Dress Coded - Carrie Firestone

Initial draw: ✰✰✰

Character development: ✰

Plot/Writing style: ✰
My rating: ⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Molly Frost is FED UP...

Because Olivia was yelled at for wearing a tank top when she had to keep her sweatshirt wrapped around her waist.

Because Liza got dress coded and Molly didn't, even though they were wearing the exact same outfit.

Because when Jessica was pulled over by the principal and missed a math quiz, her teacher gave her an F.

Because it's impossible to find shorts that are longer than her fingertips.

Because girls' bodies are not a distraction.

Because middle school is hard enough.

And so Molly starts a podcast where girls can tell their stories, and soon her small rebellion swells into a revolution. Because now the girls are standing up for what's right, and they're not backing down."

Look, I finished it, so I gave it two stars and not one, but honestly...it's a letdown. I have been eager to read this book since it first popped up on my radar a long while back, but after an ok start it went downhill pretty quickly. Right off the bat I was not a fan of the structure, but that alone I could have lived with. Sadly, the characters were not believable (sorry, but I'm a youth services librarian, and I have never encountered an 8th grader who spoke like a grown-ass adult the way these students do), there were lots of weird tangential things brought in that made no sense, and more than anything, for a book LITERALLY CALLED Dress Coded, after the first few pages the policing of young female bodies at the main character's middle school started to feel like more of a side plot.

If I could recommend a more descriptive title, perhaps Carrie Firestone could have gone with Vaped to Death or Tales of a High School Vaper. Because holy gods. She obviously has a vendetta against vaping, which...ok, that's fine. I don't think anyone wants teenagers to start vaping. But the level of hysteria surrounding the vaping plotline throughout the book was so extreme that it veered into comical. I read this book out loud with my husband, and it literally became a joke we would make to each other - before we started reading, one of us would look at the other and say, "are you ready to hear about the horrors of vaping?" The melodrama was so ridiculous that toward the end of the book I couldn't get through the passages that talked about vaping without laughing.

Also, since the vaping storyline centered around the main character's older brother, can I just say that if you're going to build a storyline around an older sibling being so terrible that their younger sibling gets to go to a special group for kids dealing with traumatic events like a parent with cancer or a divorce and their mom has to quit their job to stay home and contain said sibling, you can't just tell me that they're terrible. You have to convince me. Like, he calls Molly and her friend Frog and Toad...oh nooooooooo! That just seemed like a Frog and Toad are Friends reference to me? She blackmails him into ordering pizza for her and her friends and he texts her to come get it? Wow, what an older sibling thing to do unrepentant dick! 

I mean, I have several siblings, and a lot of his interactions with her seemed like fairly normal older/younger sibling stuff. If anything, she seemed to be much meaner to him than he ever was to her, and when at the end all their sibling problems are solved by Molly writing him a douchey note, I was like yeah...no. If he was that terrible he would have read the note, been like "lolol fuck you, sis," and thrown it away. Plus, for all the bemoaning middle schoolers vaping, there was never any acknowledgment that he was also a teenager who was addicted to vaping, so if we're having sympathy for the other kids struggling with addiction, perhaps we could spare a little of that sympathy for him too, instead of painting him as the irredeemable villain of a story about vap - oh, sorry, I mean dress coding.

At the end of the day, there was a lot of potential with this book, but it fell very short for me. The final nail in what was already a firmly sealed coffin was definitely that after spending 90% of the book crying about vaping and talking about girls getting dress coded for having their period or being tall, toward the end a Black student gets dress coded because a boy in her class touched her hair without her permission and then a trans girl reveals that she is being forced to follow the male dress code for their graduation ceremony. The first situation gets one more casual reference before the book is over, but they're both pretty much throwaway "oh yeah, and this happened also" dress coding examples, which was pretty frustrating after all of the still crappy but much less horrible examples. There was an opportunity to address some of the more fucked up examples of how dress codes are discriminatory, but instead we spent the bulk of the book hearing about vaping and how one girl got dress coded for having her period. 😐 

Seriously, you can pass on this one. It missed the mark. I wish I knew of a good middle grade example of a book like this, but Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu is a great YA option in this same vein, and bonus! It's a Netflix movie now, which I watched today and can confirm is excellent (although it has been a while since I read the book, so I can't vouch for how closely it follows the book!)

Throwback Thursday - March 2019

I love reading (I don't know if you could tell), but one of the downsides to reading in high quantities is that sometimes I forget about some of the books I've read. Of course, that means that when a book pops back up on my radar I get to go "ohh yeah, that one was excellent!" and reminisce, so I guess it isn't all bad. My sister suggested I do some flashback posts to highlight older books I've read, so I thought I would start off with some 2019 nostalgia!

So...what was I reading the first week of March two years ago?

Half Lost is the final book in the Half Bad trilogy, which follows seventeen-year-old witch Nathan Byrn and a group of rebels trying to overthrow England's corrupt Council of White Witches. I thought it was a worthy ending for an amazing series. I gave it five stars, with a warning not to read it right before you have to attend a party (although that shouldn't be a problem right now!)

Ignite the Stars follows criminal mastermind Ia Cocha, scourge of the the Olympus Commonwealth, whom everyone assumes is a man (thanks, patriarchy). What will happen when seventeen-year-old female Ia is captured and her identity revealed? I gave this one three stars overall - it was really captivating for about the first half, then took a bit of a dip before the action picked back up. If I recall correctly, I read this one out loud with my husband, so in fairness if I had read it on my own and been able to read faster, I probably would have bumped it up to four stars.

It kind of tickles me that both books follow seventeen-year-olds at the head of a revolution. Somehow I did not put those pieces together when I was reading them!

I'm not ready, but my books are!

Soooo yeah, I'm not sure I'm emotionally prepared to be a year into *waves hands* all this. March 16th will be the official date that my (now former) work sent everyone home and everything where I live shut down, and the fact that that date is just over two weeks away is difficult to process.

At least I've got one thing going for me, though, and that...is books. I finished Death is Hard Work, Queer: A Graphic History, and And the Band Played On for my Read Harder reading tasks in February. I don't know if I've ever read a translation of a novel originally written in another language before, and reading about the civil war in Syria was a new topic for me. I would file both this novel and And the Band Played On under "heartbreaking, but enlightening." Queer: A Graphic History was equally enlightening and, although still serious, much more upbeat. 

For March's challenges, #5: Read a genre novel by an Indigenous, First Nations, or Native American author and #6: Read a fanfic, I'll be reading Five Little Indians by Michelle Good and Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev (cheating a little bit with that second one, but hey, I don't like reading on a computer). Honorable mentions for task five also go to The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich and Love After the End by Joshua Whitehead, both of which I have on hold at my library.

I'm also really looking forward to April's tasks of reading a fat-positive romance and a romance by a trans or non-binary author. Have any April suggestions for me? Share them in the comments!

And the Band Played On - Randy Shilts

 My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"By the time Rock Hudson's death in 1985 alerted all America to the danger of the AIDS epidemic, the disease had spread across the nation, killing thousands of people and emerging as the greatest health crisis of the 20th century. America faced a troubling question: What happened? How was this epidemic allowed to spread so far before it was taken seriously? In answering these questions, Shilts weaves the disparate threads into a coherent story, pinning down every evasion and contradiction at the highest levels of the medical, political, and media establishments.

Shilts shows that the epidemic spread wildly because the federal government put budget ahead of the nation's welfare; health authorities placed political expediency before the public health; and scientists were often more concerned with international prestige than saving lives. Against this backdrop, Shilts tells the heroic stories of individuals in science and politics, public health and the gay community, who struggled to alert the nation to the enormity of the danger it faced. And the Band Played On is both a tribute to these heroic people and a stinging indictment of the institutions that failed the nation so badly."

Reading this book a year into the pandemic is...an experience. Early on, we read this quote:

"The bitter truth was that AIDS did not just happen to America - it was allowed to happen by an array of institutions, all of which failed to perform their appropriate tasks to safeguard the public health. This failure of the system leaves a legacy of unnecessary suffering that will haunt the Western world for decades to come."

Like, hello...sound familiar? I knew this would be an emotional read going into it, but with all the parallels to present day, it was doubly so recognizing those similarities in the response to COVID. Like cool, cool, we really have learned nothing in 40 years, that's great. Of course, COVID is nowhere near as fatal as AIDS was when it appeared, so I don't want to minimize any of that experience, because I can't even comprehend how horrible that must have been. But for fuck's sake, if people could show a little bit of growth over time, that would be nice.

And the Band Played On is told in a narrative style, but it is a journalistic work. I expected it to be a little on the dry side as a result, but it was not at all. The way Shilts wove the different narratives together was intensely personal and pulled me in immediately. Initially, it was heartbreaking reading about the response of the gay community as a whole and their unwillingness to stop engaging in risky behaviors even after being warned. If the government isn't going to respond with adequate funding, at least individuals can take steps to protect themselves, and in a time where so many people refuse to wear a mask for idiotic reasons, I found myself immediately angry at those refusing to listen to warnings. Then I paused and thought about how after a lifetime of being discriminated against, bullied, and mistreated for being gay, it was pretty logical to be suspicious of this mysterious "illness" mandating they stop having sex. I would have been suspicious too, and that makes it even more heartbreaking.

"The story of these first five years of AIDS in America is a drama of national failure, played out against a backdrop of needless death."

Even before the government and news media failed American people by refusing to take AIDS seriously because of their homophobia and bigotry, we as a country had already failed them. How many lives would have been saved if the LGBTQ community hadn't been given so many reasons to be suspicious of the warnings they were given after the virus showed up? It was difficult to read about case after case being diagnosed, knowing how preventable many of those cases should have been. As difficult as it was though, I am glad to have read this history and learned more about what happened in the 1980s. If you, like me, grew up surrounded by assholes who only ever referenced AIDS as "God's curse on homosexuals," I strongly recommend you pick this up. Obviously I don't believe it was a curse from some vengeful douchebag god, but I knew almost nothing about what had actually happened. This thorough, well-researched history of the first ten years of the virus was emotional to read but incredibly informative.

(Also, fuck Reagan, he was trash.)

Punching the Air - Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"The story that I thought/was my life/didn't start on the day/I was born

Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he's seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy. 'Boys just being boys' turns out to be true only when those boys are white.

The story that I think/will be my life/starts today

Suddenly, at just sixteen years old, Amal's bright future is upended: he is convicted of a crime he didn't commit and sent to prison. Despair and rage almost sink him until he turns to the refuge of his words, his art. This never should have been his story. But can he change it?"

As a white woman, I feel a little weird writing a review of a book about the disproportionate (frequently wrongful) incarceration of Black people and the broken justice system in the United States, particularly since white women so frequently and disgustingly weaponize their privilege to harm Black people and other people of color. But this book is so powerful and Amal's voice so strong, that I had to share this book in case I have friends who didn't have it on their radar. Potential spoilers included.

The book starts off with Amal's trial. We don't find out details of what happened right away, just snippets about a fight with a white teen, who ended up in a coma. Amal is found guilty and sent to a detention facility, and details of the fight gradually unfold, interspersed between his experiences in prison. We also get glimpses into the experiences of some of the other boys with him, and we see a lot of the ways in which all of the boys in this detention center have basically been abandoned to the system. 

The one bright spot for Amal as he grapples with fear, hopelessness, and despair in the face of violent, racist guards, an educational program that is vastly inadequate, and very little support aside from his mother's visits, is a poetry class led by an outside volunteer. The class, basically a reward for good behavior, is one of his only connections to his life outside of prison and is a vital outlet, a place for him to use his words to remind himself of his humanity. As a volunteer-run class, though, the poetry group is not a guaranteed offering, even though without it many of the kids who attend are losing one of their only sources for a healthy outlet. What will happen to Amal and the other boys if they lose the class, and with it their connection to the one person inside the detention center who treats them like human beings?

This book may be fiction, but it was inspired by Yusef Salaam's real life experience as one of the exonerated five, and we all know that Yusef and his friends are far from the only people living in the US to have been wrongfully imprisoned (or imprisoned for bullshit reasons). Amal's story is a heartbreaking reminder not only of how the United States' decision to favor punitive action over restorative justice is failing a majority of black and brown Americans, but also of how our refusal as white people to confront our implicit biases, unlearn the white supremacist bullshit we have grown up steeped in, and use our privilege for good is propping up the rampant racism in our country.

Clap When You Land - Elizabeth Acevedo

 My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Camino Rios lives for the summers, when her father visits her in the Dominican Republic. But this year, on the day when his plane is supposed to land, Camino arrives at the airport to see crowds of crying people...

In New York City, Yahaira Rios is called to the principal's office, where her mother is waiting to tell her that her father, her hero, has died in a plane crash.

Separated by distance - and Papi's secrets - the two girls are forced to face a new reality, in which their father is dead and their lives are forever altered. And then, when it seems like they've lost everything, they learn of each other.

Papi's death uncovers all the painful truths he kept hidden, and the love he divided across an ocean. And now Yahaira and Camino are both left to grapple with what a new sister means to them and what it will take to keep their dreams alive."

Everything Elizabeth Acevedo writes is impossible to put down, and Clap When You Land is no exception. This book is beautiful, breaking and warming your heart at the same time. The alternating perspectives of Yahaira and Camino were handled beautifully, and I loved the way the two narratives came together at the end. Even though they've been apart their whole lives, their voices intermingle, and without a clear distinction like in earlier pages, sometimes it's hard to tell who is speaking until we get context. It reminded me of how sometimes when one of my siblings is speaking their voice sounds so similar to another sibling that I can't be 100% sure who it is until something they're saying gives it away. (Or let's be honest, how sometimes I'll play a video of my sister talking and for a second think it's me and I just forgot I said that.)

There are a lot of complex emotions at work in this story, and you will feel every single moment along with the characters. When Yahaira's mom tells her she has a sister, I was angry on her behalf. When Camino talks about being mad at her father for his lies and also shattered that she'll never talk to him again, I felt that mixed-up grief. I am blown away by how real these characters became and how their experiences leapt off the page. Also, I know there are lots of conversations and jokes about how New York is the "fifth" character in Sex and the City, but for real, the Dominican Republic felt like a character in this book, and I loved it. The personality, the vibrancy, the feel of Camino's home was all around me as I read. Just...incredible, the magic Elizabeth Acevedo is able to weave with her words. Read this book. Read all of her books. Read her grocery lists if she decides to publish those at some point. I will read anything Elizabeth Acevedo gives me.

Read Harder update

I mentioned participating in Book Riot's Read Harder challenge in my New Year's update, so I figured now that we've made it to February I would share an update. For Task #2, read a nonfiction book about anti-racism, I read So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo, which was fantastic. I borrowed a copy from the library, but this is a book I definitely want my own copy of, because it's something I would love to return to regularly.

As mentioned previously, I couldn't come up with anything for Task #1, read a book you've been intimidated to read, so I only completed one of the challenges for January (womp womp). To make up for it, though, I've got two titles chosen for one of my February challenges...although there is a wait list for it, so we'll see if I get it in time. 😬 But what are February's challenges, you ask?

Task #3: Read a non-European novel in translation

Task #4: Read an LGBTQ+ history book

For these challenges, I will be reading Death is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa (#3), Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker (#4), and And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts (#4 - if it comes in in time...I mean, I'll read it either way. Just maybe not in February.) What would you choose for each challenge?