Counting Down with You was such a warm joy to read, and it left me with something luminous bubbling bright within my chest. It’s a charming and achingCounting Down with You was such a warm joy to read, and it left me with something luminous bubbling bright within my chest. It’s a charming and aching story with a quietly furious heart, a story that would have given me a mirror as a teenager, and now at twenty-two, pried something open in me that had been shut for a very long time.
Counting Down with You pulled me tenderly towards my younger self, and reading it, I could so easily put myself back into the picture of it: that tremulous age when what there is of you feels too heavy to bear but too weightless to have its own gravity, the familiar keenness of helplessness and words crawling back inside your throat even as you thought them—a child’s desperate urge to be seen, to be adored, as who they are, as who they want to be, not as some rarefied version that they ought to be—and the terrible, slowly-dawning realization that perhaps there is no such thing as unconditional love, or unconditional belonging, only love and belonging that seize and weigh and measure before they find you worthy. And something else too, that sharp, glittering edge of defiance, always like flint, a spark away from fire.
I can speak autobiographically to the conflict that resides at the heart of the story which is, perhaps, why the novel landed very heavily within me. Like Karina Ahmed, I wanted to pursue a career in literature instead of one that is empty of passion in medicine, and like Karina, my parents were quick to snuff out that dream like a flame pinched between two fingers. My parents did not understand why I would “waste” my high school diplomat in mathematics and chase after such an unpractical dream, and I struggled for language to explain that a career in books fit into the contours of my heart like nothing else did, that I could not conceive of doing anything else. It was the first time I put my feet down in front of my parents, and it laid me open to a world where I might decide to stand and find the ground beneath me visible and solid.
It was, by no means, an easy decision: my parents’ murmurings of skepticism—their silent disapproval—had a way of cutting me open, and it almost bled me out of what scraps of resolve I’d defiantly managed. Like Karina, I was seventeen, and I felt like a gulf lay between me and my parents. I remember that whole year as an open wound; I felt raw and tender all the time, like if you touched me, my whole body would start throbbing. I longed for my parents’ approval, I longed to find whatever combination of words that might bridge that gulf, that might make my parents understand the hugeness of my passion. Even now, as unspeakably grown up as I feel, I still do.
Counting Down with You channels all those feelings with startling acuteness. I loved the author’s warm, energetic, almost fevered attitude toward her characters. She sees her characters, and wants them to see themselves, and to be seen by those they hold the dearest. She gives Karina a net of support to break her fall: her sweet, kind grandmother and her two enthusiastically supportive best friends. The fake-dating-to-lovers romance between Karina and Ace—which, hilariously, begins when Karina, an unrepentant bookworm, reluctantly agrees to be Ace’s girlfriend only after he offers to take her to a bookstore and let her go wild with his rich-boy credit card—is chokingly sweet, and Ace’s disarmingly silly romantic gestures simply set too high a bar to vault for romance. Ace's fragile vulnerability and fundamental decency, which he is used to hiding behind the thin veneer of an irritating smirk, a black leather jacket, and a carefully crafted "high school bad-boy" persona, was also touching.
All in all, this is a cracking debut—a story lit up like a beacon, a stirring invitation to fearlessly release your dreams into the world, to let them grow, and stretch wings, and soar.
I... can’t hold enough of this book in my hands. I listened to the audiobook, and it was superb. I listened to You Should See Me in a Crown everywhereI... can’t hold enough of this book in my hands. I listened to the audiobook, and it was superb. I listened to You Should See Me in a Crown everywhere, but then it was over and I mourned its loss. I wished, then, that the story could be solid and picked up and held close, so that I could reach for it and trace the words with my fingers whenever I needed. I immediately ordered a physical copy right there and then.
You Should See Me in a Crown follows the story of Liz Lighty who wants nothing but to not feel an ache in her soul where some part of her always feels wanting. Liz hung her hopes on a scholarship to Pennington—her dream school—which she believed would be “the fast track to the rest of [her] life.” But a rejection letter douses Liz’s dream in her chest, and Liz suddenly feels she has lost her own story, fallen out of its pages, and landed in a country from which she couldn’t return. But when her brother convinces her to run for prom queen—with its $10,000 scholarship prize—the idea strikes Liz as sensible in a mad sort of way. Liz—who is accustomed to being quiet and feels secure in the near invisibility her insignificance in the high school hierarchy bestows upon her—knows this is her only chance, but dreads the exhausting artifice that comes when you put yourself onstage, and ask to be judged. A burning determination glows in Liz, nonetheless. Liz will be her school’s “infamous, subversive, dangerous, queer-as-hell prom queen wannabe” if that’s what it takes to seize her dreams. The playing field might be a steep incline with Liz at the bottom with boulders attached to both her ankles, but she is determined to push and push until something breaks in her favor, for once. That’s the Lighty Way, after all.
We feel, but we always fight. It’s the Lighty Way.
Johnson tells a deeply compassionate and tender story about the howling cold of unbelonging—that lonely dwelling-place inside that sometimes threatens to leak out and drown you—and her telling found the seams inside me and tugged. What hangs over Liz, and what the author illustrates so beautifully, is the traces of shadow where a broken system—or rather, a system that is working just as designed—has been breaking its hand against the bones of people who didn’t fit the mold of “cis, het, and white.” Liz Lighty is surrounded on all sides by people who move through the world without expectation of a door slammed in their faces, people who would look at her from the narrow parapet of their noses and finding her wanting. For years, Liz had let their words lurk quietly under the surface of herself. She learned to whittle herself down to a few essential truths—being a good granddaughter and sister, an excellent student, a first-chair clarinet player—keep her head down, and fit the small shape the world left for her. But Liz is fed up with the idea of being judged, cast in a role, given a title, measured up, inevitably found lacking—and I was buoyed by the wellspring of strength and defiance she was capable of drawing from. The heart of the novel, after all, is clear, star-bright, and powerful. There’s a fire burning in You Should See Me in a Crown like furnace doors thrown wide open so you can feel the flames, the bright fire of someone who is determined to exist in a way that is unpalatable to others, who is unafraid to take up space, to participate in the world, to reach out and grasp its beating core with bare hands, to be awake.
The friendships in this book are also so good. Liz’s friends are a calm and steady port in the storm of her life, the ones who would shore her up, and wrap up the hurt. They’re the grass between the nettles—a safe place for her to land. But friends can break your heart too and the novel doesn’t shy away from showing how friendship breakups can carve just as deep. Liz’s friendship with Jordan, in particular, pierced a little too close to my heart. Liz passes Jordan in the school hallways, works besides him on extracurricular activities, and does her best to act as if they had never quarreled, and never parted and were in fact no more than casual acquaintances in the first place. But Liz feels the distance between them keenly. The memory of what he’s done four years before is a fresh stab: not just disappointment, or anger, but grief too, real grief, for something lost. But Liz and Jordan are planets in orbit, pulling at each other as surely as gravity. Their friendship might be damaged and eroded, but it was not destroyed. They had both given each other wounds, but they were not mortal, and in their own halting ways, they were trying very hard to make amends, to make up for the hurt, so that their jagged edges might once again fit together like puzzle pieces.
The tenderness with which the author writes the sapphic romance blooming between Liz and Mack—Liz’s rivaling prom queen candidate—is so ineffable and aching, and it tugged at my heart. I yearned to find some way to hook myself to their story, to their soft moments together, and never leave. And oh my god, their first kiss! I must’ve played that part at least a dozen times lol.
Because here, always, we deserve this good thing.
All in all, the experience of reading You Should See Me in a Crown felt like pulling the curtains open on a sunny morning. It's sweet, moving, and so tenderly told. ...more
It is so intoxicating to be so clearly seen by someone else. To look at each other across a gap that had once felt unbridgeable and feel like your whoIt is so intoxicating to be so clearly seen by someone else. To look at each other across a gap that had once felt unbridgeable and feel like your whole life is being brought into sharp focus by that moment, a perfect pocket of stillness. Even if that someone else is a book. A book that gives language for the things churning restlessly in your throat, a book that helps you build the kind of vocabulary that makes you feel less alone.
It was intoxicating to feel so clearly seen by Felix Ever After.
To say that I loved this book would be to indulge in criminal understatement. Felix Ever After glowed in my chest, pouring brightness into cavernous lofts inside me that I didn’t even know existed. Still, this wasn’t an easy read by any stretch.
**
Sharp spikes of anger and fear are the heartbeat of this narrative that follows Felix Love—a 17-year-old Black trans boy—down the rabbit hole of his senior year. Felix, a talented visual artist, is vying for a unique slot at Brown University against Declan, a rival classmate and ex-friend, and their competition—and the uncertainty of Felix’s future—perches heavily on Felix’s shoulders. The absence of his mother is another sore topic, and his world continues to limp on without Felix hitting send on his drafted emails to her. To make matters worse, Felix’s relationship with Ezra—which once felt settled, a carefully tended corner of friendship—begins to waver when Ezra starts dating one of their classmates.
But nothing knifes into Felix’s life more swiftly and more viciously than a transphobic act targeting him. Felix is caught in abject horror, spending every day fearing having his deadname and pictures of his pre-transition days sprung on him at every turn, always having to peer around the corner just to make sure. Determined, Felix Love sets out to find the person who’s tormenting him—and to make them pay.
I am Felix. No one else gets to define who I am. Only me.
Felix Ever After is a novel that probes achingly at gender identity like it is a loose tooth. It’s an honest and open discussion about how gender identity can be as amorphous and shifting as a cloud caught in the wind, and how a lot of us can feel lost in its wake, with nothing to hold on to, no arms to reach or hands to grip. And as if the journey to understanding our own identity isn’t enough, we must also deal inevitably with all the ways in which it can be perceived and affected by the outside world looking in.
This story felt deeply personal to me in so many ways. Like Felix, I had felt unmoored, spinning, for years. My gender identity sat inside me like an ill-fitting puzzle piece. It fit under my skin like an uncomfortable self that I couldn’t ignore once I acknowledged it. Unlike Felix—who is brave enough to run straight into things rather than barricade himself against them—I did my best to ignore it. And for years, I steadfastly avoided meeting its eyes. I was terrified, that much I know now. I didn’t like that sort of knowledge, how it bubbled up from a source I couldn’t put my finger on. I didn’t like not knowing my own self. In retrospect, I can see now how, in a slow upwelling of despair, I had clung to the idea that ignoring it would diminish it somehow.
But a few months ago, while I was listening to the Penumbra Podcast—an audio drama that centers around a non-binary detective on Mars who uses he/him pronouns but refers to himself as a lady—the politely waiting truth cleared its throat, stepped forward, and reintroduced itself. Fiction has a way of awakening emotions that had lived underground for a long time, and something inside me simply gave way. Non-binary. Here is a word that felt true as I said it, that felt as though it had always been true, and had only needed knowing. Only this time, it was as easy as wishing. I felt my heart take root in my body, and though I was still terrified—I still am, sometimes, the world is a wretched place when you dare to be different—a serene certainty sang in me. For the first time in so many years I feel like I have a firm grip on myself, like all my tethers are once again drawn taut. Kacen Callendar—who talks in their author’s note about the episode of Degrassi: The Next Generation that had changed their life—understands this so acutely, and they press their experience into a novel that’s, in so many senses, a grateful nod and a celebration of the transformative effect of fiction.
“I’m not flaunting anything. I’m just existing. This is me. I can’t hide myself. I can’t disappear. And even if I could, I don’t fucking want to. I have the same right to be here. I have the same right to exist.”
But while the novel presses, companionably, like a palm against the reader’s back, its hero is no stranger to loneliness.
Felix’s brand of loneliness is heartbreaking. Unlike Ezra, Felix’s best friend, who can walk into a crowd of strangers and walk out with a group of friends, Felix has a habit of always sinking into himself, and like most habits, this one was hard to break. Keeping everyone at arm’s length becomes Felix’s way of girding himself against the fear that he would one day offer his heart, only to be told it wasn’t as precious as he had thought it to be. So he makes a silent plea in his head—to love and be loved, to be enough—even when it felt unattainable. Because at the bottom of that fear was Felix’s conviction that he wasn’t worthy of a love that came softly, of a love that wasn’t violence, and that every path he took to it would always be laid with agony. But that was just being caught out of life, and Felix’s journey of learning to trust the wild, impossible sweetness of placing your love in the safe deposit of someone else’s heart, of letting them see you in all the ways that you are messy and hurt and lost and all the ways they made you want to be better, of accepting that you, in your entirety, are loveable, that you are enough, that you are worthy—it filled me with a pure, aching joy.
“It can be easier, sometimes, to choose to love someone you know won’t return your feelings. At least you know how that will end. It’s easier to accept hurt and pain, sometimes, than love and acceptance. It’s the real, loving relationships that can be the scariest.”
All in all, Felix Ever After is a blisteringly honest and reverent book. Kacen Callendar writes their story like they’re facing it head-on, sinking deep, never cruising past anything—and the novel is all that much better for it. I hope every queer teen—and every queer adult, for the novel’s themes transcend its categorization—find their way to it, so they too might sink into its steady warmth, like a blanket drawn around their shoulders....more
This book should definitely cement Acevedo's place as one of the brightest YA writers around.
Tender, patient, and raw as a wound, Clap When You Land bThis book should definitely cement Acevedo's place as one of the brightest YA writers around.
Tender, patient, and raw as a wound, Clap When You Land burrowed deep under my skin. This is one of the most moving explorations of grief that I've ever read, a deep-dive into the lightless depths of what it means to lose something and be utterly unable to move on—not only a literal person, but also a way of life. A space yawns open in the lives of Camino Rios and Yahaira Rios after their father dies in a flight crash, an absence made even more acute by the truths it reveals: Camino and Yahaira are half-sisters who didn't know of each other’s existence. For sixteen years, their father had been living a double-life, keeping his two families cleanly separate, unaware of each other. And now gone and it's just the two daughters, hunting in the rubble of his life for answers, trying to find their way to each other across the many distances that divide their two worlds.
This is Cami and Yaya’s story of unbearable grief and contemptuous longing—the novel alternating between their voices—but you are in there too, and that makes their loss your loss, the ache your ache, the anger you anger, and the shape of their father's secrets something you too must process and come to terms with yourself. This owes in huge part to Acevedo's deft, tender characterization and the tremendous empathy she artfully infuses her novel with, offering the reader so many questions, but not giving any direct or easy answers. How can Cami and Yaya love their father and mourn him and at the same time wonder if they can ever really forgive him? How can they reconcile the loving, attentive father with this newly revealed side of him: the terrible husband and the selfish man? Does one side cancel out the other? Will Cami and Yaya ever be able to think of him and see only the word “father” and not the terrible things he left behind?
The novel also handles other thematic notes with so much clarity and grace; namely the question of identity, what it means to grow up in a world you felt only halfway inside of and constantly question your claim to your parents’ roots when you’ve never set foot in their world. “Can you be from a place you have never been? You can find the island stamped all over me, but what would the island find if I was there?” the novel asks, “Can you claim a home that does not know you, much less claim you as its own?” There's also a very astute interrogation of how different tragedies are portrayed in the media, particularly when they touch a minority community: how those stories tend to be quickly robbed of their edges, minimized, or entirely ignored even while those communities are still wrestling with the unutterable weight of loss.
In short, this is a novel that tugged at many of my heartstrings, and I cannot recommend it highly enough!...more
This novel is every conservative parent’s nightmare (affectionate).
It is so refreshing to read a YA novel that dares to venture outside the close-roomThis novel is every conservative parent’s nightmare (affectionate).
It is so refreshing to read a YA novel that dares to venture outside the close-roomed expectations of its genre; a novel that understands, deeply and with compassion, what young people need, and makes itself a safe place in which they can just be, without judgment. In Jack of Hearts, Rosen openly confronts issues of homophobia, stereotypes, and the fetishization of queer men, while deftly handling topics of sexuality, gender fluidity, consent, and even BDSM. The resulting book is a bold work of self-making and discovery that is both intensely intimate and insistently universal, and the YA landscape is a better place for it. I really hope Jack of Hearts finds a wide audience of young readers who will feel both seen and empowered by it....more
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