pagesofjulia

From the author of Yolk comes this utter delight about two young people struggling to find their ways and their people. I loved it!

We meet Penny just as she’s getting ready to leave home and head off to college, which can’t come soon enough. She figured out in ninth grade “that she wouldn’t be popular until she was a grown-up and that was fine because life was a long con,” and she’s always been awkward. She has a boyfriend she barely knows and doesn’t much care for; it’ll be a chore to break up with him, but he was only with her because he has a thing for Asian girls anyway. She’s used to the microaggressions, like her teacher’s need for her to be “exotic” despite being born in Seguin, Texas. She loves her mom Celeste, who is needy, emotional, and obsessed with beauty products, but she’s also furious with her. It’s a great relief to head off to UT Austin, where she hopes to pursue her writing.

Then we meet Sam, a few years older, who sleeps on a mattress in a storage room upstairs from the coffee shop where he works. Sam would like to be developing as a documentary filmmaker, but he’s broke, estranged from his mother, struggling to keep away from a toxic ex, who, oh joy!, has just told him she’s pregnant.

And wouldn’t you know it: Penny’s assigned college roommate turns out to be Jude, a privileged, bubbly young woman who was briefly, by marriage, related to Sam. Jude and her best friend Mallory latch onto Sam, dragging Penny along for a first meeting which is deeply awkward but also reveals a magnetism that is mutual, though neither realizes it.

Their second meeting is sort of perfect, and (as the back of this book has it) sort of the opposite of meet-cute: Sam has a panic attack on Sixth Street, thinks he’s dying of a heart attack, and Penny rescues him. She recognizes what he’s going through. They exchange numbers, and call each other ’emergency contact.’ From there, contact is near-constant, but only via text message. Within the little screen, their connection is sublime: all awkwardness falls away; “even on text, where there are no inflections or nuance or tone for non sequiturs. You’ve always spoken fluent me.” Penny and Sam would not be the first or the last people to find it easiest to confess their deepest, most vulnerable feelings in a format that’s not face to face. It’s the perfect relationship – if they can just keep it out of the real world. They can’t, of course.

I love that this novel about weird, wounded, awkward young people does wind up a very sweet romance, by a circuitous path. And neither has to change themselves, although they will open up a little. This process opens them up just a touch to the rest of the world, as well, and Penny and her mother even have a bit of a moment. It felt like an echo, because I had just watched 10 Things I Hate About You (for the first time!) with the main teenager in my life, and had a chance to observe that we don’t have to bend ourselves toward ‘normal,’ whatever that is – we just hope to find our own particular brand of weirdo, the ones whose eccentricities match or complement our own. (A song lyric: “I’m lookin’ for baggage that goes with mine.”) It feels wholesome, and preserves what is most odd and wonderful about Penny and Sam.

I’m already working on getting into more of Choi’s work.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: children's/YA, coming of age, family, misc fiction, romance |