SF Chronicle Book Review: Young Adults Navigate Life’s Crossroads in Hong Kong and Philadelphia →
The best fiction is able to take readers along on a journey as characters grow and evolve (or don’t, in some cases). Of course, this is especially true of the young-adult genre, where protagonists are at a crossroads in their lives between childhood and becoming an adult.
In Maurene Goo’s “Somewhere Only We Know” and Elizabeth Acevedo’s “With the Fire on High,” the authors create a distinct sense of place, as well as food and the identities that others project onto us to take the reader deeper into the lives of their main characters, Lucky and Emoni, respectively.
Goo’s novel is primarily set during one day in Hong Kong, where American-born K-pop (that’s Korean pop music, to the uninitiated) superstar Lucky (not the name she was born with) has just finished a massive Asian tour. She decides to ditch her security detail in search of a great hamburger and some freedom before she heads back to America for a late-night show appearance that should send her career to the next level.
Soon she meets Jack, another American expat who’s a photographer for a tabloid. They spend a day together — “Roman Holiday”-style — where both are trying to hide part of themselves while simultaneously getting closer to figuring out what they want in life. Lucky tells Jack her name is Fern, while he pretends he’s not going to use their day together to get his big break with the tabloid.
Through it all, there is also a food journey with each dish — from fish congee for breakfast to bao (stuffed buns) — seemingly unlocking a piece of Lucky that she’s hidden away during her time in training to become Lucky and the years thereafter. Every moment of her life (and her diet) is regulated by someone who is not her, and she might just be done with it all. Her name and her unhappy pop-star status call to mind the Britney Spears song “Lucky,” which includes the lyrics:
Early morning, she wakes up
Knock, knock, knock on the door
It’s time for makeup, perfect smile
It’s you they’re all waiting for
They go
Isn’t she lovely, this Hollywood girl?
And they say
She’s so lucky, she’s a star
But she cry, cry, cries in her lonely heart, thinking
If there’s nothing missing in my life
Then why do these tears come at night?
As Lucky and Jack traverse the city, taking it all in, she’s rediscovering the girl she once was and the woman she wants to become — and possibly falling in love. The girl everyone knows as Lucky, but whom Jack knows as Fern, might just become someone else altogether.
Emoni Santiago, the protagonist of “With the Fire on High,” already has quite a sense of self when the novel begins, yet her future is in some ways as uncertain as Lucky’s. After becoming pregnant as a high school freshman, she is living with her ‘Buela (the paternal grandmother who also raised her) and her 2-year-old daughter, Emma, or Babygirl, as Emoni calls her. She’s balancing school, motherhood, her part-time job at a burger joint, a relatively absent father (both her own and Emma’s), and a passion for cooking that she’s not sure what to do with. But will the decision to have her daughter be the one that always defines her? It does to many of her fellow students at the Schomberg Charter School she commutes to from her mostly black and Puerto Rican neighborhood in Philadelphia.
Emoni stands up for herself when necessary and has a best friend named Angelica who is pretty much a dream BFF, and the new boy in school, Malachi, seems to have a thing for her. But what could life look like after graduation? Like Lucky, Emoni’s preferred method of self-care involves food — she’s a talented cook with a knack for putting her own spin on recipes in a way that feels God-given. More than once, her talent is referred to as magical.
Her journey of self-discovery is furthered by a culinary arts class taught by a tough chef, which forces her to reexamine both what she wants out of life and how to get there. It’s also in class that Emoni is able to become a leader while fundraising for the group to travel to Spain for a week — a week that changes everything. Acevedo’s style immerses the reader in the specificity of Emoni’s life, while also making it relatable to your own.
Both novels explore the identity that young women are given by the world around them and how they navigate their own sense of self in worlds where expectations (both high and low) could end up defining them. They also offer readers a sense of place and culture that further proves the need for diverse voices, storytellers and characters in the world of young-adult fiction and beyond. Though the journeys of their characters and the writing styles differ in appropriate ways — one grittier, one glossier — spending a day (or a school year) with Lucky or Emoni is a journey worth taking.
“With the Fire on High”
By Elizabeth Acevedo
HarperTeen; 400 pages; $17.99
“Somewhere Only We Know”
By Maurene Goo
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 336 pages; $17
