It's Not Like It's a Secret

by Melvin Pohl

Overview

"Well-paced, brimming with drama, and utterly vital."—Kirkus Reviews (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.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538417768
Publisher:	HarperCollins Children's Books
Publication date:	05/28/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.50(h) x 5.00(d)
Age Range:	13 - 17 Years

About the Author

Misa Sugiura’s ancestors include a poet, a priestess, a samurai, and a stowaway. She grew up in Northfield, Illinois (which is less rural than it sounds), and went to college on the East Coast. She lived in Japan for three years before moving to Silicon Valley and becoming a high school English teacher. During her years in the classroom, she met the many wonderful Asian, Latinx, and LGBTQ students who inspired her to write It’s Not Like It’s a Secret. Misa lives under a giant oak tree with her husband, two sons, two cats, and a gray-banded king snake.

Editorial Reviews

It’s a queer coming-of-age story that also tackles big topics like adultery, racism, and the cultural conflicts of immigrant families.

Brightly.com

It’s a queer coming-of-age story that also tackles big topics like adultery, racism, and the cultural conflicts of immigrant families.

Brightly

06/01/2017
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

School Library Journal

★ 2017-04-01
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)

Kirkus Reviews