Search

Tuesday 4 June 2019

This Time Will Be Different

This Time Will Be Different by Misa Sugiura (Review)


This Time Will Be Different
Published by HarperTeen

Release Date: June 4th 2019

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance, Coming-Of-Age

Retail Price: $17.99 USD

Rating:
5 Stars
Katsuyamas never quit—but seventeen-year-old CJ doesn’t even know where to start. She’s never lived up to her mom’s type A ambition, and she’s perfectly happy just helping her aunt, Hannah, at their family’s flower shop.

She doesn’t buy into Hannah’s romantic ideas about flowers and their hidden meanings, but when it comes to arranging the perfect bouquet, CJ discovers a knack she never knew she had. A skill she might even be proud of.

Then her mom decides to sell the shop—to the family who swindled CJ’s grandparents when thousands of Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps during WWII. Soon a rift threatens to splinter CJ’s family, friends, and their entire Northern California community; and for the first time, CJ has found something she wants to fight for.
First off, thank you to Edelweiss and the publisher, HarperTeen, for providing me with a free e-ARC to read and review.

I would just like to state that this book was really good, and so somewhere along the line, I completely forgot that I had to write a review about this novel and I stopped taking review notes. So, suffice to say, this review will not be the best BUT the book is amazing regardless.

Honestly, this book started off as a 5 star read for me, but then it dipped down to a 4 star read for me BUT then the last half of the novel really redeemed the whole book and brought the rating up to a 5 again.

This Time Will Be Different included little bits of relevant and important topics such as white saviourism. I really enjoyed how this topic was handled, and it actually taught me that sometimes in order to better the world we need to be rational and educate others on their mistakes and wrongdoings rather than being mad and burning them at the stake. It also made me super conscious of how to be a better ally to other minority groups I am not a part of, so I'm super grateful for that.

This novel was brilliant with the portrayal of POC history. I learned a lot of new things about the treatment of POC throughout history. It was really enlightening on this front, I already knew about the mistreatment of Japanese people during WWII because of History at school, but there was a lot of personal insight and reflection that helped with other tidbits of history that you wouldn't get from a history lesson. An example of this is the fact that the Chinese government sold the ideology of Chinese children being hard-working, and white people bought into this, using it as a weapon against Latinx and African American people, by drawing comparisons between the different POC. This is an explanation for the racism the Asian community harbours, which not a lot of people comment upon (and I really do applaud Sugiura for calling our community out on this). This paragraph on this topic stuck with me; 'Each new wave of Asian Americans and Asian immigrants have fallen for the myth and made it bigger, more elaborate, more constricting, and more insulating. And the myth keeps doing its job: giving us nearly equal social privilege, pitting us against black and Latinx people, and erasing everyone who doesn't fit into the myth.' So many of us Asians nowadays do not fit into this myth, but the pressure to perform even better than our absolute best has been handed down psychologically from generation to generation. Another quote on this topic that stuck with me was 'I'm so sick of the model-minority thing (...) It makes kids like me feel extra defective, like I'm disappointing not only Mom but also the entire world.'

CJ was such an interesting character to read about. Sometimes I hated her decisions and thought she was being stupid. Others I applauded her decisions. I definitely loved her. She really grew into herself, transforming from this girl who was desperate to please her mum and unsure of what or who she wanted to be to this powerful, independent girl who demanded to be heard. She also learned so much. Throughout the novel she has a lot of resentment and anger, but toward the end of the novel, she learns that sometimes we need to let go of things, and that sometimes we don't know the whole story. She became more understanding of other people's personal and internal struggles. 

CJ also went through a lot of growth with her relationships. The main relationship with issues would be CJ's relationship with her mother. CJ and her mother have a strained relationship, but eventually we see that they grow to understand each other a bit more. They don't have the perfect relationship at the end of the novel, but CJ understands that while it was hard for CJ to see her mother make decisions that contradicted her family's history and beliefs, it was even harder for her mother to make these decisions. She understands that her mother did what she had to do, and that her mother may not be perfect, but no one is. CJ's aunt, Hannah, is the exact opposite of her mother, and so CJ viewed her in rose tinted lens. However, CJ grows to understand that not even Hannah is perfect, and that Hannah has her downfalls just like her mother and herself.

I can't read a romance contemporary and not comment on the actual romance, so I'm making a short paragraph just for that! CJ definitely took her time realising her feelings (this is what I meant when I said I sometimes thought she was being stupid), but to be honest it makes her more human. The romance was super cute, and I loved how the two of them were constantly supporting each other while also being able to call each other out when needed.

A character I was unsure of the whole time was Brynn. Her decisions were really complex and so was she as a character. I never knew whether to label her as 'good' or 'bad,' but I guess that makes her more realistic. Sometimes good people do bad things. What matters is how they try to rectify their wrongdoings. This ties in with the common message of how we need to learn from history and do better. We need to ensure that history doesn't repeat itself, and this can be seen through Brynn herself. Brynn did something horrible, but she couldn't go back in time and change it. What she could do, however, was acknowledge she messed up and apologise for it. The one thing that really stuck with me from this novel is that a lot of our history is bad, with POC, LGBTQI+ and other minorities being oppressed, and we can't change that. But we can acknowledge how horrible it was, and we can strive to do better, and demand that we all be better than our histories. We can be better.

'There's point in dwelling on the past, but you can acknowledge it and try to make things better. Or try a new way, and know that this time will be different.'


No comments:

Post a Comment