I am not the _target audience but I wanted to see why Johnson's work is challenged. It looks pretty darn sweet to me. But it does hit the buttons of the banners, because the main character is both African-American and not straight. For me, 20 pp at the beginning and two at the end were enough... I definitely hope this is widely avl. to *all* teens.

July 2023

#ContainsMinorSpoilers

This was the August YA pick for Reese Witherspoon's YA Book Club. So I decided to give it a try as I was anyway in a mood to experiment with an unknown book. Unfortunately though, this was a really disappointing read. I'm still trying to figure out if the book itself is bad or whether my expectations soured my experience.

Liz Lighty, a financially-struggling 17-year-old black girl who stays with her grandparents and younger brother, loses out on the scholarship to her dream college. To earn money, she decides to participate in the highly competitive school prom to win the title of Prom Queen and the financial prize that comes with it. Along the way, she accepts her sexual orientation more openly and falls in love with a fellow prom queen competitor. The book is about her journey to accepting herself without being worried of what others will say.

What could have been a brilliant narration of self-awareness turns out to be a book full of commonplace clichés. Try thinking of any done-to-death idea, it's there in this book. Dead mother, absconding father, loving grandparents, mean cheerleader classmate, sickness that worsens at the most inappropriate point in the narrative, triumph of true love, villainous teachers turning out to be secret heroes, underdog winning the competition, friendships that break and get patched up at the opportune moment,.... Yeesh! There was absolutely nothing in the book that strode away from the tried-and-tested path. Basically, it is a school love story with only the LGBT factor making it stand apart from a typical chicklit. If it were a children's book, I would have been very forgiving of the typical storyline because children like comparatively straightforward plotlines and happy endings. But as a YA book, it could have experimented so much more with the flow. However, it ends up as an unsatisfying attempt. On second thought, this is Leah Johnson's debut work, so maybe I should cut her some slack. I'll rate it 0.25 more than what I originally intended.
My rating: 2.75/5.


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This was a great coming of age story. I love that the author included characters that have had to face many different issues in their short lives; it made it more realistic. I will definitely look for more books written by Leah Johnson in the future. This was an enjoyable and quick read. ( )

Perfectly nice book about competition for Prom Queen in a small town that makes a huge deal about it. Can a girl who doesn't fit the mold (nerdy, black, lesbian) win the crown?

While I enjoyed this I felt like it was all a bit too surface level and I never really felt close or invested in the characters or relationships the way that I wanted to. That said, I'm really glad that books like this exist now because they certainly didn't when I was a teen. ( )

Cute book, characters had good depth for a HS YA book ( )