probably we skipped it because my American Lit class never really got all the way to the 1950's (we did read Their Eyes Were Watching God,which I guess is 1930's). E's class read it aloud, which is probably good as a) it's a play, and b) I think you would need a lot more background knowledge to read this than the YA stuff they read. I'm encouraged that her class did this (I was starting to side-eye all that YA) and also glad I read it, although wow it was depressing.
- Keeper of the Lost Cities: Books 2-9.5 (Messenger) - Continuing the adventures of Sophie Foster, who discovers (in the first book) she is one of the extra-special elves -- all of whom are gorgeous and super-intelligent and well-dressed and who have magical powers (except for the very few who don't) -- and is taken from the human world to live in the gorgeous elf cities -- and also is extra-special even among elves, having brown instead of blue eyes (all other elves have blue eyes), and is a telepath which is not common, and also multiple magical powers, which is extra super rare. Anyway, in these books she has more adventures and becomes a member of the Black Swan, a group of rebels against the current elven government. (It does, in fact, turn out that the offputting things about elven society were put there on purpose!) Eventually, both the Black Swan and the current government are pitted against the Neverseen, a group of extremists. Sophie is all very zomg!Dramatic about all this.
Because these are YA-ish books, at least as important as all these existential struggles is that she is also involved in a love triangle of sorts with Fitz, who is super handsome and sweet but has a bit of a temper and is not always very clear-eyed about his society's drawbacks, and Keefe, who is irreverent and always getting in trouble and has awful parents but inside has a heart of gold. I say a love triangle "of sorts" because although it is blindingly clear that both Fitz and Keefe have stupendous crushes on her, she takes 5? 6? books to figure out that Fitz likes her as much as she likes him, and then for several books more she is incomprehensibly dense about Keefe, to the extent that another character starts talking about the "Great Foster Oblivion." (The parts where a few characters start going a bit meta and not taking everything nearly so seriously are my favorite parts.) Sophie is, perhaps unsurprisingly, also very zomg!Dramatic about all this.
Anyway, reading these was a labor of love, particularly given that I am an adult who is pretty much Done with large fantasy epics, and this is... a large fantasy epic, pitched to middle schoolers. I recommend it highly if you are a middle schooler (or an elementary schooler who is willing to read large fantasy books)! Or if you like zomg!Dramatic! Messenger clearly knows her audience, and there are quite a few plot twists and cliffhangers galore.
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Heroes of Olympus, The Trials of Apollo, Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard (1) (Riordan) - the classic stories about half-Greek-god (well, okay, Magnus is not half Greek god, as you can guess) half-human kids and their adventures with mythological creatures and gods in the present day. Yes, I never read Riordan at the time that these came out, so I got to read them now. These have a fair amount of angst, but are also quite irreverent and fun, and the writing is compelling enough to keep one entertained, and they also have plenty of plot twists; each of the longer series is somewhat epic in each book, and then pretty much cataclysmic by the end of the series. It's not surprising that these were and are so popular! Riordan also, especially in the later books, does seed them a bit with inside jokes for the adult reader -- one that I remember fondly is when King Midas settles in Omaha, because he was told there was a sage there -- I had to explain that one to A. I liked these more than the Keeper books, but that may just be because there is correspondingly less internal angst.
My favorite so far has been the five-book series The Trials of Apollo, in which Apollo is cursed by his father to be a gawky adolescent human who is bound to obey another demigod's instructions. This series benefits both from Riordan growing as a writer and the weight of two five-book sequences behind it (so that we already have an attachment to a bunch of characters), as well as Apollo himself being a hilarious narrator -- but what I like about it is Apollo's gradual growth.
One random thing: I absolutely loved the resolution of the whole Reyna arc, which was introduced in the Heroes book sequence but is finally followed up on here.
Given all the clues Riordan put in our path, I was braced for a romance between Apollo and Reyna, but the way she started laughing so hard about how ludicrous it was to expect her to want to date him, especially godly!him, and how that itself became an epiphany that she didn't need a man, or even a woman, to "heal her heart," she was enough for that herself -- that was just great and the best resolution possible! I loved it!
I did think the ending fell a little flat --
I am still working on Magnus Chase, and as I mentioned we just got the latest Percy Jackson: Senior Year Adventures (a much more low-key series) from the library, so I do have a few more to go...
This is what I've actually been reading over the last six months/year and why I've been even slower than usual about reading everything else (although I did tell A. I had to take turns with the Hugo novels). For E this was mostly stuff she read for school that she wanted me to read so I could help her with her papers, while for A. this has been books he really likes and wants to... well, he doesn't want to talk to me about them really, he more wants to ask me questions about what parts I liked and whether I thought X was funny and so on.
- American Born Chinese (Yang) - a graphic novel with three separate threads (that all eventually come together). The first thread is about the legendary Monkey King and how the other gods laugh at him, and how he tries to become a non-monkey-like character. The second is about Jin Wang, a second-generation Asian-American kid (the eponymous American-Born Chinese) who struggles through fitting in at school where he is one of very few Asians. The third thread is about Danny, an "all-American" boy who has a Chinaman "cousin" who is basically a caricature of all the worst stereotypes about the Chinese. I liked this book a lot more than I was expecting to -- partially because I had an almost visceral reaction to some of Jin's issues (having also been a very small minority in my city until I went to school in a different city in 11th grade) -- partially because I enjoyed seeing the story come together. It was interesting to me that E has had such a very different experience growing up that Jin's issues in this book were somewhat alien to her.
- All American Boys (Reynolds / Kelly) - Rashad, a (well-behaved, artistic) Black boy, is accused of shoplifting and then beaten by a police officer. There is a witness: a white boy, Quinn Collins, who is a family friend of the police officer. How they and their community deal with what happened is the subject of the book. I didn't relate to this as much as the previous book for obvious reasons, but I thought it was a good book for both E and me to read. (She had a choice of several different YA novels to read, including Frankly in Love below.) Mostly avoided being too preachy, and had at least one interesting vignette that highlighted a little more complexity, although it was never in doubt where most of your sympathy was supposed to be.
- Frankly in Love (Yoon) - Frank Li, a second generation Korean-American, is in love with Brit Means, a white girl. His parents Do Not Approve, and so he hatches a fake dating scheme with another kid in their Korean-American community, Joy Song, who has a similar problem with her boyfriend. Because they are high school kids, it gets exponentially more messy. Meanwhile, life continues to happen, including both family angst and college applications/acceptances/rejections.
Actually, E did not read this for school, her best friend did, and then E also read it because one of the major characters in the book the same first name as one of their friends at school, and they both thought it was hilarious that the character in the book is not anything like their friend, and then I got curious, and then I got hooked. I must admit I did skip some of the messy adolescent love bits, though -- like, I don't really want to watch the inevitable collision.
And oh gosh. Being second-gen myself, the whole milieu of "our parents get together regularly because they are the same ethnicity/culture and for no other reason; and often don't even seem like they even like each other that much; but at the same time expect us, their kids, to all be best friends; but we're really not even though we called each other best friends when we were in, like, second grade" was, er, extremely relatable, although my parents went against the flow in being okay with my sister and me dating not just our own ethnicity but also white guys. (No additional ethnicities, though!) The only thing I thought really didn't work was the college acceptances, which seemed implausibly prestigious for the amount of work they weren't putting into them, but Yoon is probably remembering what it was like when he went to college, which is a bit different than the college landscape these days.
Content note: terminal illness of important minor character. (Which I was totally not expecting, hmph.)
- Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry) - A Black three-generation family living in an apartment in Chicago debates what to do with the life insurance check they are about to get. Somehow I'd got through my own high school experience without reading this play, although it was considered a classic then too. Probably we skipped it because my American Lit class never really got all the way to the 1950's (we did read Their Eyes Were Watching God,which I guess is 1930's). E's class read it aloud, which is probably good as a) it's a play, and b) I think you would need a lot more background knowledge to read this than the YA stuff they read. I'm encouraged that her class did this (I was starting to side-eye all that YA) and also glad I read it, although wow it was depressing.
- Keeper of the Lost Cities: Books 2-9.5 (Messenger) - Continuing the adventures of Sophie Foster, who discovers (in the first book) she is one of the extra-special elves -- all of whom are gorgeous and super-intelligent and well-dressed and who have magical powers (except for the very few who don't) -- and is taken from the human world to live in the gorgeous elf cities -- and also is extra-special even among elves, having brown instead of blue eyes (all other elves have blue eyes), and is a telepath which is not common, and also multiple magical powers, which is extra super rare. Anyway, in these books she has more adventures and becomes a member of the Black Swan, a group of rebels against the current elven government. (It does, in fact, turn out that the offputting things about elven society were put there on purpose!) Eventually, both the Black Swan and the current government are pitted against the Neverseen, a group of extremists. Sophie is all very zomg!Dramatic about all this.
Because these are YA-ish books, at least as important as all these existential struggles is that she is also involved in a love triangle of sorts with Fitz, who is super handsome and sweet but has a bit of a temper and is not always very clear-eyed about his society's drawbacks, and Keefe, who is irreverent and always getting in trouble and has awful parents but inside has a heart of gold. I say a love triangle "of sorts" because although it is blindingly clear that both Fitz and Keefe have stupendous crushes on her, she takes 5? 6? books to figure out that Fitz likes her as much as she likes him, and then for several books more she is incomprehensibly dense about Keefe, to the extent that another character starts talking about the "Great Foster Oblivion." (The parts where a few characters start going a bit meta and not taking everything nearly so seriously are my favorite parts.) Sophie is, perhaps unsurprisingly, also very zomg!Dramatic about all this.
Anyway, reading these was a labor of love, particularly given that I am an adult who is pretty much Done with large fantasy epics, and this is... a large fantasy epic, pitched to middle schoolers. I recommend it highly if you are a middle schooler (or an elementary schooler who is willing to read large fantasy books)! Or if you like zomg!Dramatic! Messenger clearly knows her audience, and there are quite a few plot twists and cliffhangers galore.
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Heroes of Olympus, The Trials of Apollo, Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard (1) (Riordan) - the classic stories about half-Greek-god (well, okay, Magnus is not half Greek god, as you can guess) half-human kids and their adventures with mythological creatures and gods in the present day. Yes, I never read Riordan at the time that these came out, so I got to read them now. These have a fair amount of angst, but are also quite irreverent and fun, and the writing is compelling enough to keep one entertained, and they also have plenty of plot twists; each of the longer series is somewhat epic in each book, and then pretty much cataclysmic by the end of the series. It's not surprising that these were and are so popular! Riordan also, especially in the later books, does seed them a bit with inside jokes for the adult reader -- one that I remember fondly is when King Midas settles in Omaha, because he was told there was a sage there -- I had to explain that one to A. I liked these more than the Keeper books, but that may just be because there is correspondingly less internal angst.
My favorite so far has been the five-book series The Trials of Apollo, in which Apollo is cursed by his father to be a gawky adolescent human who is bound to obey another demigod's instructions. This series benefits both from Riordan growing as a writer and the weight of two five-book sequences behind it (so that we already have an attachment to a bunch of characters), as well as Apollo himself being a hilarious narrator -- but what I like about it is Apollo's gradual growth.
One random thing: I absolutely loved the resolution of the whole Reyna arc, which was introduced in the Heroes book sequence but is finally followed up on here.
Spoilers, I suppose
Given all the clues Riordan put in our path, I was braced for a romance between Apollo and Reyna, but the way she started laughing so hard about how ludicrous it was to expect her to want to date him, especially godly!him, and how that itself became an epiphany that she didn't need a man, or even a woman, to "heal her heart," she was enough for that herself -- that was just great and the best resolution possible! I loved it!
I did think the ending fell a little flat --
Mild spoiler regarding the ending
-- in the end, Apollo becomes a god again, as has been signposted the entire time (so I don't really even think it's a spoiler), and has a different perspective on it -- but that's all. I guess I was expecting him to be a little more exciting? Strike out from Olympus, or overthrow the gods himself, or -- idk, but just returning to the status quo felt a little tame.I am still working on Magnus Chase, and as I mentioned we just got the latest Percy Jackson: Senior Year Adventures (a much more low-key series) from the library, so I do have a few more to go...