Ashraf never thought he could fall in love. So when he falls hard and fast for marine biologist Jamie Singer, it’s a shock to the system—in more ways than one.

Even if he can wrap his head around what love is and how relationships work, Ashraf’s not sure this is viable. He’s hydrophobic. And Jamie’s entire world revolves around the sea. What’s the point of trying if so much of Jamie’s life is inaccessible to Ashraf?

But Ashraf has vastly underestimated the pull of loving Jamie. For the first time, he wants to face the water, rather than flee from it. He has underestimated the power of love in making people brave, stupid, or a little bit of both.

Starfish by Akemi Dawn Bowman

*I received a free ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review*

Kiko Himura has always had a hard time saying exactly what she’s thinking. With a mother who makes her feel unremarkable and a half-Japanese heritage she doesn’t quite understand, Kiko prefers to keep her head down, certain that once she makes it into her dream art school, Prism, her real life will begin. But then Kiko doesn’t get into Prism, at the same time her abusive uncle moves back in with her family. So when she receives an invitation from her childhood friend to leave her small town and tour art schools on the west coast, Kiko jumps at the opportunity in spite of the anxieties and fears that attempt to hold her back.

Why did I want to read? Although I don’t read all that much contemporary YA, I had seen a lot of really positive reviews for Starfish from people I trusted, praising the anxiety and Japanese American biracial rep (which, being white British, I cannot comment on).

TW: emotional abuse, gaslighting, sexual abuse, attempted suicide.

So…Starfish is an amazing, difficult, book. I write this review sleep deprived because I had to read it all in one sitting – once it had hooked me in I couldn’t stop reading. Not because the book is well written (although it is) but because the story filled me with the same discomfort that thrillers do: I have to see it to the end because I need to know the characters are going to make it out in one piece.

Starfish is not a thriller. Kiko is not running from a monster or an axe murderer, but an abusive home life that has taught her to hate herself and her heritage. If I was to characterise it, I would call it a coming-of-age story. But the story, and Kiko’s narrative voice, is so uncomfortable and unsettling that it filled me with the same feeling – the need to see these characters make it to the other side.

That a book whose story is understated in a lot of ways made me feel so invested, as if the book was a marathon I had to finish, shows how talented the author is. But it’s a very intense experience that might be triggering for some.

How to Make a Wish by Ashley Herring Blake

Love story: 💖💖💖💖💖 (5/5)

Writing: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 (5/5)

Happy ending? Yes

Is it about coming out? No

wlw books, contemporary fiction, grief and loss, biracial (black/white) main character, interracial relationship

Summary: All seventeen year-old Grace Glasser wants is her own life. A normal life in which she sleeps in the same bed for longer than three months and doesn't have to scrounge for spare change to make sure the electric bill is paid. Emotionally trapped by her unreliable mother, Maggie, and the tiny cape on which she lives, she focuses on her best friend, her upcoming audition for a top music school in New York, and surviving Maggie’s latest boyfriend—who happens to be Grace’s own ex-boyfriend’s father.

Her attempts to lay low until she graduates are disrupted when she meets Eva, a girl with her own share of ghosts she’s trying to outrun. Grief-stricken and lonely, Eva pulls Grace into midnight adventures and feelings Grace never planned on. When Eva tells Grace she likes girls, both of their worlds open up. But, united by loss, Eva also shares a connection with Maggie. As Grace's mother spirals downward, both girls must figure out how to love and how to move on.

Thoughts:  Grace and Eva are two girls who have a connection on the deepest levels: both with absent fathers and lost mothers, accepting their feelings for other girls, on the cusp of adolescence and adulthood with no idea what they want from their rest of their life.

I can't express how much it means to me to read a love story between two girls caught in trauma and grief. Their love is not a bandage or a solution, but they are able to find peace, understanding, and safety in each other. They know that healing is a long, slow journey that they are just beginning, but they are beginning it together. My struggles look nothing like Grace and Eva’s, but this book showed me that I can fall in love with a girl who will love all of me, and we won’t have to hide our painful pasts from each other.

“A beautiful story about love's paradoxical ability to be the most difficult yet most effortless thing in the world. Ashley Herring Blake breaks your heart for these girls and then stitches it back together with starlit magic.” - Dahlia Adler, author of Under the Lights

Warnings: 

Death of mother

Absent fathers - one dead, one never met

Alcoholism and child neglect

Yasmín Treviño didn’t have much of a freshman year thanks to Hurricane Humphrey, but she’s ready to take sophomore year by storm. That means mastering the marching side of marching band—fast!—so she can outshine her BFF Sofia as top of the flute section, earn first chair, and impress both her future college admission boards and her comfortably unattainable drum major crush Gilberto Reyes.

But Yasmín steps off on the wrong foot when she reports an anonymous gossip Instagram account harassing new band members and accidentally gets the entire low brass section suspended from extracurriculars. With no low brass section, the band is doomed, so Yasmín decides to take things into her own hands, learn to play the tuba, and lead a gaggle of rowdy freshman boys who are just as green to marching and playing as she is. She’ll happily wrestle an ancient school tuba if it means fixing the mess she might have caused.

Nettie Lonesome lives in a land of hard people and hard ground dusted with sand. She’s a half-breed who dresses like a boy, raised by folks who don’t call her a slave but use her like one. She knows of nothing else. That is, until the day a stranger attacks her. When nothing, not even a sickle to the eye can stop him, Nettie stabs him through the heart with a chunk of wood and he turns to black sand.

And just like that, Nettie can see.

But her newfound sight is a blessing and a curse. Even if she doesn’t understand what’s under her own skin, she can sense what everyone else is hiding—at least physically. The world is full of evil, and now she knows the source of all the sand in the desert. Haunted by the spirits, Nettie has no choice but to set out on a quest that might lead her to find her true kin . . . if the monsters along the way don’t kill her first.

By day Eustaquia “Kiki” de Sonza and Ana Lezama de Urinza are proper young seventeeth century ladies. But when night falls, they trade in their silks and lace for swords and muskets, venturing out into the vibrant, bustling, crime-ridden streets of Potosí, in the Spanish Empire’s Viceroyalty of Peru. They pass their time fighting, gambling, and falling desperately in love with one another.

Noah Ramirez thinks he’s an expert on romance. He has to be for his popular blog, the Meet Cute Diary, a collection of trans happily ever afters. There’s just one problem—all the stories are fake. What started as the fantasies of a trans boy afraid to step out of the closet has grown into a beacon of hope for trans readers across the globe.