FAKE BY DONNA COOPER

Attending Fort Collins High School in Colorado, Maisie Fernandez is a mixed race girl whose father is a Filipino Californian and whose mother is a white Texan.  Branded as one of the Froot Loops, Maisie learns that it isn’t easy being sixteen and fat.  Despite her artistic, humorous, and intelligent characteristics, she finds herself outside the hub of the magic trifecta of high school: popular, pretty, and skinny.  Craving acceptance, she achieves solace in what she does best: uses her artist’s vision to refocus and tamp down her negative feelings.  In her comic strips, she draws powerful, independent girls, but she is unable to draw herself as the hero of the story until she has shape-shifted.  The subject of her comics are her kind of people, “the freaks, misfits, and outcasts of high school.  It’s a mash-up of oversharing and revenge therapy” (34) in which characters shape-shift into wolves, dragons, and tigers and eat all the popular but mean bullies—people like Jesse Santos.  When Maisie is working on the Froot Loops strip, she isn’t afraid, alone, powerless, or the target of hatred.  She lets every worry go and escapes into her art, often taking inspiration from her idol, Lexi Singh, and imitating her style.

Her best friend, Owen Carpenter is another of the Froot Loops, but rather than resenting his status, he embraces being a high school misfit.  Not being normal is something of a badge of honor to Owen, who is crazy-smart and an intense collector of unusual things.  Because of these traits, Owen reminds Maisie of a raven.  And like a raven, Owen also has green eyes and uses logic to solve problems.  Soaring above all the high school drama, Owen stays true to who is he is, engaging in the self-study of esoteric topics like tea or hygge—the Danish concept of comfort.  His superpower is having no desire to blend in.  About friendship, he dispenses his brand of hygge wisdom to Maisie: “Gaining something doesn’t mean you have to lose something in return.  Sometimes our hearts just get bigger” (268).

In an act of uncharacteristic deceit and anger, Maisie creates Sienna Maras, an online personality that she will use to bring down Jesse Santos, the face of the popular people.  Just as shape-shifters are awe-inspiring, powerful, and vicious in the stories that feature them, Sienna’s special powers will make Jesse Santos vulnerable.  Initially, this deception begins as a revenge stunt, but as Maisie grows obsessed with her creation, she becomes a defender against bullies, a champion for the underdog—so she thinks.  Maisie’s perception of the school dynamic is that people are classified and sorted according to predetermined characteristics like looks, money, brains, and friends: “All the factors go into this socially acceptable machine and out spits your place in the world” (58).

YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY BY GORDAN JACK

A stoner, a type-A achiever, and a new girl with a secret fight for the class presidency.

Stacey Wynn, who is white, is running unopposed for student body president of her California high school—and that’s just the way things should be. Her best friend, Brian, who she suspects may be gay, is her campaign adviser, which is working great until his (secret) crush, new student Julia Romero, decides on a whim that she is running too. And for reasons no one can understand, Chinese-American underachiever Tony Guo is also now on the ballot. What should have been a sure thing—in Stacey’s mind—is now a true election, and it soon devolves into a game of scheming and back-stabbing. Each candidate hides a troubled home life and strained family relationships, but Julia’s struggle is especially central to the election’s conflicts; the French-Canadian child of a white mother of Italian descent and a sperm donor, she appears Latinx but her mother has refused to reveal her donor’s ethnic heritage. The story begins two weeks before the election, and the hijinks are chronicled by an unintentionally hilarious and earnest student blogger. Discerning readers will appreciate the timely and astute exploration of both the gravity and levity of identity politics and the critique of neoliberal ideals.

Sharply observed—but so sharp it may be missed by less woke readers—this is satire at its best. 

CARING IS CREEPY BY DAVID ZIMMERMAN

Fifteen-year-old Lynn Marie Sugrue is doing her best to make it through a difficult summer. Her mother works long hours as a nurse, and Lynn suspects that her mother’s pill-popping boyfriend has enlisted her in his petty criminal enterprises. Lynn finds refuge in online flirtations, eventually meeting up with a troubled young soldier, Logan Loy, and inviting him home. When he’s forced to stay over in a storage space accessible through her closet, and the Army subsequently lists him as AWOL, she realizes that he’s the one thing in her life that she can control. Meanwhile, her mother’s boyfriend is on the receiving end of a series of increasingly violent threats, which places Lynn squarely in the cross-hairs.