by Madeleine Nesbitt
It’s a new year, which means it’s time for new reading lists, and, in our case, the kick-off of the 2015 SPARK Book Club. Each month, we’ll be
posting a review of a book (fiction or nonfiction, prose or poetry). This year, we’ll be joining the #ReadPOC2015 campaign, reading and reviewing books exclusively by authors of color.
Last year was a big year for diversity in literature: Ellen Oh and other authors founded We Need Diverse Books, which held a “Diversify Your Shelves” event in May to encourage readers to read more inclusive literature, and drew attention across social media to the fact that statistics on diversity in literature are depressingly low. In 2012, Roxane Gay found that only 22% of the books reviewed by the New York Times that year were by authors of color.
At the 2014 National Book Awards, Daniel Handler made racist jokes as he presented the award for Young People’s Literature to Jacqueline Woodson for Brown Girl Dreaming. Woodson spoke out about the experience in her essay “The Pain of the Watermelon Joke.” Handler later apologized, but the event served as a painful reminder of how entrenched racism is in our culture. With this year’s book club, SPARK aims to challenge the marginalization of people of color within publishing.
For January, I read To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, the first novel in a new YA series by Jenny Han (you may recognize her name from The Summer I Turned Pretty). It’s a romance about Lara Jean Covey, a mixed-race teenager who, when she wants to get over a crush, writes a letter to said crush, explaining all of her feelings. Then she seals and addresses the letters and puts them away in a hatbox. When (gasp!) the letters are somehow sent out, Lara Jean finds herself in the middle of a conflict that’s about more than just old crushes.
Without giving too much away, I have to say, I was surprised by how much I liked the book. Usually I shy away from romances because they assume that girls and women need a boyfriend, and that a romantic partner has to be male (boys are gross!). With Lara Jean, though, we see a lot more than just romance. She has to deal with the new responsibility of being a big sister, since her older sister, Margot, leaves for college overseas. That means learning not to be so nervous when she’s driving (“My hands are gripping the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles are white.”), and dealing with her white dad’s disconnection with her mother’s side of the family, which is Korean (one particularly funny scene has him trying to cook bo ssam. It doesn’t go well).
The romance is sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always dramatic– but it felt real. I was reading while driving down to DC over winter break, slowly getting closer to the Virginia town where Lara Jean lives, and thinking, Lara Jean is so me, everything about this book is so perfectly high school. “Perfectly high school” is, in this case, a good thing. The cliques, makeup advice and weird school skiing trips, all fit perfectly into Lara Jean’s (and my) world.
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is a light, funny read that got my year of reading off to a great start. Whether it’s her sisters, her dad, girls at school or crushes, Lara Jean is smart and real. I laughed and cried, and though I do both of these rather easily, Jenny Han’s writing left me and her characters on a high note, refreshed and ready to face a new year.