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WHO PUT THIS SONG ON?
By Morgan Parker
Parker, an award-winning poet and essayist, drew from her high school journals and an unfinished memoir to create this loosely autobiographical Y.A. debut. “Who Put This Song On?” is lovely, honest, wrenching and funny — a tribute to music, survival and the power of finding beautiful moments of “temporary escape,” even if “when I return, the world is always the dumb same.”
Parker’s 17-year-old protagonist, who’s also named Morgan Parker, is clinically, questioning-the-purpose-of-living depressed. She’s one of the few black kids at her conservative Christian school, but because she likes emo music, thrift store fashion and Noah Baumbach movies, she’s been told she’s “not really black” more times than she can remember. Her mental illness is just one more thing that makes her feel like an outsider in her family, her school and her stifling Southern California town.
Morgan is sarcastic and fragile, acutely self-aware but still riddled with self-doubt. As she moves through the first semester of her junior year, she becomes close friends with other misfits, holds her own against an idiotic teacher and successfully weathers romantic disappointment. But she also still gets in trouble at school, still causes her parents frustration, still makes impulsive, self-destructive decisions.
At the end of the novel, Morgan’s life isn’t tidy or depression-free, but it’s better than it was. As Parker reflects in an author’s note: Self-discovery is a lifelong pursuit; figuring stuff out leads to more things that need to be figured out. “I decided to keep being alive,” Morgan says at one point, “so I have to decide how to do it.
336 pp. Delacorte. $18.99.
JULIET TAKES A BREATH
By Gabby Rivera
It’s 2003 and Juliet Milagros Palante, the droll and earnest 19-year-old heroine of this debut novel, is struggling to breathe — both literally (she has asthma) and figuratively (she feels like there “isn’t enough air” in the Bronx). Juliet comes out to her close-knit Puerto Rican family hours before she gets on a plane for Portland, Ore., where she’ll spend the summer interning for a feminist author named Harlowe Brisbane.
Brisbane’s famous book about empowerment has been a refuge for Juliet, a way to mentally escape the neighborhood “bro-dudes” who harass her in the grocery store and the anxiety of being young, gay and uncertain. But as Juliet researches “fierce” women for Brisbane, learns new feminist vocabulary and meets other gay women of color, she becomes conflicted about her hero worship for Brisbane and even more confused about womanhood and what it means for her.
Read “Juliet Takes a Breath” slowly and your imagination may catch on some of the novel’s logistical snafus and rhetorical devices that don’t quite work. But if you read too quickly you might miss the bite of Juliet’s humor or the adeptness with which Rivera captures both the disappointments and the possibilities that come with realizing that your life’s solution cannot be figured out by someone else.
“And now it’s on me,” Juliet says as she moves toward profound self-recognition. “I gotta shout when I need to and ask more questions. And demand better of myself and everything around me.”
320 pp. Dial. $17.99.
AMERICAN ROYALS
By Katharine McGee
McGee’s glitzy romp takes place in an alternate America that has a monarch instead of a president — one where George Washington accepted a crown and never insisted on giving a democracy a try. Its chapters are told from multiple perspectives, letting readers see the “privilege and opportunity” as well as the “unusual constraints” of royal life from different heights and angles.
Princess Beatrice Washington will become the first queen to rule, and the closer she gets to ascending the throne the more acutely she feels the personal sacrifices she has to make in the name of duty and country. Samantha Washington, Beatrice’s younger sister, is the palace’s bon vivant, but privately resents being the “spare” to Beatrice’s heir and is searching for her purpose, an “indefinable something” that eludes her.
Then there’s Sam’s best friend, Nina Gonzalez, who’s in love with Prince Jefferson but doesn’t know if she can withstand the scrutiny and expectations that come with being his girlfriend. And Daphne Deighton, Jefferson’s ex-girlfriend, has made it her life’s mission to marry into the royal family, no matter what it will cost her.
For all the glamour and intrigue, there’s also a reality check. All four central characters struggle to reconcile the expectations that the world imposes on them with the internal selves they discover through heartbreak and struggle. Each, in her own way, feels as if “she wasn’t inhabiting her own life” but rather “reciting a script that someone else had written.”
448 pp. Random House Books for Young Readers. $18.99.
THE BEAUTIFUL
By Renée Ahdieh
The 19th-century New Orleans of Ahdieh’s (“The Wrath and the Dawn”) dramatic new novel is a “last refuge for those who believed in magic and mysticism,” a place of dark creatures and intrigue.
Seventeen-year-old Celine Rousseau has come to New Orleans from Paris to escape something terrible from her past. Celine’s secrets and unladylike, unsettling desires set her apart from the other young female immigrants at the Ursuline convent. For Celine, “the things she wanted and the things expected of her were like oil and water in a baker’s mixing bowl.”
It doesn’t take Celine long to become mixed up with La Cour des Lions, a group of beings with supernatural abilities who share her affinity for nighttime and danger. “The Court of the Lions” is led by the handsome and enigmatic Sébastien Saint Germain, the sole heir of the powerful Le Comte de Saint Germain. As Celine gets pulled deeper into New Orleans’s underbelly and Sébastien’s strange circle, an otherworldly killer becomes more determined to use Sébastien’s growing affection for Celine against him.
The novel has some clunky passages that could easily be overlooked because of the exciting story. The fact that Celine and Sébastien’s courtship is occasionally more disturbing — at one point, he wraps a hand around her throat — than sexy or romantic is more difficult to get past.
But “The Beautiful” successfully executes several Y.A. romance tropes: the love triangle, the heroine who’s devastatingly beautiful yet also clever and ahead of her time, and finally, the this-is-a-series-opener-not-a-standalone book surprise.
448 pp. Putnam. $18.99.
