The Land of Forgotten Girls by Erin Entrada Kelly

Rating: WORTHY!

Read delightfully by the amazingly-named Lulu Lam, this is the story of two girls who came with their father to Louisiana, only to have him abandon them and return to the Philippines, leaving them at the mercy of their somewhat sadistic stepmother. Soledad and Dominga, aka Sol and the unfortunate abbreviation of 'Ming' which makes her sound Chinese, lost their other sister, Amelia when they were much younger, and Sol feels she is responsible in some way. As if that wasn't bad enough, their mother died not long afterwards. Now their dad has ditched them so they're stuck with stepmother for the last two years or so.

Their stepmother Vee (?spelling since this was an audiobook) works, and feeds and houses them, but in many ways she resents them and demands strict adherence to her rules. Sol quietly and not so quietly rebels and often retreats into fantasy, particularly when she's punished. Some of those occasions, like when she's locked in a closet in her bedroom, are paradoxically quite amusing because she pretends she's in a spaceship traveling through space. When Ming opens the door later and asks why she isn't coming out, there ensues a conversation which made me laugh out loud. Sol asks, "What's your planet like?" and Ming looks around their bedroom and answers, "It's kind of messy."

Sol's behavior is highly questionable. She and her best friend Manny regularly steal from a convenience store where the popsicles are wonderful and out of the line of sight of the person minding the checkout. She and Manny regularly bully the kids from the snotty school not far from the convenience store. At one point, Sol throws a pine cone and hits the albino girl on her head, cutting her so badly that blood runs down her face. This girl is nicknamed Casper after the white ghost, but her name is Caroline. She's a particular favorite to mock, but Sol later seeks her out at her home and apologizes and the two become friends, and Ming befriends Christine, Caroline's younger sister.

Somehow, because of Sol's constant story-telling, Ming begins to focus on their non-existent Aunt Jove, and claims she writes to her and gets letters back. She refuses to show these replies to Sol, but maintains Jove will come and get them - which of course never happens. Meanwhile, Sol is regularly seeing Amelia's ghost and asking advice of a ghost which appears to be the same age now as Sol is. Fortunately for their welfare and sanity, they befriend a Chinese woman down the hall, Mrs Young (Yung? Again, audiobook) who seems to enjoy their company as much as the enjoy hers.

I felt that this book had some unresolved issues, but in other regards, I liked it. I liked the inventive stories and the humor, and I consider it a worthy read, although the morality is a bit off, be warned.

Blackbird Fly by Erin Entrada Kelly

Rating: WORTHY!

Analyn Pearl Yengko, aka Apple, is a Filipino girl who has moved to the USA, and is living in fictional Chapel Spring, Louisiana. She's very conscious of her appearance and doesn't consider herself "American". She learns what losers her "friends" are one day when jerk Jake makes a jackass "joke" about all Asians eating dogs, and how Analyn is on the Dog Log - a virtual list of ugliest girls in school that some boys create each year.

Given that the author is a Filipino and hates carrots, it seems to me that this novel might be very much autobiographical, at least in its roots, although that's just a guess. The biggest problem for me with it was that it's first person PoV, which is actually Worst Person PoV. That said, this effort actually didn't nauseate me. Some authors can make it work, and this is evidently one of those!

Analyn wants to become a rock star. Improbably, her favorite band is the Beatles because all she left the Philippines with was a tape from her deceased dad. The tape was Abbey Road, the last album the Beatles recorded together, although not the last to be released. Now Analyn has a whole set of Beatles albums of her own, although how she managed to get those if her mom is as stingy as we're led to believe is a mystery.

Analyn wants to buy a guitar she's seen in a store, but her mother is very negative on pretty much anything Analyn wants to do, except that in a fit, Analyn finally gets her mom to quit calling her Apple. My prediction at that point was that, given her love of The Beatles and her desire to play guitar, Analyn will be proud to be Apple by the end of this novel. It felt that predictable. But it is a middle grade novel, so I tried not to down-grade it too much for the trite factor!

The author does make the classic debut novel mistake, however, of having the character look at herself in the mirror so we can get a description of what she looks like. I think it was even a bigger mistake in this case because it's not necessary to know exactly what she looks like. In fact, I think the novel would have been better had we had no idea (other than that she's Filipino, of course) what she looks like.

On the subject of cliché, the new cool guy in school has his hair in his eyes, but on the other side of this coin, he's improbably not actually the new cool kid. The A-list girls take an immediate dislike to him because he's not fawning over them, and he almost gets into a fight with one of the A-list boys at the dance over them making fun of one of the dog list girls - one who is trope-ish-ly overweight.

I think she had the new boy hail from California because there's perhaps a Filipino population there, so he's got an 'in' with our main characters and doesn't think she's ugly. That said, the author offered no explanation for why he and his mom moved from California to a penny-ante little town in the middle of Louisiana. His mom is an artist, so it's not like she had to move there for her work. She paints abstracts, but why she wouldn't want to live by the sea, or in the forests, or in the mountains, for pure inspiration is unexplained.

For that matter, why did Analyn's mom move there? Yes, we're told there's a nurse shortage and so she got in on that, but is there really a huge nurse shortage in that little town? It would have made more sense had they moved to a large city where a shortage might be expected. And why would the US hospitals be looking to hire nurses from the Philippines given how picky they are about what schooling nurses have had? This wasn't well thought through, and it makes little sense to adults, but I guess the author thought it wouldn't matter for a middle grade novel.

On the up-side, the novel did make for an interesting and engaging read. There's a subtle undercurrent of humor running through the text which I appreciated even as I cringed at some of the clichés: school bullies, cliques, the overweight girl, the snotty cheerleader type, mean boys, the derided teacher, the beloved teacher, and so on.

The bottom line is that this story, for the grade it's written, isn't bad at all. It's a very fast read: the lines are widely spaced, so despite it being ostensibly almost three hundred pages long, it would probably be only half that if it were single-spaced and in a slightly smaller font size.

The situations Analyn gets into are reasonable and realistic, and her behavior, for her age, is understandable, so for me, overall, this rates as a worthy read.