It’s Monday & I read a bunch of YA from the last century

This past week, I read:

A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich by Alice Childress
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was a little hard to get into because the first chapter is told in dialect, and I was tired when I started it. It’s told in alternating POVs by everyone affected by Benjie’s drug use and offers some interesting perspectives on family, race, and economic equality.

It’s a slim volume but took me longer than I expected to read–probably because it took me a little while to figure out.

That ending is killer, for sure. Worth it just for that.

(I also wrote a full-length review of this on the blog. You can read it here.)

 

Sweet Sixteen by Linda A. Cooney
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

2.5 stars, rounding down

I liked that this was actually more about the girls’ relationships with their families and each other than anything else–even though the cover and back of the book description led me to believe otherwise. The beginning was a little slow and the emphasis on sixteen was a little weird, but this was firmly grounded in reality and the summer romance was more of a summer friendship, which is a thing I dig. Slice of life, man. It works for me.

 

The Boy Who Drank Too Much by Shep Greene
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The title of this should really be “The Friend of the Boy Who Drank Too Much. Also: Hockey” or possibly “How to Tell If You’re the Friend of the Boy Who Drinks Too Much Who Is Your Hockey Teammate.” Too much?

This was fine but I will probably forget that I read it. Julie was cool, though.

 

Now That I Know by Norma Klein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I feel the same way about this book that I did about Tiger Eyes. Super authentic and relatable, and I wish more current YA were written this way.

 

 

 

Necessary Roughness by Marie G. Lee
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Football, football, football, football. There is a lot of football in this book. Just…a lot. So there’s that.

I will say, though, that Lee gets the shock of moving from a multi-ethnic big city to a small lily-white town in the Midwest pretty right. I agree with other reviewers that the ending was rushed, but I did like the family stuff and most especially all of the stuff with O-Ma and Mrs. K. Those ladies are the best.

View all my reviews

 

As of today, I’m reading:

I’m still listening to Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz (and read by Lin-Manuel Miranda). That Dante kid is pretty great, huh?

 

As I mentioned before, I’m moving this summer and am therefore trying to read all of the (unread) books on my shelf to see what’s making the move with me. One of those books is The Obnoxious Jerks by Stephen Manes. I actually read this many, many years ago when I was a kid but remember absolutely nothing about it except the cover. So we’ll see how that goes.

 

Happy reading, everyone!