Sponsored by What’s Mine and Yours, the new novel from Naima Coster.
A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! From the author of Halsey Street, a sweeping novel of legacy, identity, the American family—and the ways that race affects even our most intimate relationships. A North Carolina community rises in outrage as a county initiative draws students from the largely Black east side of town into predominantly white high schools on the west. For two students, Gee and Noelle, the integration sets off a chain of events that will tie their two families together in unexpected ways over the next twenty years.
Welcome to Read This Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that I think you absolutely must read. The books will vary across genre and age category to include new releases, backlist titles, and classics. If you’re ready to explode your TBR, buckle up!
Today’s pick is the third book by someone who’s rapidly becoming a new favorite author, and a great YA/adult crossover book for anyone who loves family and coming-of-age stories with an emotional edge.
Yolk by Mary H.K. Choi
Content warning: disordered eating, cancer
Jayne and June couldn’t be more different, despite the fact that they’re only a few years apart and each escaped their small Texas town for New York City as soon as they both graduated. Jayne is in college, struggling with disordered eating, ignoring phone calls from her family, and rooming with a guy who isn’t treating her well. June is a hedge fund manager, a high achiever making gobs of money who still calls their mom regularly. When June shows up one day and reveals that she’s got cancer, the sisters find their entire lives overturned as they’re forced to confront a complicated history.
This is Choi’s third novel, and what I like about her writing is that it’s very interior, intelligent, snarky, and a bit of a gut punch. She writes lost characters, characters trying their best, characters hurting and persevering, and characters just fumbling about as they figure things out so well. Although technically YA, this book features a 20 and a 23-year-old, so it’s solidly in that crossover range and I think it’ll appeal to fans of books about millennial angst (although these characters might be more Gen Z, I don’t know, generations are confusing).
This book is so great because even when the sisters are being extremely antagonistic towards one another, you can tell how much they still care for each other…even though they might have a hard time expressing it. One big selling point of this book is that things get seriously complicated when Jayne learns that despite being wealthy, June doesn’t have health insurance and has to use Jayne’s in order to get surgery. But the insurance fraud is just a tiny part of this messy and beautiful story as Jayne sorts through her anger and fear, and both sisters work through how they were shaped by a complicated childhood in order to learn how to best care for each other.
I think that this is a great book to read if you ever feel like life is too lonely or too complicated to figure out, and it’s heartbreakingly real and just a bit romantic!
Bonus: Get this hardcover. Trust me, the book’s design is worth it!
Happy reading!
Tirzah
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