If Vera were born forty years earlier, her looks and figure could be the envy of all her friends. Instead, she lives hyper aware that contouring, styling and instagram fame are what’s important if she wants to have popularity and impact. She’s happy to go without those things – a shallow existence never appealed anyway – but she wouldn’t mind the attention if it got her causes notice. Soon, it won’t matter. She’s getting attention whether she wants it or not. The heir to a throne always does. Along with that attention she meets an intriguing man who is far more than his bland appearance suggests.
“You are more to me than all art can ever be.” - Oscar Wilde, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’
Excerpt #1
James had never been one to wear his heart on his sleeve. He much preferred to keep it securely tucked inside his chest beneath the cashmere layers of his sweaters. He would likely never have spoken to Adrien at all, would’ve been too shy to even attempt it, had Adrien not chosen during one of the class tea breaks to speak to him first.
Before long, James had found himself looking forward to class in a way he never had before. Some mornings, he took the spiral stairs two at a time. He dreaded the moment of class ending almost as much as he longed for it, because Adrien always hung around afterwards for just a few moments to talk to him. And James had grown familiar with the envious glances of his classmates because, of all the interesting and talented people who milled around the studio, Adrien - bright, charming, vivacious Adrien - had chosen to speak to him.
That was the other reason why the prospect of submitting the painting tomorrow filled him with dread: it meant that the project was over, that Adrien’s job was finished, that James no longer had the means or the excuse to see him every other day.
An elite university for the study of the arts, including poetry, music, theatre, history, dance, and astronomy.
Excerpt:
The old building always took on a strange atmosphere after moonrise. There was something transient, something ethereal about it that gave one the inexplicable feeling of having somehow slipped into a different world. A world where moonlight shimmered through stained glass and cast subtle opalescent hues of blue and violet across a polished marble floor, where alabaster columns glimmered like white-gold and ivory.
The Studio
Excerpt:
Paintings hung high on the walls, the remnants of students from bygone years, forgotten moments in time captured in elegant brushstrokes and vibrant colours. Sculptures lined the shelves and topped the cabinets, images of the classical muses of art and inspiration standing proud alongside renaissance icons of creativity, each molded carefully from clay and decorated beautifully with a reverence that bordered on worship. Glass-fronted cabinets stood against the walls, filled with paints and oil pastels, pencils and charcoals. Rolled up sheets of blank canvas stacked in overflowing racks.
Growing up male in America, there were many damaging things I learned about being a man. Society taught me some of these things explicitly, while others were implicitly made clear through potential consequences that were a constant threatening undercurrent. The one I want to discuss here is the one I find myself thinking about a lot these days as a high school teacher and a writer of fiction for young adults: the lie that boys do not feel deeply, that we are simply hard-wired to be insensitive.
Society constantly bombarded me with this lie even as I knew it wasn’t true. As a kid, I cried easily. I enjoyed poetry and reading. I loved cuddling stuffed animals. I felt bonded to pretty much any living thing I came across (or even any inanimate object if given a name). But as I grew older, I received the message loud and clear that these were not aspects of myself I should embrace publicly, or I would be labeled as “gay” or a “pussy” and then suffer the social consequences. Of course, as a kid I didn’t have the ability to deconstruct the homophobia and misogyny inherent to this limiting view of masculinity and the wider damage caused by buying into it. I didn’t have the self-esteem to be my actual self. Instead, I downplayed all of those “softer” sides. I learned to stop crying, to hide my stuffed animals, to avoid emotions outside of humor and anger. I emphasized the sports I played and the girls I wanted to get with. So it was not that as a male I did not feel things deeply, but that I became an expert of suppression.
As a result, I never lacked for friends, which I suppose was the point of conforming. But, even so, I was always lonely. I never felt very close to any of the guys I hung out with in my middle school or high school years no matter the quantity of time we spent together. I believe they were also buying into the same lie as me—a lie even more strongly messaged to boys of color—so there was this collective unspoken agreement to never talk about anything too real, anything that would expose our softness. Instead, we played—sports, video games, music, etc.—because to play was to distract ourselves, to make us believe our friendship was deeper than it was. Yet I always wondered how many of us were secretly lonely, how many of us dealt with that loneliness in damaging ways.
I think this is why when I write YA fiction, I gravitate toward exploring friendship among boys, and particularly boys of color. This is why my characters are, at their core, lonely. After the Shot Dropsbegins with Bunny and Nasir each in isolation, struggling with the fallout of Bunny’s decision to transfer schools. Their issues are grounded in this loneliness, and it seems so obvious that they could resolve their problems if only they knew how to communicate honestly, to be vulnerable with each other. But the challenge here as a writer of realistic fiction is the challenge of real life: how do they overcome all of the societal programming that pressures them to do the exact opposite?
As many writers of children’s literature, I believe that fiction can serve as a roadmap. It can be countercultural, can be a form of resistance that shows readers another way to exist. A better way, a more freeing way. That is what I hoped I have done with Nasir and Bunny, and it’s what I hope to do with my other stories as well. I consider myself lucky to be writing at a time when so much of what I’ve struggled with in silence is now part of the national conversation, and I’m proud to be writing alongside so many other young adult authors who are trying to dismantle these toxic ideas. InThe Fire Next Time, James Baldwin writes, “Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” I am hopeful that these stories will help our boys figure out how to remove their masks in order to construct a healthier masculinity.
Randy Ribay is the author of An Infinite Number of Parallel UniversesandAfter the Shot Drops. He was born in the Philippines and raised in the Midwest. A graduate of the University of Colorado and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he is a high school English teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area where he lives with his wife and two dog-children.
Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure our how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous in hindsight, but which felt like the only way out at the time.
I know I’m not a great guy, he said. But I do love you, you know. Of course I do. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but I didn’t know if you wanted to hear it. I’m sorry.
I was smiling. My eyes were closed still. It felt good to be wrong about everything. Since when have you loved me? I said.
Since I met you, I would think. If I wanted to be very philosophical about it, I’d say I loved you before then.
I feel so frightened of being hurt — not of the suffering, which I know I can handle, but the indignity of the suffering, the indignity of being open to it.
And by now you can only look at me with pity - not with love or friendship but just pity, like I’m something half-dead lying on the roadside and the kindest thing would be to put me out of my misery.
Maybe eventually we will just drop out of each other’s lives, or become friends after all, or something else. But whatever happens will at least be the result of this experiment, which feels at times like it’s going badly wrong, and at other times feels like the only kind of relationship worth having.
A delightful and sad amuse bouche that defies fictional categorization and does what great literature has the potential to do: transcend. This novel will be described as “unique” because it breaks categorical rules - might it be contemporary fiction? Yes? Magical Realism? Maybe. Time travel? Not exactly, but surreal contemporary? Is that a genre?
Sabrina is throwing her 30th birthday dinner party - and inexplicably, her dinner party is actually her five-person “If I could have dinner with any 5 people” list - both living and dead. Having completed the novel, I still don’t know the how or the why of it. And I also don’t care. How refreshing to drop into a world where there are just as many questions as answers and the author doesn’t feel the need to over-explain! It’s storytelling. This is part of the magic!
The Dinner List is a little as if Audrey Hepburn were part of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 interspersed with episodes of Girls watched nostalgically 5 years in the future of its Series Finale. It conjures the kind of sad longing of Euphoria juxtaposed with the mismatched love of every coupled 20-something in New York that will break up by 30.
The Dinner List could easily have been a kitschy concept book, but it delves deeper. It explores the frustration of having the perfect romantic relationship — albeit one that only exists in a bubble of studio apartment solitude. It touches on the sadness and inevitability of losing friendship due to life choices, because some people just have kids and move to Connecticut. It is bittersweet and complete, a satisfying little package of a book that will leave you a little enlightened and a little sad, and possibly a little empty even on a full stomach.
*Thank you to the publishers for providing B3 with an ARC.
Chapter 8 of The Day You Walked Into My Life is now available on Wattpad!
If you are looking for a romantic story that will tug on your heart strings and take you away from the craziness of the world, this might be the story for you. Take a walk in Olivia’s shoes as she wades into the stormy waters of love, betrayal, and heartbreak.
Check it out now: wattpad.com/story/232207083-the-day-you-walked-into-my-life
The residents of Haven, Wisconsin, have dined on the Fine Chao Restaurant’s delicious Americanized Chinese food for thirty-five years, happy to ignore any unsavory whispers about the family owners. But when brash, charismatic, and tyrannical patriarch Leo Chao is found dead—presumed murdered—his sons discover that they’ve drawn the exacting gaze of the entire town.The ensuing trial brings to…
Audiobook Review: Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda
Audiobook Review: Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda
A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns; a cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious bath; a silent house-caller who babysits and cleans while a single mother is out working. Where the Wild Ladies Are is populated by these and many other spirited women—who also happen to be ghosts. This is a realm in which…
Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This…
After the tragic death of his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house–a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn’t understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.
At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world, where “things happen.” He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many.
And he meets his very own Book–a talking thing–who narrates Benny’s life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter.
Best friends since second grade, Fiona Lin and Jane Shen explore the lonely freeways and seedy bars of Los Angeles together through their teenage years, surviving unfulfilling romantic encounters, and carrying with them the scars of their families’ tumultuous pasts. Fiona was always destined to leave, her effortless beauty burnished by fierce ambition–qualities that Jane admired and feared in equal measure. When Fiona moves to New York and cares for a sick friend through a breakup with an opportunistic boyfriend, Jane remains in California and grieves her estranged father’s sudden death, in the process alienating an overzealous girlfriend. Strained by distance and unintended betrayals, the women float in and out of each other’s lives, their friendship both a beacon of home and a reminder of all they’ve lost.
In stories told in alternating voices, Jean Chen Ho’s debut collection peels back the layers of female friendship–the intensity, resentment, and boundless love–to probe the beating hearts of young women coming to terms with themselves, and each other, in light of the insecurities and shame that holds them back.
Spanning countries and selves, Fiona and Jane is an intimate portrait of a friendship, a deep dive into the universal perplexities of being young and alive, and a bracingly honest account of two Asian women who dare to stake a claim on joy in a changing, contemporary America.
Joan is a thirtysomething ICU doctor at a busy New York City hospital. The daughter of Chinese parents who came to the United States to secure the American dream for their children, Joan is intensely devoted to her work, happily solitary, successful. She does look up sometimes and wonder where her true roots lie: at the hospital, where her white coat makes her feel needed, or with her family, who try to shape her life by their own cultural and social expectations.
Once Joan and her brother, Fang, were established in their careers, her parents moved back to China, hoping to spend the rest of their lives in their homeland. But when Joan’s father suddenly dies and her mother returns to America to reconnect with her children, a series of events sends Joan spiraling out of her comfort zone just as her hospital, her city, and the world are forced to reckon with a health crisis more devastating than anyone could have imagined.
Deceptively spare yet quietly powerful, laced with sharp humor, Joan Is Okay touches on matters that feel deeply resonant: being Chinese-American right now; working in medicine at a high-stakes time; finding one’s voice within a dominant culture; being a woman in a male-dominated workplace; and staying independent within a tight-knit family. But above all, it’s a portrait of one remarkable woman so surprising that you can’t get her out of your head.
Dr. Maya Rao is a gynecologist trying to balance a busy life. With three young children, a career, and a happy marriage, she should be grateful–on paper, she has it all. But after a disastrous encounter with a patient, Maya is forced to walk away from the city hospital where she’s spent her entire career.
A new opportunity arises when Maya enrolls her daughter at an exclusive private school and crosses paths with Amelia DeGilles. Amelia is the owner and entrepreneur behind Eunoia Women’s Health, a concierge wellness clinic that specializes in house calls for its clientele of wealthy women for whom no vitamin infusion or healing crystal is too expensive. All Eunoia needs is a gynecologist to join its ranks.
Amid visits to her clients’ homes to educate and empower, and occasionally to remove crystals from bodily orifices, Maya comes to idolize the beautiful, successful Amelia. But Amelia’s life isn’t as perfect as it seems, and when Amelia’s teenaged daughter is struck with a mysterious ailment, Maya must race to uncover the reason before it’s too late. In the process, she risks losing what’s most important to her and bringing to light a secret of her own that she’s been desperately trying to keep hidden.
