It Started with Goodbye by Christina June

It Started with Goodbye by Christina June
Blink, May 2017

Actually it starts with the main character being in a lawyer’s office, but that’s a little less catchy!

Riffing on the Cinderella story, this amiable realistic YA novel explores family, friendship, and finding your own path.  After white high school junior Tatum Elsea is wrongly convicted of a misdemeanor, she must spend her summer doing community service and earning money to pay her fine, under the watchful eye of her harshly strict Chilean “stepmonster.”

There turns out to be a silver lining as, under the influence of her fairy stepgrandmother, Tatum sets up her own design business, meets a dreamy “tawny brown” skinned boy, makes new friends, and comes to better know her stepmother and stepsister.

Debut novelist June has an easy touch with characters and plot, though neither pushes any boundaries and the resolution feels a little too slick. Review based on an ARC.

Four Weeks, Five People by Jennifer Yu

Four Weeks, Five People by Jennifer Yu
Seventeen/Harlequin Teen, 2017

I always enjoy a good teen with issues novel, and this decent, easy reading, realistic YA novel has five teens with five different issues! Stella (depression), Clarissa (OCD), Andrew (anorexia), Ben (bipolar), and Mason (narcissism) have all been sent to Camp Ugunduzi, a “wilderness therapy camp.”

Debut novelist Yu makes a reasonable go at creating these five different characters who narrate the four weeks of camp. Of the five, I most enjoyed spending time with Stella, who has a caustic wit, and Clarisa, who is genuinely striving to ‘get better’ even though her definition of what that means changes over the four weeks. Andrew is also a sweetheart, and I felt that the author got closest to his psychology than to any of the others. I found Ben’s chapters rather long winded and Mason just feels like a filler character to make up the five. All the characters are apparently white, with the exception of Asian Clarisa.

Very little of the solo or group therapeutic treatment is actually shown. The camp director is perceived as creepy and full of anodyne cliches and the teens deride their two counselors, Josh and Jessie, as a hippie and a drill sergeant. Conversely, there is much rule-breaking including heavy drinking, without consequence, which leads to a potentially skewed portrayal of what such a camp might offer.

The group are told to create a Safe Space Cabin as a team project, which seems like it’s meant to provide a spine for the novel but it gets a bit shuffled into the background. A tragedy in the final third of the book feels a little perfunctory, and happens offstage so lacks immediate impact. Really, only Clarisa seems to derive much benefit from the camp, though they create strong relationships with each other.

While debut novelist Yu has drawn from her own experience of mental illness, she does not cite any additional research or offer any helpful resources for teens who might recognize their own challenges (though I did read this as an ARC so it might have changed).

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Black History in Its Own Words written and illustrated by Ronald Wimberley

Black History in Its Own Words written and illustrated by Ronald Wimberley
Image Comics, 2017

This visually stunning collection of bold portraits of Black icons paired with quotations started as a Black History Month project by Ronald Wimberley in 2015 for an online political comics newsletter, The Nib.

Each double page spread has a high impact black and white comic book style portrait set on a colored background with a quotation incorporated into the illustration. On the facing page, there is some biographical information, sometimes straightforward, sometimes quite sophisticated. There is also usually the source of the quote.  The order of the portraits is a little random – done by date of production and no other discernible organization.

The author has selected his subjects as “people whose words and lives spoke to me personally” and these include Civil Rights notables, such as Angela Davis and Sojourner Truth, and cultural figures including Spike Lee, Prince, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Barack Obama are notably omitted while more obscure figures, like punk rocker Poly Styrene, are included.

The quotations do not follow a particular theme, and a few lack meaning without context, but overall they add up to an individual and poetic portrayal of Black thought.

However, though the majority of quotations have sources and dates, there are a handful that don’t, and the Works Cited at the back of the book is in unreadably miniscule font.

Thought-provoking browsing for teens and adults.

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Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers by Deborah Heiligman

Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers by Deborah Heiligman
Henry Holt, 2017

Heiligman (Charles and Emma, 2009) artfully lays out her magnificent biography of the Van Gogh brothers “as if you are walking through a museum show of their lives – a collection of paintings, drawings, and sketches.” This series of chronologically arranged vignettes, grouped into thematic “galleries,” is written in the present tense and illuminates the lives of Vincent and his younger brother Theo and their deep and intense relationship.

There are two touchstones which the author returns to several times. One is a conversation the teen brothers had on a walk together in 1872 in which they pledge that “they will be more than brothers, more than friends. They will be companions in the search for meaning in life and meaning in art.” She also uses as a central metaphor the idea of Vincent and Theo “carrying each other’s parcels.”

Drawing deeply on the plethora of letters from, to, and between the brothers (and recording this in detail in the endnotes), she follows them from their early years in rural Netherlands across Belgium, England and France, sometimes together, often apart. Echoing Vincent’s eclectic and evolving style, the author moves fluidly between sketches, impressions, and richly detailed portraits narrating the brothers’ friendships and romances, their mental and physical states, and the development of their work, showing how these are all fused together.

Theo (left) and Vincent

Though Vincent is the more famous one, she argues that without Theo’s support – financial, emotional, and professional – he would not have become the magnificent artist we know. Using black and white reproductions of ink drawings as illustrative “gallery” dividers and an insert of color prints of key paintings, the author connects Vincent’s life with his work and gives the reader an insight into his process and vision.

Ms Heiligman has succeeded in writing an intricate and layered biography that readers will enjoy both as a story of the complicated bond between two brothers and for the understanding that they gain into one of the world’s most renowned painters and his art.

Extensive backmatter also includes a list of people, a thorough timeline, sources, and index.