Author: Tirzah Price

Jane Re is a Korean-American orphan who has been brought up by her demanding and judgmental Korean aunt and uncle in Queens, New York. Lately she’s been her time working in their Korean grocery, despite having a college degree, because the economy tanked and she lost the job she had lined up after graduation. Desperate to get out, she takes a job as a live-in nanny to a wealthy Brooklyn family, the Mazer-Farleys. They consist of two white professors and their adopted Chinese daughter, and Jane is annoyed that they expect her, a Korean-American woman, to teach their Chinese daughter about Asian culture, but she loves the freedom of being away from her family and being surrounded by the quiet affluence of her new Brooklyn neighborhood. She finds the mother rather odd, as she spends all her time in her attic study when she’s not lecturing Jane about feminism, but Jane is drawn to the father, and it’s not long before a dangerous affair sparks between the two of them.

But just as Jane crosses a line, she spooks and seizes the first opportunity to flee New York and travel to Seoul. There, she reconnects with her extended family, digs deeper into her mother’s past, and starts building a new life for herself. But is Korea truly home?

I thought this was a really clever and interesting retelling of Jane Eyre. It’s set during the turn of the millennium, and it’s really full of lush and vibrant setting details that really made the story come alive. Jane’s naivety may make some readers cringe, but this is a coming of age story that looks closely at what it means to be biracial and grow up entrenched in two very different cultures, and I both learned a lot and felt myself identifying with Jane’s aimlessness and desperate hope for a purpose. Park addresses a lot of the problematic bits of the source material in really interesting and surprising ways, and I found myself flipping the pages not because I wanted to know if the romance would play out, but because I wanted to see what life would look like for Jane when she finally reclaimed her life and found her strength. I was definitely not disappointed!

Happy reading!
Tirzah

In this YA novel, Raina is happy with her senior year goals and plans until her boyfriend dumps her out of the blue. Millie has a plan to finally shine in mock trial…until Raina’s ex and his male teammates use her knowledge and research to push her off the team. In a moment of heartbreak and anger, Raina and Millie connect and decide to form an all-girls mock trial team to take on the boys, much to the alarm of some in their school administration. But never ones to shy from a challenge, Millie and Raina work their contacts to assemble a crack team of girls who take the mock trial scene by storm, because hell hath no fury like six angry teenage girls. But they’ll face more than a little stiff competition on their journey all the way to the National Championships.

I feel like I should warn you all and say that if you don’t like to be righteously angry, then maybe this isn’t the book for you because there were so many times while reading that I gasped, “Oh no he DIDN’T!” This is a very savvy and timely political comedy about six girls deciding that they’re fed up with casual sexism and racism, and they’re not going to let anyone tell them what they can and can’t do, or even how they define what it means to be a girl. It’s a dual narrative novel that jumps from Raina to Millie and takes readers through the final semester of senior year as the girls tackle injustice at school, and slowly grow more aware of the sexism in their personal lives and in their communities. As they find success in their mock trial courts, they also gain the confidence to speak up at home. The sense of camaraderie is something I truly enjoyed in this book, both in the team that is assembled, but also in the allies they discover in their wider community: a legal mentor, the school librarian, and the women of a very opinionated and politically active knitting group. This is a novel that shows that fighting for equality is not something that can be done alone, and that while teens are more than capable of changing the world, they can also learn a lot from community mentors and the women who came before them.

The ending isn’t neat or pretty, but it’s realistic. I won’t say too much about it, other than I was happy to see where Kisner left things for these characters–triumphant, but not perfect. It’s a good reminder that although you’re very likely to lose some battles, progress can be gained gradually, and that seeing small changes in your personal lives can amount to big change later down the road.

Hope Jahren is scientist and writer who studies geochemistry and geobiology, and in this very accessible and interesting little book she gives readers a short history on how we got to climate change. (Spoiler alert: The answer is capitalism.) As someone who gets very anxious when thinking about how we are destroying the planet, because OH MY GOD THIS IS OUR ONLY PLANET, I was afraid this book would make me even more anxious, but it actually reassured me. Knowledge is power, and Jahren writes in a measured tone. She confronts the facts, talking about the history of farming in the U.S., the sixth extinction, salmon fishing in Scandinavia, the history of the auto industry, and how just because something is electric doesn’t mean it’s energy efficient, just to name a few things. She also touches on politics, and the (seemingly insurmountable) challenge of getting governments from all over the world to make actual progress with climate change.

All of this context and history is important, because it serves to enforce Jahren’s underlying message, which is don’t panic. Scared people make bad decisions, Jahren wisely points out. But it’s time to get very, very serious. The good news is that there’s a lot that normal people can do to start counteracting the effects of climate change on a personal and local level, and it all starts with using less stuff. This isn’t any one person or industry or entity’s responsibility to fix, but it is our human moral imperative to take action. But Jahren doesn’t shame anyone because she understands the complexities of living in a global age–she’s a Minnesotan by birth who lives in Oslo, so she’s not giving up plane rides any time soon–but she asks questions, offers alternatives, and makes suggestions. The back of the book also provides a step-by-step guide to becoming more aware of your consumption, and offers advice for reducing your energy use. Even if you’re not scientifically minded, if you know that you ought to know more about climate change and what we can do, this is an excellent book that empowers you to become more knowledgeable!