Essential for opening and fueling dialogue about a culture that normalizes slut-shaming and promotes toxic masculinity.
High school senior Izzy O’Neill has a “spectacular list of problems” that’s about to get longer.
The hilariously crass 18-year-old self-proclaimed “aspiring comedian and all-around idiot” is an unapologetic connoisseur of peanut butter cups and sex. When photographic evidence of her love for the latter is posted to a website entitled “Izzy O’Neill: World Class Whore,” she finds herself at the epicenter of a national sex scandal, bearing name-calling, judgment, and public scrutiny of her actions and her body. During the following weeks, Izzy tackles double standards, slut-shaming, and male entitlement. The boy who appears in the leaked sex photo is the son of a powerful uber-conservative politician. In their small American town, the school’s sex ed program focuses on abstinence and purity—and is taught by a deeply religious teacher. Izzy tells her story via blog entries as events happen. Her snarky, scathing, and irreverent narration is dotted with hilarious parenthetical asides. The shaming and harassment wear down her natural confidence, but she manages to keep her sense of humor even when she truly is the opposite of OK. Whiteness is assumed for most characters, including Izzy. Ajita, Izzy’s supportive best girl friend, is Nepali-American, and Izzy’s love interest, Carson, is black.
Essential for opening and fueling dialogue about a culture that normalizes slut-shaming and promotes toxic masculinity. (Fiction. 13-adult)Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-287752-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperTeen
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This compassionate and beautifully rendered novel packs an emotional punch
From death row, a young man navigates prison and writes to his best friend in this powerful work of realistic fiction.
A poignant story of loyalty, abuse, and poverty is woven throughout a narrative that alternates between flashbacks to Luke and Toby’s senior year of high school (presented from their perspectives in the third person) and the present-day experience of Luke’s incarceration (told in first person through his letters to Toby). This structure allows the novel to build a slow and gripping tension as it progresses, revealing the horrific events that led to Luke’s arrest only at the very end, as the other details of the boys’ lives naturally unfold. Both are seemingly white. The two struggle to guard their friendship fiercely even as Toby becomes sexually involved with a likable but troubled young woman and Luke falls for a different girl. The two have been lifelong friends, supporting each other through family struggles—Toby’s with a physically abusive father and Luke’s with a neglectful mother who leaves him playing a parental role to his two younger brothers. Readers will easily empathize with quiet, tightly controlled Luke, who’s college-bound on a wrestling scholarship, and goofy, self-effacing Toby.
This compassionate and beautifully rendered novel packs an emotional punch . (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-249427-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A solid sophomore novel celebrating love that begs for a soundtrack.
Queer Black girls fall in love at a summer music festival.
When dating the top basketball recruit in Indiana turns disastrous, ruining her socially, emotionally, and in her mother’s eyes, perpetually in love 16-year-old Olivia Brooks begs her best friend, Imani Garrett, to take a summer road trip to the Farmland Arts and Music Festival in Georgia. Imani agrees on one condition: Olivia cannot hook up with anyone on the trip. Meanwhile, Toni Jackson is heading to Farmland for the first time without her musician-turned-roadie dad, who was killed 8 months ago. Joined by her best friend, Peter Menon (whose surname cues him as Indian), Toni is trying to figure her life out—college or something else? She believes that if she performs in the festival’s Golden Apple amateur competition, the truth will become clear. The four meet in Georgia, and when all the solo slots in the competition are full, Toni and Olivia agree to enter as a duo and help each other with their individual quests—Toni’s to perform on stage, Olivia’s to be distracted from the upcoming judicial hearing over violating behavior by her ex-boyfriend and to win the prize of a much-needed car. Although Imani and Peter feel more like devices than well-developed characters with substantial relationships to the protagonists, the exploration of Olivia’s tendency to adapt to others’ expectations of her is wonderfully nuanced, and her relationship with Toni is delightfully swoon-y.
A solid sophomore novel celebrating love that begs for a soundtrack. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-66223-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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