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Enrolled at Riverstone High School (RHS) in Ohio, Jasmine and Jackson Ghasnavi are the mixed race (half White, half Iranian) children of doctors. Jasmine is a senior who loves pottery, and Jackson’s passion is theatre. When their parents divorce, Jackson develops abandonment issues and Jasmine struggles to find a lasting relationship. Jackson helps his sister cope with her breakups by constructing breakup lists. At the recommendation of his therapist, Jackson also uses lists to cope with his own anxiety. These lists and teen relationship drama form the plot for Adib Khorram’s novel The Breakup Lists. As a former “theatre kid” himself, Khorram infuses his novelRead More →

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The Silence that Binds Us by Joanna Ho – Rel. 6/14/22 Maybelline Chen loves her parents, but sometimes she needs her brother Danny to stand between her and their expectations. When Danny commits suicide, May is suddenly adrift. The big brother she loves is gone and there’s a silence in her house that neither May nor her parents are able to fill. As they struggle to return to a semblance of normality, May’s family comes under attack when a prominent community figure not only accuses her parents of driving Danny to suicide but accuses the entire Asian community of putting unbearable pressure on their childrenRead More →

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Set in Riverton, Washington, Jay’s Gay Agenda by Jason June follows the life of Jay Collier, a young man who feels alone in his difference. A hyper-organized list maker, Jay is a statistics geek, mathematician, and reality tv aficionado who can recite the MTV, VH1, and Bravo show schedules. He is also an award-winning hoedown costumier and a self-proclaimed “inexperienced and getting-desperate gay virgin” (60). Jay’s life grows more complicated when his ride-or-die best friend, Lu Fuhrman, goes into “Heterosexual Hookup Mode.” While Lu experiences various milestones with her boyfriend, Chip, Jay feels abandoned and like he’s living in quarantine. Then, his mom is promotedRead More →

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Sixth grader and lover of horses, Waka Tanaka was born in the United States and lives in Kansas, but her Japanese parents worry that Waka’s Japanese language skills are lacking, so they decide to send her to Tokyo to live with her Obaasama, her grandmother. In her semi-autobiographical account, While I Was Away, Waka T. Brown shares Waka’s struggle to find a place in her grandmother’s home, to curate a friend group, and to read and write the complicated strokes of kanji. Brown also takes the reader on a tour of Japan with its culinary, linguistic, and cultural practices. In Tokyo, Waka experiences a life-changingRead More →

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Weighed down by her parents’ rules, paranoia, fears, and three years of betrayal after her sister Rachel’s death, Elizabeth Jones wants to escape the noose and have some fun.  Because of the constraint Beth feels, she yearns to “bust windows, get drunk, and have sex with as many people as possible” (136).  So, before summer ends and her senior year begins, Beth attends a party and hooks up with Chase, a blond hottie with an aura of controlled calm. “But it didn’t take very long for . . . the thrill of doing something new and exciting and rebellious [as losing her virginity] to beRead More →