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It's Not Like It's a Secret

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

""Well-paced, brimming with drama, and utterly vital.""—Kirkus (starred review)

This charming and bittersweet coming-of-age story featuring two girls of color falling in love is part To All the Boys I've Loved Before and part Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. Winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature!

Sixteen-year-old Sana Kiyohara has too many secrets. Some are small, like how it bothers her when her friends don't invite her to parties. Some are big, like the fact that her father may be having an affair. And then there's the one that she can barely even admit to herself—the one about how she might have a crush on her best friend.
When Sana and her family move to California, she begins to wonder if it's finally time for some honesty, especially after she meets Jamie Ramirez. Jamie is beautiful and smart and unlike anyone Sana's ever known. There are just a few problems: Sana's new friends don't trust Jamie's crowd; Jamie's friends clearly don't want her around anyway; and a sweet guy named Caleb seems to have more-than-friendly feelings for her. Meanwhile, her dad's affair is becoming too obvious to ignore.
Sana always figured that the hardest thing would be to tell people that she wants to date a girl, but as she quickly learns, telling the truth is easy...what comes after it, though, is a whole lot more complicated.

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  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Emily Woo Zeller shines as 16-year-old Sana, a Japanese-American girl who is grappling with her sense of self. Sana and her family have just moved from Wisconsin to a more diverse community in California. As Sana finds herself connecting with a group of Asian-American girls, she is also falling hard for a Mexican-American girl on the cross-country team. Zeller excels at embodying the teen angst and immigrant family drama at the center of Sana's life. Author Misa Sugiura masterfully weaves in struggles of identity, race, class, and young love without emphasizing any one issue over another. Shifting between the accents of Sana's friends and even Japanese phrases from her mom with ease, Zeller showcases each character through Sana's eyes in this coming-of-age novel. E.A.B. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
    • School Library Journal

      June 1, 2017

      Gr 9 Up-When high school junior Sana, who is Japanese American, moves from her lifelong home in Wisconsin to California, she can socialize for the first time with other Asian American teens. She arrives at her new school with a number of secrets, including her suspicion that her father has been cheating on her mother for years. Sana is also sure that she herself is a lesbian. And now she has a crush on Jamie, a whip-smart Latina classmate, and Sana has another secret that she's sure she must conceal from her new crowd of friends. In addition, Sana also copes with her emotionally cold mother and faces racial profiling by a local cop when she's with a group of Mexican American friends. Sugiura handles the story adroitly; readers will feel Sana's onslaught of emotions, understand her missteps as she chooses dishonesty over opening herself to rebuke in several situations, and cheer for her strengthening capacity to own her identity, trust her friends, and see her parents' relationship with empathy. Major and minor supporting characters of every age and both genders are just as credibly realized as Sana as her narration unfolds. VERDICT An essential and delightful choice that realistically celebrates a teen's discovery of trust in herself and in others.-Francisca Goldsmith, Library Ronin, Worcester, MA

      Copyright 2017 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from April 15, 2017
      Sugiura debuts with an angst-y coming-of-age narrative set at the intersections of identity, family, and first love.Sixteen-year-old Japanese-American Sana Kiyohara doesn't like to rock the boat, biting her tongue over such secrets as her resentment of her conservative and casually racist mother, her suspicion that her father's in a yearslong affair, and an unrequited crush on her white childhood friend Trish. Things change, however, when Sana's father moves the family from predominantly white Wisconsin to much-more-diverse California. Sana finds a world of camaraderie as she becomes friends with Vietnamese-American Elaine and Hanh and Chinese-American Reggie and bonds with (and eventually dates) Mexican-American and fellow poetry nerd Jamie. But finding support and unburdening some secrets only leave room for those left unspoken to grow, and soon Sana's suspicions about her father and the flawed logic of her mother's worldview spill over into her other relationships until she is confronted with just how much she does not know. The graceful complexity of this first-person narrative is an accomplishment in itself. Sana is a fully realized protagonist with faults and unacknowledged privilege alongside her nuanced experience of identity and "model minority" racism. Sugiura thoughtfully explores intersecting issues of race, immigrant-family relationships, queer romance, and, less explicitly, class dynamics without implying the significance of one over the others. Well-paced, brimming with drama, and utterly vital. (Fiction. 14-18)

      COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • The Horn Book

      July 1, 2017
      After moving from a mostly white Midwest town to a multiethnic California suburb, Sana, the daughter of Japanese immigrants, expands her horizons and struggles with coming out amid expectations and assumptions by family, friends, and new girlfriend Jamie. Compelling, finely drawn themes of secrets and belonging permeate this ambitious debut, but some of the stereotypes Sana voices about Jamie's Latino friends aren't adequately unpacked.

      (Copyright 2017 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

Levels

  • ATOS Level:4.7
  • Interest Level:9-12(UG)
  • Text Difficulty:3

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