The Truth about White Lies by Olivia A Cole
​
​For my last weekend pick, I’ve selected a new book, The Truth about White Lies by Olivia A Cole. This book comes highly recommended and is blurbed by other YA authors such as Nic Stone, Tiffany D. Jackson, Mark Oshiro and Brendan Kiely, to name a few of my own favorites (see the jacket for even more!). This is the story of Shania Hester, a white high school junior who has moved to the new town of Blue Rock with her mother, after the death of her grandmother shatters her world back home in Morrisville. While Shania works evenings at the donut shop in a gentrified side of town, by day she attends Bard Academy of Excellence, an elite school for the city’s privileged class, the likes of siblings Catherine and Prescott Tate.

​Shania is enamored with Catherine’s queen-like status, and she can’t resist Prescott’s charm. But something darker lurks just underneath the surface of this shiny new space. In between trying to make the right new friends and figure out the social codes for her new school, Shania seeks refuge in the school’s greenhouse where she is able to tend to the green thumb she inherited from her grandmother. She carries around an old almanac that belonged to Gram, and inside she finds a scrawled note that sets Shania on a scavenger hunt for missing information. As Shania tries to solve the mystery of her grandmother’s past, she comes face to face with the harsh realities of her present and what Bard means for students who aren’t rich or white. Shania must confront the effects of her own silence and greater complicity in a broken system set up to fail so many others. 

​Shania is a complicated character, one who struggles with her own sense of self and her desire to be a good person and to do the right thing. Readers might relate to her squeamishness around the topic of race and her desire to build up walls of protection in her mind when she doesn’t know how to respond to her classmates’ comments. This book prompts important, uncomfortable and very necessary conversations about race and privilege, especially for those young people who identify like Shania and are just coming to realize their own racialized identity as white people. I would recommend this book for readers of Bredan Kiely’s nonfiction text The Other Talk, Reckoning with Our White Privilege, or Frederick Joseph’s The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person. 

​This weekend’s pick is another celebration of beauty in narrative verse: Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam, a National Book Award finalist. I am absolutely in love with this text, and I can’t recommend it enough for everyone to read, especially as we continue to recognize National Poetry Month this April - the minute I finished it I turned right back to the beginning to start rereading it! This is the story of Amal Shahid, a young Black teen who at the beginning of the story finds himself in the courts, awaiting a verdict after being charged with aggravated assault and battery after a neighborhood fight he and his friends were involved in. The reader doesn’t know all the details of the fight yet; those details come out as the story progresses, when Amal is found guilty and sent to a juvenile detention center. And so the reader begins a journey with Amal in hopes that his conviction will be overturned. Each page brings a new poem with a provocative title that speaks to that sense of hope in the face of injustice. 

​But Amal’s story is unique to his own identity and experience, as would be that of every other boy in that detention center - something the reader comes to understand as they listen to Amal. Amal is not just a boy who made a mistake, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time - he is a poet and an artist. He is a passionate young man with a thirst for knowledge and a love for deep books. He is a son, and a brother, and a friend, and a romantic interest, and the reader gets to know him in all these ways. He is more than the crime itself, or the headlines, or the brief quips of those who spoke at his trial (watch for the testimony of his art teacher, Ms. Rinaldi, if you want to see how injustice perpetuates itself in our school and court systems).  

You’ll Be the Death of Me by Karen M. McManus
The first selection is You’ll Be the Death of Me, by mystery writer extraordinaire Karen M. McManus, most famous for her series One of Us Is Lying / One of Us Is Next series.  For those of us of a certain age who work with young people and enjoy reading young adult literature, McManus’s first series brought to mind some nostalgia for our Breakfast Club days, and You’ll Be the Death of Me offers a similar start: noting that the story begins with three friends who spontaneously decide to take the day off from school has us yearning for a Ferris Bueller's Day Off-themed storyline. But just like her other tales, the story quickly takes a dark turn, as Ivy, Cal and Mateo’s seemingly innocent adventure turns into a race to solve a classmate’s murder. Once close friends in middle school who grew apart over time, the threesome have to contend with the awkwardness of navigating estranged relationships all while trying to prove their own innocence when it looks as if they’re being implicated in the murder. The three set off on a dark scavenger hunt of sorts, looking to stay ahead of the police in confronting the details about drugs, family secrets, and a town scandal that is sure to leave readers’ jaws dropped. 

​The Project by Courtney Summers
​
The second pick for this weekend is called The Project by Courtney Summers, author of the NYTimes bestseller Sadie.  This too is another dark tale, the story of Lo Denham, a young woman and aspiring journalist whose suspicions about The Unity Project lead her down a harrowing journey of self-discovery. When Lo was just a girl she almost died in a tragic car accident that claimed the rest of her family except for her older sister Bea. Bea, desperately afraid that her little sister Lo would die too, found solace and faith in the Project’s spiritual leader, Lev Warren. When Lo miraculously survived, Bea left to join The Unity Project and Lo was left alone, feeling abandoned and betrayed. When The Unity Project finds itself thrust into the headlines, Lo sees her opportunity to investigate the secretive organization and to hopefully find the answers about her sister she’s been searching for years. Told in alternating chapters of contemporary events and flashbacks, the mystery evolves as readers come to learn more and more of the backstory between Lo and Bea, leaving them to both hope for a reunion and to dread what might become of Lo as she gets even closer to the Project in her investigation. 

​This weekend’s pick brings us back a little bit in history, to 1989 and the break-up of the communist bloc in Eastern Europe. I Must Betray You is the story of 17-year old Cristian Florescu, a student and aspiring writer who struggles to live under the extraordinarily repressive regime of Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceaușescu where everyone lives under the constant threat of surveillance and can’t know who to trust. At the beginning of Cristian’s story, he is confronted by the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, and forced to become an informer in order to secure much-needed medicine for his sick grandfather. He is directed to observe and inform on a friend, the son of an American diplomat and share information about his activities with the Securitate. 

​Cristian is devastated; he knows that “it was not a proposal. It was an order, and one that compromised all principles of deceney. I’d be a rat, a turnător, secretly informing on the private lives of others” (p. 11).  Thus begins his struggle as Cristian adapts to his new life as a secret spy, all while trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy amongst his family and friends. For today's readers, that “normal” is unrecognizable - a life in which students lived in fear, stood for hours in line to get food rations, couldn’t speak with any criticism against their country or leader, weren’t allowed to congregate in groups larger than four people at a time, and were completely cut off from the world outside their country’s borders. When Cristian is able to befriend Liliana, the girl who’s held his interest for some time, he is torn between his desire to tell her the truth and to keep quiet for their safety and the safety of his family, who he fears suspects his betrayal. Things only get more complicated when Crisitan discovers who else around him may also be working as an informer.

​
​I Must Betray You is a fascinating, page-turning look at life in Bucharest, Romania just as its people rose in revolution against its tyrannical dictator. Cristian is a likable protagonist with whom readers come to empathize, as his story both teaches about a time and place with which readers are most likely unfamiliar, as well as offers the very recognizable conflicts a young person has in navigating issues of trust with family and friends. This book has much to teach young readers about the realities of living in the Eastern Bloc at this time, yet it also serves as a testimony to the power of a single voice in a sea of so many others. Cristian’s story is truly inspirational and will have young people wondering how they too can speak up and act out in the face of injustice.

The story alternates between chapters told from the two girls’ points of view as they grapple with their grief and this new realization. The reader comes to know each girl in her element; Camino, an avid swimmer and an aspiring doctor in her small tropical town who spends more and more time dodging the unwanted attention of a local man, and Yahaira, a talented chess player in love with her best friend next door in her Morningside Heights neighborhood. In the days and weeks that follow, both girls have to painfully navigate the daily realities of family friends and mourners' well-wishing, funeral arrangements and the expectations of school that have not changed. Yahaira decides that if Papi is going to be buried in the Dominican Republic, that she will be there to see it happen, and thus begins her journey to meet the sister she's only recently discovered. ​