ANELA'S CLUB

After her brother’s sudden death, a teen girl struggles to find a future for herself beyond her loss and trauma in Yamashiro’s debut YA novel.

“Two months ago, my brother, Jake, died,” confides Anela Lee, a 15-year-old of Italian and Polynesian descent whose already difficult and impoverished family life all but disintegrates in the wake of the tragedy. Before Jake’s death, Anela’s parents ignored her, putting their focus solely on her brother’s high school football career. Previously an exceptional student, Anela now isolates herself from friends and lets her grades swiftly decline. But Miss DeGracia, her social studies teacher, refuses to give up on her, and during a school trip to the State House she introduces Anela to the firebrand senator Nastasia Yen Strasberg. Strasberg offers the girl a job and a mentor, sharing stories of youthful hardship not unlike Anela’s own suffered by men who would become American presidents. These hard-luck tales of historical figures (in combination with the lessons in self-confidence that Jake instilled in her) guide Anela toward reforging relationships with lost friends and her contrite mother—and, ultimately, to an essay contest that offers a pathway to Harvard College. Yamashiro has long studied the childhood traumas of American presidents and relates many of these stories here through the character of Senator Strasberg in a seamless, organic manner, offering informative parallels to Anela’s journey. Equally impressive is the Boston-based community the book depicts, as many of Anela’s neighbors, peers, and mentors are revealed to also be silently carrying their own burdens. (These problems are presented as being equally relevant, even if some characters are more socially or financially privileged than the protagonist.) The story never portrays poverty in an exploitative way or as a moral failing. Instead, adversity is presented as something that, if not surrendered to, can shape an individual—an important lesson for readers of any age.

An inspiring story of teenage resilience and how trauma need not be an insurmountable obstacle.