Summering: Hearts, Strings, and Other Breakable Things by Jacqueline Firkins

It's an understatement to say that this has been the winter of Edie's discontent. Her mom has died and Edie and her best friend Shondra have had a horrible quarrel. And now Edie's been sent off to her wealthy suburbanite aunt and uncle in Mansfield, Massachusetts, to finish high school there and summer over with them until she can find a way to fund college. Edie hates being cast as the ragged orphan, and the rescue is a dismal prospect.

And her fears of being received as the poor relation are not unjustified.

At first the car ride was just annoying. Edie slouched in the back seat of the SUV, clutching her mom's sticker covered guitar case. Her Aunt Norah blithely rattled on from the passenger seat. "Poor Edith" must realize that she lucky to have left foster care for a "real home," she says.

"Her wardrobe was atrocious. Her posture was appalling. She had no understanding of proper diet or personal care.

And that hair!" Norah exclaimed. "Good lord, what will the neighbors say!"

The only thing Edie has to look forward to is seeing Sebastian, the boy-next-door with whom on one summer visit she had blissfully shared tree-climbing, Pixie sticks, and her first kiss at age ten. But while Sebastian is just as kind and welcoming as always, most of his time is taken up by a demanding and gorgeous girlfriend, Claire. And then her cousins, Maria and Julia, take Edie on as a potential Aschenputtel, woefully in need of a magical makeover.

"We get to go shopping!" Maria said. "Dad gave us his credit card."

"You're totally Cinderella," Julia gushed. "Which means we have to find you a Prince Charming."

"You, Miss Edie Price, are about to be introduced to Mansfield society," said Maria.

And before she's even learned to walk in high heels, Prom is approaching. It seems that in Mansfield society, she can't opt not to go. And when the dazzlingly handsome and charming Henry finds time away from his other admirers to pay attention to Edie, she impulsively asks him to Prom. She finds herself impossibly falling for the magnetically attractive Henry and for the romance of it all. But something about it just doesn't satisfy her expectations. There's still that connection to Sebastian, and when he and Claire part, Edie realises that the Cinderella role with Henry doesn't quite fit into her happy ever after....

In her just published Hearts, Strings, and Other Breakable Things (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), Jacqueline Firkins clearly molds her modern novel in the format of Jane Austen's classic social romance, Mansfield Park, even using some of the same character names--Julia, Maria, Claire, Tom, and Henry-- and although Fanny becomes Edie and Edmund becomes Sebastian, Firkins keeps basic personalities easily recognizable and even leaves behind "bread crumbs" of plot links--names, games, jewelry, and places embedded for those Austen afficionados to discover.

Love and marriage and getting on in the world have changed since the early 1800s, but the process remains quite recognizable in this engaging social coming-of-age story of a girl finding her way through the twists of happily-ever-after, leaving plenty of the twists of true love left yet entangled, perhaps awaiting a sequel.

Walking the Wall: Frankly in Love by David Yoon

Senior Year Is Begun.

For Frank Li, only son of Korean immigrant parents, this is the year he must prove himself worthy of his parents' sacrifices--their thrift, his dad's twelve-hour shifts at The Store, as they call it--by getting the magic SAT score that will get him into The Harvard or its equivalent. His parents are in America, but not really of it, living in a bubble, speaking Korean-English, socializing with other immigrants, whom Frank calls "The Gathering," most of whom are more successful than his father.

Each month, they ritually attend a round-robin dinner where most of the adults compete in their success stories and the teenagers hang out together. They are not really friends, but fellow second-generation Korean-Americans who call themselves "The Limbos,"  who complain while their parents drink too much, speak Korean and play Korean board games, and hope their children will marry each other.

But Frank has a problem.  He's almost in a relationship with Brit, the perfect girl--except she's white, and he knows Mom-n-Dad will not accept that. His older sister, who married a non-Korean, has been cast out of the family and lives on the other coast in Boston. And Mom-n-Dad have already settled on Joy Song as his ideal match.

"You're stupid." says Joy. "Your parents are stupid."

"Your parents are stupid," I said. We laugh because it's funny, but then stop because the funny doesn't last.

But then Frank and Joy Song discover that they are in the same second-generation teen boat. Frank wants to date Brit, and Joy wants to date her boyfriend, Wu, a Chinese-American, equally unacceptable to her parents. They work out a plan; they will pretend-date each other. Frank will pick up Joy, she'll meet up with Wu; and Frank and Brit can actually go out alone. They'll be happy, and their parents will be happy. What could go wrong?

In a plot line that Shakespeare would (and did) love, their fake-dating plan works for a while. But life happens to interrupt their best-laid plans. Frank's dad is diagnosed with cancer, and in the hard times immediately after, Joy takes on more the role of girlfriend, and Frank realizes that he is really attracted to her, too, and in the days following the diagnosis, Frank begins to try to know his dad.

How much of my dad do I know? I realize it's not much. Dad settled into his role as breadwinner, expected me to settle into my role as disciplined academic, and we put put our noses to the grindstone and never looked up. I began to calculate our time together. A few minutes each evening. Sundays at The Store for the last couple summers. It adds up to about three hundred hours.

Who is this man who was my dad?

Is, Frank. He's not dead yet. But he will be.

In a funny, heart-rending, life-affirming, coming-of-age young adult novel, David Yoon's just published Frankly in Love (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2019) deals frankly with issues of immigration, racism (refreshingly not all white racism) and class prejudice, the stuff of our culture these days, as in the past. As in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and in J.D. Salinger's landmark The Catcher in the Rye, young people have a way of running into the social complexities in the world that they must enter and find their own way through, just as their parents and the adults around them have done by learning to be the persons they want to be. As author Yoon's punning title suggests, it is not easy, but, frankly, it's what we all have to do.

Writes the New York Times reviewer writes, "Yoon explores themes of racism, forgiveness and acceptance without getting earnest or preachy or letting anyone off the hook. And there's a universality to the story that cuts across cultures."