A Valentine's Recommendation: My Most Excellent Year by Steve Kluger

So, in honor of Valentine's Day today, I am going to talk about my favorite book ever. (It's in my top three favorite books of all time so you know it's good. 

It's calles My Most Excellent Year, and it was written by Steve Kluger and takes place in Boston over the 2003-2004 school year. (I think. It may be 02-03 or 04-05. Anyway, it was a contemporary when it came out, now there are SOME bits that are outdated, but for the most part it has aged very well.)

(It's not my favorite cover, but it works well enough that I won't complain. It could have been a lot worse.)

Actual description:

 Three teenagers in Boston narrate their experiences of a year of new friendships, first loves, and coming into their own.

Wow is that boring or what? Here's my description/review, which is way more informative: 

My Most Excellent Year is a 3+ POV epistolary novel. (There are 3 official POVs, but sometimes we see emails between the parents or a note from the guidance counselor, or newspaper clippings. It's realt seamlessly integrated and it's great. 

It's about a Bostonian boy with a dead mom falling in love for the first time with a whip smart Mexican daughter of an ambassador, while his “brother”/bff is struggling with being gay and Chinese. Oh and a little Deaf boy who plays baseball in the park and is obsessed with Mary Poppins crashes into their lives and shakes EVERYTHING up.

 It is a FABULOUS book full of realistic freshman-year feels, a really nice girl friendship in the background, and a diverse cast. It’s so awesome. The kids have their love stories, but there's also a huge emphasis on friendship, family and adults starting over too. 

There are shenanigans, jokes, a LOT of musical theater references, baseball games, a quest involving internment camps, and an especially hilarious ski trip. It is one of my top three favorite novels ever and you should DEFINITELY read it. 

There is literally something for everyone in this book. Sports people get the baseball, there's political activism in the form of Alejandra's outspokenness, there's a musical serving as an EXCELLENT allegory, there is SO MUCH AWESOME IN THIS BOOK I AM CONSTANTLY FLOORED. 

Also the author's website is in-universe and it rocks. 

This book and The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks are the reasons that I have such incredibly high standards for the contemporary YA I read. 

Please please read it. It's awesome and you won't regret it. 

Happy Valentine's Day! 

A Pseudo-review of A.S. King's Reality Boy

This is a series of tweets I wrote early this morning. I finished Reality Boy and it killed me. It kills me, when people have families and friends who just don't care. I still read their stories because often they're so beautiful, but it makes my heart hurt.

We're all searching to find our people in life, and that's what so much of YA is about: figuring out that our parents and hometowns don't have to be our only people, or even our people at all, and setting out to find those who truly understand us.

There's an article sitting on my desk right now that my mom gave me when she visited last week. It's about intimacy as viewed from a religious and romantic standpoint, but she also talked about it in terms of emotional intimacy with friends and family. I haven't read the article yet, but I know what she's talking about. That is the reason I read YA.

Recently, my thoughts are always all over the place about everything. When I think anything, it gets connected to literally everything else I'm interested in. An article about Amazon is something I can easily connect to code-switching (linguistics) or the feminist movement. In my brain, everything is related and it's easy. But spewing it all out in words is hard.

Reality Boy was a great book. I liked it a little less than King's Ask the Passengers, but it was still definitely worth pulling an all-nighter for.

(Reality Boy was checked out via my college town's eLibrary system.)