Today my students' final grades are due so I don't have time to do a write-up, which is why I asked my friend Patrice to tap in!
She recommends Black author Nicola Yoon, author of Everything, Everything and The Sun is Also a Star. She would also like you to know that Charles Melton is in the movie version of The Sun is Also a Star, thus the above image. Here's the actual book cover.
Without further ado, here's PATRICE:
Nicola Yoon, author of Everything, Everything, is an extraordinary YA novelist, and I love her work so much because she so wonderfully illustrates young Black women being adored, whether or not they take their suitors seriously. We still don’t get that enough in novels for any age range, and though her characters experience their own kinds of tragedies, they are always - always - loved.
The book I picked is The Sun is Also a Star, about a young Jamaican woman trying to prevent her family’s deportation on their last day in NYC. She meets a young Korean man who swoons - and I mean SWOONS - over her, and attempts to get her to fall in love with him in a few hours. Her pragmatism and societal criticism - some in part as a trauma response ingrained in Black girls and some in part because she believes in rationality - go toe to toe in every line with his hopelessly romantic, poetry writing, genuine intrigue of this woman he sees as a sign from the universe.
Black girls deserve love, to be loved on, and to be protected, and Yoon’s writing expresses in a way that reminds readers that they are always worthy of that love.
Buy Yoon's work here: https://www.esowonbookstore.com/search/site/nicola%2520yoon