Last Night at the Telegraph Club: a Young Adult historical fiction coming of age tale

Last Night at the Telegraph Club the 2021 National Book Award for Young People's Literature written by Malinda Lo is a story that has yet to be told in the arena of young adult literature. Lo deserves the award for her portrayal of Lily Hu, a 17 year-old Chinese-American daughter of immigrants who settled in Chinatown in San Francisco.  The year is 1954 and the Red Scare is is buzzing all around Lily and her community. She must be careful with whom she associates or else it could spell trouble for her family.  What ends up happening not only affects Lily's future, but also those around her.  

With the tone of a coming of age story, Lo reminds the reader of what it's like to be a teenager trying to figure out who you really are.  When Lily sees an advertisement for The Telegraph Club with a male impersonator or cross-dresser, something in her is awakened. She feels drawn to the club and finds a fellow classmate, Kath, who has an in there.  Once Kath introduces Lily to the club and the people inside, a whole new world opens up for Lily.  A world where others who feel like her can feel normal.  How can Lily return to the person her family expects her to be after she's discovered her feelings for women?  

The best part of this story is when Lo uses the flashbacks between Lily's storyline with ones about her parents and her aunt.  Their own circumstances and journeys to the U.S. to where they are in the 1950s sheds much light on their actions.  As I read the story I kept telling myself if Lily only knew her own family's struggles with their identity in the U.S., then she could open up to them about her own apprehension about where she stands.  

As a former history teacher, I also enjoyed the timelines that Lo includes that show the year, Lily and her family's major moments, and parts of world and American history that have affected Chinese Americans since they were first brought to the U.S. to build the trans-continental railroad.  As the daughter of an aerospace engineer, I enjoyed the development of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as Lily's other passion is studying space travel.  Thankfully her aunt is a human computer for the program and encourages Lily to pursue her interest in math, science, and engineering.  This part of history is interesting for readers to compare to Katherine Johnson and her pioneering work she did for NASA.

This story is an important one for people to read who may not be familiar with the experiences of Chinese Americans.  It's also a history of how the LGBTQ+ community has had to seek out safe spaces to be themselves.  It surprised me that in the ever-inclusive city of San Francisco, there was once a time that it was illegal for homosexuals to even congregate in public.  The end of the novel is full of more information that Lo explains served as her basis for all of the storylines in the book.  Readers who are interested have a number of resources to use to continue learning about more people who lived during this time and left their mark on the country. 

Once Upon a Camel: middle grade fantasy, adventure

 

Once Upon a Camel, a middle grade chapter book written by award-winning author Kathi Appelt with pictures by Eric Rohmann is a heart-warming, educational story that is perfect for animal & history lovers.  The twist is that this story is told from the point of view of Zada, an old camel who is thrust into protecting the baby chicks of two kestrel friends as a wind storm rushes their way.  Zada takes the journey seriously as they make their way across the wilderness towards safety and hopefully the chicks can reunite with their parents who were carried away by the storm.  To help the time pass, Zada recalls how she came to live in Texas from Turkey. Through a series of flashbacks the touching tale leaps off the page and ends in the most uplifting, surprising way imaginable.  

I highly recommend this for elementary, middle school and home libraries, especially those with readers who enjoyed The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate. If readers like this book, then I suggest offering them  Exiled: Memoirs of a Camel by Kathleen Karr about the perspective of an Egyptian camel who ends up in the U.S.  There are similarities between the camels' experiences and those interested in the real-life history of camels being brought to the U.S. in the 1850s to be part of the camel corps for the U.S. Army. The illustrations also help the story move forward and softens the high stakes situations in which Zada finds herself. 

Appelt shares more about her book and reads an excerpt in the video below:

 Here's an entertaining book trailer to share with readers:

I Can Make This Promise: family secrets & identity

 Christine Day's debut middle grade novel, I Can Make This Promise, conveys a perspective of a 12-year old Native American girl who only knows that her mother was adopted by a White couple so she has no connection to the Native side of her heritage.  Although Edie is constantly "othered" by people asking her "what are you?", she feels as though her parents would've shared anything they knew with her.  That is until she and her friends stumble across a box of keepsakes in Edie's attic full of mysterious photos, letters, and postcards.  The woman in the photos looks just like Edie and even shares her name.  When Edie asks her parents, they act shifty and change the subject.  Why would they keep something like that a secret? 

Edie and her friends approach this sensitive mystery in different ways. One of her friends urges Edie to talk about it with her parents more while her other friend thinks they should dig for more clues on their own.  The journey that Edie takes to find out the truth is both heart-breaking, yet, hopeful.  Day puts real faces and emotions to the atrocities Native people suffered at the hands of the U.S. Government.  Readers can take the snippets of people mentioned in the story and conduct further research about who they were and why they were considered activists of their time.  Readers can also relate to the changing friendships and history that follow them into adolescence.  Edie decides to cut ties with someone who refuses to be an ally to her and that is a situation that readers can discuss.  

As a teacher, librarian and parent, I would definitely share this book with my students and daughter.  The themes of identity, family, friendship, and historical power and injustice offer a lot of important conversations that connect to other media.  Share the book trailer below with readers to gauge their interest in this story:

Initially I read Day's second novel, The Sea in Winter and was impressed by the authentic voice her characters use while teaching the reader about the upper northwestern U.S. and the Native tribes located there.  I'm looking forward to reading more by Day!