Bluefish by Pat Schmatz and Same Sun Here by House and Vaswani
I just finished Bluefish by Pat Schmatz today on my lunch break. I picked it up because she read at the book festival, and I've seen some positive reviews in a few places.
It's one of those books where the description on the book flap is annoyingly cagey about what the book is actually about, even though the protagonist's 'secret' is revealed fairly early on. The description on the website is a bit more forthcoming, though. SPOILER: it's about a poor kid, Travis who's functionally illiterate. His grandpa is his primary caregiver and they've just moved to a new town. He is in mourning for the dog who was his closest companion and vanished, distrusts his grandpa's attempts to sober up, and has some anger issues. He meets a girl named Velveeta who lives in the trailer park and who has also recently suffered a loss, in her case the older man who lived in a neighboring trailer and who mentored and encouraged her where her screw-up mother never did.
The story is well paced and does a really good job of getting into the heads of both Travis and Velveeta. They both work as characters and their mistakes and miscommunications feel so natural, as does Schmatz's work showing Travis's difficult slog toward literacy. He has an inspiring teacher, yes, but that teacher has to do a lot of work to break through his shell and he never totally trusts him, though he does come to respect his teaching. I also liked that this book dealt with the issue of peers teaching one another, and that process didn't go smoothly. There were a few notable moments where Velveeta attempts to teach Travis and her approach hits some of his buttons, shutting him down and making him angry.
Schmatz really got well into the different ways each of these characters experience and respond to being poor. Travis's home life with his (recovering) alcoholic grandfather, and the extremely barbed relationship they have, was particularly interesting. Velveeta's family were a little harder to puzzle out, partly because her perspective came from diary entries addressed to a recently deceased father-ish figure. Because she's writing to someone who knows her family situation, she doesn't explain who most of them are, so that was confusing.
I also read Same Sun Here by Silas House and Neela Vaswani, which is a YA novel coming out in February (I snagged an advance reading copy).
I really liked it, even though I'm not usually very fond of epistolary books. This one is constructed entirely in letters exchanged between Meena, a young Indian immigrant living in New York City, and her pen pal River Justice, a poor coalminer's son living in Kentucky. I think the book tried a little too hard to hit on too many Issues in their personal lives--both having absent fathers who have to live elsewhere to work, River's mother's mental health problems, Meena's family's difficulties with immigration and her family's illegal housing situation in a rent-controlled home with a nasty landlord. But those details, while making the story busy, also really made each character's context come alive and their feelings mattered on a subjective level. The narrative did a good job of situating and humanizing these very different kids, finding resonances between them as they navigate their class, access to technology, political opinions, cultural estrangements, and personal happiness and grievance. It's a surprisingly nuanced book.
The transnational emotional baggage Meena has to deal with--especially concerning having left her beloved grandmother, who practically raised her for several years until Meena's family could afford to bring her over, was particularly heartfelt. And the ways each kid found to console one another, share each others' culture and perspective, were really well done in this book. I liked that even when one child took pains to 'correct' the other on some issue, the other didn't necessarily come around on it--it felt like fairly natural interactions. The details about River not wanting to hear about Meena shaving her legs, for instance, were great. I was sad when this story ended, I wanted to know how their relationship would change once they met face to face.