Transitive Verve

Thoughts at a glance: **** (I really liked it) Summary: After a disastrous ending to a relationship with a bad-news guy (and basically a lifetime of bad choices), Reagan is more than ready to hit the road for the summer with her best friend, Dee... aka, teen country superstar Lilah Montgomery. Dee, also dealing with her own broken heart on top of the pressures of fame and her career, is headlining her first major US tour. When a particularly harmful tabloid news story drops, the girls are joined by Dee's new opening act, Matt Finch. The plan is for the media to start gossiping about Dee and Matt, but it's Reagan who catches his eye, and it's not long before sparks begin to fly. But Reagan has been conditioned to expect the worst from almost everyone in her life, including herself, and therefore, the walls she has built up seem impenetrable, and if she allows Matt to break down those walls, she's worried that her heart will be the next thing to break.

Thoughts at a glance: *** (I liked it) Summary:  Olga was always the perfect Mexican daughter--she never stayed out, she lived at home and worked a receptionist job while attending classes, and she never talked back to her mother. Was ... because Olga died in a tragic accident. And Julia, the younger Reyes sister, who always gets in trouble, who always mouths off, who never gets along with their mother, who wants more in life than to just be a docile wife to some man, is left to pick up the pieces. But Julia discovers something about Olga that leads her to believe that Olga may not have been quite so "perfect." And as she tries to investigate further, she also has to learn to navigate her forever-troubled, ever-worsening relationship with her mother, her own post-high school plans, and her sense of self as she finds her life rapidly changing.

Thoughts at a glance: ***** (It was amazing!) Summary: Starr Carter leads a double life, attending a wealthy white-dominated private school but living in a poor urban neighborhood. But her life changes one night when she witnesses her friend Khalil getting gunned down by a police officer. You know this story because you've read something similar in the news many times: a person of color gets killed or brutalized by a police officer and immediately the narrative begins to unfold in the media about how the kid was a "thug" and he "deserved it," even though he was unarmed and just a kid. In THUG, Starr finds herself no longer able--or willing--to keep those two sides of her life separate because she is suddenly at the center of a national news story, and it starts to become unbearable to be "respectable Starr" when she is filled with grief and anger. As the only other person who knows what happened that night, it's up to Starr to decide whethe...

So, for the past couple years on this blog, I've recapped my top ten YA books that I've read for the year. Looking back at my 2017, I realized that I haven't read that much YA this year that came out this year . I've read and reread a lot of older books, and I've read a lot of non-YA (like, mainly romance). So I don't really have much of a list for you this year, but it's a list, nonetheless :/ Here are my top FIVE YA books from this year, in no particular order (I read more than five, but definitely didn't love them as much as these): Turtles All the Way Down  by John Green The much anticipated follow-up to TFIOS, TATWD manages to be awesome all on its own in very different ways. Yes, it's a mystery story, and yes, there are plucky, intelligent teenagers, but TATWD takes a very close, personal look at Green's own experiences with OCD and thought spirals through protagonist Aza Holmes. Read my review here . When Dimple Met Rishi ...