“They always tell us that we’re the good ones, the ones who don’t complain, the model minority. We smile as they walk all over us.” In XiXi Tian’s debut novel, This Place Is Still Beautiful (Penguin, £7.99), two very different sisters deal with the repercussions of a racist incident at their home in small-town Illinois.
The already-political and opinionated Margaret quits an internship to spend the rest of the summer with her family, determined to find a way to make the police — and the community — take things seriously. Her younger sister Annalie would prefer not to think about it, and instead focus on her job at the ice-cream shop and the cute boy she’s started seeing. If she’s honest, she finds Margaret’s social-justice-warrior side a little, well, embarrassing. If the dichotomy between “picking your battles” and “letting nothing slide” when it comes to racist treatment is a little too pat here, it’s also made plausible through the sibling dynamics, including their relationship with a mother still struggling to balance her Chinese upbringing with the expectations of her American environment. This summer read with substance feels like the lovechild of Amy Tan and Sarah Dessen.
That tension between tradition and liberal modernity also emerges in Cynthia So’s If You Still Recognise Me (Stripes, £8.99), in which protagonist Elsie is unsure why her UK-based family haven’t been back to see relatives in Hong Kong for many years. Like many teenagers, though, her priorities have more to do with friendship and fandom. Elsie’s obsessed with a post-apocalyptic comic-book series, and through the online fandom she’s made a number of friends — including Ada, whose own family history prompts Elsie to set out on a quest.
Contemporary quest stories sometimes have a slightly shaky motivation; here Elsie’s desire to impress someone she has a crush on is an effective bulwark against the sense that this is all a tad convenient. That it doesn’t quite work as hoped is a pleasing touch of realism. Elsie’s devotion to a particular series, including an appreciation for fan-created works, is another successful aspect of this debut. The ways in which fanfiction can provide a sense of community and belonging are depicted beautifully. “I still haven’t kissed a girl,” she reflects, “but I get to live vicariously through my favourite fictional characters”. This is a warm hug in book form.
In sharp contrast, Emily Thiede’s This Vicious Grace (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99) opens with 18-year-old Alessa Paladino about to bury someone she’s just married — for the third time. As Finestra of the island of Saverio, she is a “window to the divine” and chosen to protect her country from an impending demonic invasion. In order to do this, though, she needs a partner, a Fonte whose powers she can channel and magnify. Others in this role have found theirs easily; she’s managed to kill each one she’s touched. Enter Dante, a hired bodyguard with a murky past and the first person Alessa has been able to safely touch since coming into her powers. That romance ensues is no surprise, but it’s woven together neatly with danger, intrigue, and magic. A delicious page-turner.
Carnegie-Medal-winning poet Jason Reynolds and artist Jason Griffin team up once more on the graphic novel Oxygen Mask (Faber, £9.99), an account of a black American family in 2020, grappling with both the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd. Divided into three breaths, three long sentences, the book explores the threat of literal suffocation — whether at the hands of abusive police officers or from a disease attacking the respiratory system — as well as its metaphorical cousin. Lockdown and societal oppression coalesce to threaten the protagonist and his family, and he yearns to find an oxygen mask, “because what is life/in a house underwater”.
Griffin’s collage-style artwork, reproduced on lined notebook papers, allows this to feel like a real art journal; already I can imagine it being used in classrooms. Moving between realistic and abstract renditions of the family and the world at large allows for this to become a more expansive text than simply a long narrative poem. There is a cohesiveness here that reflects a long-time collaborative relationship between these two artists, a shared vision for something that does not sit easily in any category and is all the better for it.
Supernatural forces are at play in Laura Steven’s The Society for Soulless Girls (Electric Monkey, £8.99), a dark thriller set in a small college recently reopened after a series of tragic deaths 10 years previously. Chalk-and-cheese room-mates Lottie and Alice, who share narrative duties, clash at first but soon grow to trust one another — in part because they both know something sinister is afoot and in part because there’s a spark of attraction there. At one point Lottie describes Alice as “both the vast, dark woods and the glorious light of a full moon”, and we know — or at least hope — that kissing will ensue.
Drawing on The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as well as a number of other gothic sources (conveniently, Lottie is studying such things as part of her English Literature course), this novel puts a feminist spin on the idea of “dark doubles” or “shadow selves”, with a particular focus on the anger girls and women so often experience yet are told to repress. This is a quick read and immensely pleasing.
Murder also lurks in the shadows of Emily Barr’s latest mystery, Ghosted (Penguin, £7.99), in which Ariel feels like she’s “losing it on an epic scale” the day she starts to see blue figures no one else can. Given that it begins just after her angry father leaves her and her sister for good, she persuades herself there’s a psychological origin to her visions — until she meets Joe, who disappeared 20 years beforehand and has lived the day of his death over and over ever since. Occasional clunky moments, such as some too-sudden changes of heart, can be forgiven; these compelling characters will keep readers flipping the pages to find out how it ends.
Sara Barnard returns to familiar characters with Something Certain, Maybe (Macmillan, £7.99); Rosie is the last of the three girls in this tight-knit friendship group to get a book of her own and it’s as achingly tender and real as one might expect from this award-winning author. The challenges of the first year of university — and in particular the threat to someone’s identity when a long-held plan doesn’t work out — are handled skilfully here, with Rosie learning to leave “a space for a maybe” as she confronts the ways in which entering adulthood can be far messier and complicated than often imagined.
Finally, there’s another verse novel from Dean Atta in the world, with Only On The Weekends (Hodder, £8.99) delving into queer identities, relationships, and friendships. What happens after “coming out”, and what does love really look like? This successful follow-up to The Black Flamingo sees protagonist Mack caught between an old flame and new love interest, as he moves with his film-maker father to Scotland and struggles to balance new and old lives. Hopeful, endearing and warm.
