I’ve already shared two lists of books, but I think it’s important to say – again – that reading levels differ widely, and in multiple ways. For instance, I know that as a child, my linguistic level (in English) was higher than that of some of my peers, but I often read books for children who were younger. I was still reading what was clearly children’s literature, while friends of mine had ‘graduated’ to murder, romance and thrillers. A list of any kind must be taken with a pinch of salt, and this one is no different.
With that out of the way, here are six young adult books I read and loved last year.
Ben’s parents want to conduct an experiment. They want to study different aspects of the same thing – his father is a behavioural scientist who is convinced that chimpanzees can learn a human language if the environment is conducive, and Ben’s mother is writing a thesis on cross-fostering. With tentative grants in place and a new job for Ben’s father, they go ahead and bring home a chimpanzee, who is to be part of the family, for it is within the family structure that the chimp is likely to learn language. Ben is told that Zan is now his brother. Not a pet, but a brother.
Ben isn’t keen on a brother at all, but finds himself drawn to Zan more and more as time goes by. What happens, though, when the experiment does not go as planned? Do all the ideas of family and siblings get thrown out of the window if Zan does not produce the results he should?
Half Brother is a moving story that forces us to question family, mores and friendship.
Nomad’s Land is a breathtaking read, and if you read the book, you’ll see why I choose that word. I love books that celebrate female friendship, but that’s just one of the reasons I enjoyed Nomad’s Land so much. Just like Across the Line, which was one of my top middle grade reads last year, Nomad’s Land questions what we choose to hold on to – hate or love. Do we hold a grudge against a people, even though we know that each person’s identity is defined by more than their religion? Or do we remember the love and friendship that came before the hatred?
Nomad’s Land is the story of two girls who leave their homes behind. While Shanna remembers her Kashmir all too well, Pema knows only stories of the forever skies from which her people come. It is a lovely book, which brings together the beauty of poetry and the silly light-heartedness of adolescence.
Omar has plans. He has a good head for business and nothing’s going to stop him from becoming rich.
Except the civil war in Syria.
Welcome to Nowhere is heart-wrenching. Through Omar and his brother, we see the atrocities committed by the Syrian government. Omar’s brother Musa is fired up, determined to be part of the rebellion. Omar alone knows what Musa is up to, and even he doesn’t know the whole story. Musa, afflicted with cerebral palsy, is more vulnerable than most and Omar is terrified about everything that can go wrong.
Welcome to Nowhere is about filling in shoes that you never knew you would have to fill. When their lives fall apart, Omar, Musa, their mother and their sister must take a stand and become the bravest versions of themselves.
What if your brother was sentenced to death and you began to doubt if he was really innocent, as you always believed? What if you didn’t have the money to go see him but knew that you had to go, somehow? What if, once you travelled all the way there, you found yourself dragging your feet and not going to the prison to meet him?
Moonrise is a poignant story that touches the rawest of emotions and forces you to explore them. It is about helplessness, frustration, hope, resignation and love. It’s about trying to seek a sense of justice in an ocean of injustice. It’s about how, somehow, we always manage to make do and move on, however heartless it may seem.
The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling is one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best YA Books of 2020. In Australia, it’s on the 2020 shortlist for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. It’s been on all kinds of lists and yet, I would never have come across the book if I hadn’t met the author Wai Chim at the Asian Festival of Children’s Content three years ago.
It’s only recently that I’ve started discovering books about mental health. The stigma around mental health is bad enough as it is, but things become more complex when we move to relatively traditional cultural contexts.
The narrator Anna strives to be a good girl and part of being a good girl involves hiding her mother’s mental illness. Perhaps ‘hiding’ still isn’t the right word, for the first step is recognition. How long do we try to maintain the farce of normalcy? How to we couch secrets in language that says less than it means?
The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling is, once more, about caring for your family and, with that, learning to care for yourself.
Another book about mental health, family, sisterhood and friendship, Broken Soup is the story of Rowan and Stroma, who care for each other in their own ways, protecting each other from the world and from grief. How do we cope with grief? And how much do we struggle to create a semblance of what we want from life and our family?
Rowan pretends that everything is okay with her mother because she does not want to live with her father. If this means that she must take care of her little sister Stroma even as things slide downhill, so be it. What she doesn’t realise, however, is how much Stroma helps her to heal, how little things that Stroma does are a sensitive child’s way of taking care of her big sister.
Broken Soup is a beautiful read, one that embraces both strength and vulnerability.
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