Me on How We Roll

Title: How We Roll
Author: Natasha Friend
Release Date: June 5, 2018
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux (Macmillan imprint)

For Quinn McAvoy, losing her hair the summer before eighth grade was the beginning of the end. Suddenly she was Pluto: a has-been planet, too dwarf-like and unimportant to hand with the other celestial bodies. But Quinn gets a second chance when her family moves across the country a week before her freshman year. No one in Gull's Head, Massachusetts, knows that Quinn has alopecia, the autoimmune disorder that took the hair she had never really thought about-until it was gone. No one knows that the wig she's wearing isn't her real hair. All Quinn wants is to blend in with the crowd. When the popular girls mistake her for one of their own, Quinn plays along, until a boy in a wheelchair who's been hurt even more than she has turns Quinn's carefully constructed world on its head.

How We Roll is a kind and open story about healing, about struggle, about illness and disorder and understanding. About perception and differences. About honesty and learning.

Quinn didn't have much hope but she does now, after moving across the country from Colorado to Massachusetts. Here's a fresh start for her family, for her brother and his new school that will help them all learn to better understand his autism and his needs, and for Quinn. No one at her new school will know what happened to her. How she lost all her hair and wears a wig when she goes out. How kids at her old school made fund of her, called her names, and how her old friends slowly ditched her. Here in Gull's Head, she's made new friends, she's fitting in when some of the popular freshmen girls start talking to her. But then she comes across Nick, moving through the school in a wheelchair, and she wonders what happened to him. Why he's so sad and so angry.

There's something interesting at play in this book, which is perception, how people see us versus how we want to be seen. Quinn wants to be seen as normal, as one of the girls, but she feels awkward and out of place when she's the only girl in school who wears a wig, who has to deal with it and the itch that races across her scalp. Nick wants to be normal, too. He wants his legs back. But Quinn is able to hide under her wigs. Nick can't, and so Quinn sees a deeper side to being out of place. But they're still teens, still kids with hopes and dreams and likes and dislikes and snarky moments. They're still learning, growing, and still fragile when someone stares. Sometimes friends will accept and sometimes friends will be jerks. Sometimes families are complicated. But we all keep moving forward in some way. I'd recommend this to younger YA readers, middle grade readers making the transition, as Quinn's voice came across as a little young for YA (which would make sense, her being a freshman in high school in the US would make her 13 or 14).

(I received an advance copy of this title to review from Raincoast Books.)

Me on Waiting on Wednesday (254)

Waiting on Wednesday is a bunch of weekly fun hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine. :)

Title: On the Edge of Gone
Author: Corinne Duyvis
Release Date: March 6, 2015
Publisher: Amulet Books (Abrams imprint)

From Goodreads:

January 29, 2035. That’s the day the comet is scheduled to hit—the big one.

Denise and her mother and sister, Iris, have been assigned to a temporary shelter outside their hometown of Amsterdam to wait out the blast, but Iris is nowhere to be found, and at the rate Denise’s drug-addicted mother is going, they’ll never reach the shelter in time.

A last-minute meeting leads them to something better than a temporary shelter: a generation ship, scheduled to leave Earth behind to colonize new worlds after the comet hits. But everyone on the ship has been chosen because of their usefulness. Denise is autistic and fears that she’ll never be allowed to stay. Can she obtain a spot before the ship takes flight? What about her mother and sister?

When the future of the human race is at stake, whose lives matter most?

So excited for this book! Yay to more Corinne books, which means yay to more diversity in YA and yay to more genre fiction. I'm really looking forward to this futuristic survival in a European city with an autistic, biracial heroine. :)

Me on Fragile Bones

Title: Fragile Bones: Harrison & Anna
Author: Lorna Schultz Nicholson
Release Date: March 15, 2015
Publisher: Clockwise Press

Meet Harrison and Anna. One is a fifteen-year-old boy with an uncanny ability to recite every bone in the skeletal system whenever he gets anxious ― and that happens a lot. The meaning of "appropriate behaviour" mystifies him: he doesn't understand most people and they certainly don't understand him. The other is a graduating senior with the world at her feet. Joining the Best Buddies club at her school and pairing up with a boy with high-functioning autism is the perfect addition to her med school applications. Plus, the president of the club is a rather attractive, if mysterious, added attraction.

Fragile Bones is intriguing and eye-opening, a look into the lives of two teens and the struggles they face daily. A look into autism and not only how it impacts Harrison but the people around him.

Harrison is an interesting character with his honest no nonsense voice, his rituals and routines, his breakdowns. His family, as supportive as they can be, with their gentle nudges towards trying new things. His is a very clear view of the world. Black and white, no shades of grey. Ordered. The world is chaotic, changing, unpredictable, and Harrison's brain can't quite process that the way someone's without autism can.

Anna is bright and cheerful. She tries so hard to get her mother's approval, to get her to understand it's not all about going to university on the east coast or in the UK. She tries so hard in school. She tries so hard to make things work with Harrison, not just going through the motions but genuinely interested in getting to know him better. But she doesn't need to try so hard all the time. The answers aren't always found in a textbook. There's no shame in not being perfect, in not knowing everything.

Harrison's family tries to help, they try to understand him. I didn't always like them, though. I'm torn between supporting them as they support him, as they try to break him out of his shell, and disliking them for putting too much pressure on him to mature and one day get a girlfriend. That he'll have to get over his phobia of germs if he's ever going to kiss a girl one day. I'm not sure if he'll ever be interested in girls that way.

This is a very interesting and relevant kind of book. It's not overwhelmed by the young romance Anna has, there's a good mix of friendship and learning along with it. It's all about Harrison and Anna learning from each other. Harrison's growth is slow, but I expected that. Baby steps. If the series continues, I imagine I'll continue reading it.

(I received an e-galley of this title to review from Clockwise Press through NetGalley.)