Hey everyone, it's Jananie.
And welcome back to another episode of hashtag Epic Book Recs.
So this is a monthly series that I do here on the Epic Reads channel,
where I recommend a bunch of books based on a certain theme.
So we've done a lot of fun themes before, so
go check out the playlist down below in the description.
Because there's just so many books that I've recommended that I love,
that I would love for you guys to pick up.
But today's theme is kind of throwing back to the beginning of
hashtag Epic Book Recs.
I'm gonna be recommending a bunch of contemporaries today,
all based around the theme of being unapologetically you.
So these are unapologetic YA contemporaries featuring characters who
are ostracized or put down because of their weight, their sexuality,
their race, or something about them.
And they are trying to be unapologetically themselves, learning to love themselves.
And to be happy with who they are, and
let the world know that they are happy with who they are.
So I love every single one of these books, and I just had so
much fun with each of them.
So I hope you guys will definitely go and pick up all these books, and
I know each of these books is bound to put a smile on your face.
[SOUND] All right, so let's jump in with the first book,
which is I'll Be The One by Lyla Lee.
This is probably my favorite book on this list just because it made me so
happy while reading it.
I just had a smile on my face the entire time and
I just love our main character Skye Shin.
Skye Shin is a plus size bisexual Korean American protagonist, and
she is a great singer and dancer as well.
And so when a K-pop competition kind of comes through America and is looking for
people to audition and to compete to become a K-pop star,
she decides to enter this competition.
And there are two categories for the competition, so
you can enter as a singer or as a dancer or as both.
And Skye enters as both even though she knows that her mother
would definitely not approve of her dancing.
Because her mother thinks that because Skye is fat that she
shouldn't be dancing and she shouldn't be putting herself on display.
But Skye is amazing and is attempting to prove everyone wrong,
and to prove that she's not too fat to be a K-pop star,
that she is perfect the way she is, and that she can shine because of that.
They're also just some really great elements of Skye just being open and
honest about her sexuality.
And there's a sweet little romance as well with one of the other contestants and
I loved it, it was so cute.
And there's also just a strong element of like social media and
just how it affects our lives in general day to day.
And it all just worked so very well.
And I loved the relationship that Skye had with her family, and
with her friends, and the other contestants.
And overall this is just a fun, wonderful read that you are sure to love.
Like I'm not kidding, go pick it up, it's wonderful.
Also there's like this thing in the book where there's like this hashtag Queen Skye
fan club and it's my favorite thing.
I am totally part of the Queen Skye fan club like she is the bus.
If she was a real K-pop star I would be her number one fan.
Right, the next book is one that another recent read of mine and
I absolutely loved it.
It just blew me away.
So many people have told me that they have loved this book, that I should pick it up.
And then I finally did and I was just so immersed in it.
I like devoured it in like two days and I was just blown away by the ending as well.
And that book is Slay by Brittney Morris.
This is an incredible book.
It follows our main character Kiera who is in high school.
She's a 17 year old.
She is a black gamer and she loves gaming, but her family and her friends don't
really know that she games and that's kind of a place that she goes to for comfort.
But the gaming space like our real world is kind of racist and
she struggles to find places where she can be herself be black and
be comfortable without racists and trolls kind of coming after her.
So she created this game called Slay, which is this game with combat and
competitions and duels and things that is based on black culture.
And there are cards in the game that are specifically related to black culture and
that Kiera has created.
And so she created this game is kind of a black only space,
where black people can come and
game and just have a great time without having to worry about outside pressures.
And so, it is a password protected game and that you have to get a password from
another gamer in the game to enter the game, so it's kind of really protected.
But one of the really interesting things about this book is that there
are different perspectives in this book that follow different gamers who
play Slay.
And so, you're seeing Slay from their perspective and how it's
changed their lives, which is just so incredible and really, really interesting.
Especially because their ages kind of vary, but
the book does follow Kiera mainly and it follows this main
conflict where one of the gamers in Slay gets killed over like game points.
And it causes this really big thing in the news and
a lot of people are looking at Slay.
And Kiera is an anonymous owner of the game, she's an anonymous creator.
No one knows who she is, they only know her avatar in the game.
And so when this blows up, people are starting to call the game exclusionary and
racist and saying all these terrible things about it, and
not understanding how much resolve people find in this game.
And things get even worse when a troll kind of enters into the game,
and is trying to take it down, and is trying to challenge Kiera in the game, and
everything in her life is kind of unraveling.
She has other kind of pressures in her life with her boyfriend,
with her friends who are casually racist, and all these things going on,
it is just such a wonderful book.
It is just so well done and it has such complex characters.
And there are some really,
really great twists in this book that you will not see coming.
And I just loved it so very much.
So yeah, I highly highly recommend this one because you are definitely going to be
blown away and it's such a quick read, you are gonna rip through it.
I'm very excited about the next book,
which is The Henna Wars by Adiba Jaigirdar.
And this is a book that follows her main character Nishat,
whose a young girl who is Bengali, shes from Bangladesh but she lives in Ireland.
And this is following her in high school, and
the book actually opens with our main character Nishat coming out to her parents
or debating how to come out to her parents.
And she does, and she's a lesbian.
She wants to marry a girl one day and
she's trying to convey this to her parents.
And they're just like what is going on and all jokes aside,
they are not accepting of it.
And Nishat is trying to come to terms with how her Bengali culture is very
homophobic and how to get her parents to accept her.
And so with all of this kind of going on in the background with Nishat and
with her family, there's this new girl that shows up at her school named Flavia.
And Flavia is actually a friend that Nishat knew from primary school,
but they are kind of reconnecting now.
And Nishat kind of finds herself overwhelmed with this
huge crush on Flavia.
Flavia is Brazilian Irish, and
the two of them kind of come head to head when a business competition at their
school leads them to have to create their own businesses.
But the two of them are in separate groups.
And Nishat decides to create a business based around henna, so
she's learned how to do henna from her culture, from her family.
And she does it for her sister one day for a wedding and Flavia sees this and
decides to make her business henna as well,
and decides to appropriate the culture and use henna for the competition.
And so both of them have these competing henna businesses going on.
And Nishat is trying to prove to everyone what's kind of wrong with this whole
scenario, but she's also trying to come to terms with being proud of her culture
amidst kind of mean girls at our school who are kind of racist.
This is obviously such a sweet and fun book.
Nishat is such an endearing character.
She is very introverted, thinks a lot in her head,
doesn't know how to be exactly herself, but she's trying her hardest.
And I think the first scene where she's just trying to come out to her parents was
just a wonderful expression of her character.
She just wants to be herself and she just wants everyone to accept her.
And it's just a wonderful kind of coming of age type story and I loved it so much.
Okay, the next book is one that I recommended before and
that's There's Something About Sweetie by Sandhya Menon.
I loved this book so much and like I'll Be The One.
It features a plus sized main character who is trying to show the world that she
can be happy and have fun, and be whoever she wants to be even though she is fat.
It follows our main character Sweetie who is an Indian American protagonist.
And her mother strongly believes that she is too fat to be seen as attractive,
to really accomplish anything in life.
And when this kinda like setup comes to light between this other Indian American
family with this son who is kind of an eligible young man,
her mother kind of turns that down because she thinks that Sweetie is too fat.
So Sweetie is determined to prove her mother wrong.
And she starts the sassy Sweetie project.
So she's gonna be unapologetically herself.
She's gonna do whatever she wants and
she's gonna go after the guy and show everyone, that she's still desirable,
that she's still attractive, that she's still amazing.
And our main male character is Ashish who is a like minor character in
When Dimple Met Rishi.
This is a companion to that book, but you don't really need to read it.
To read this and he is kind of been a playboy previously, and
when he gets dumped by his girlfriend,
he's trying to find a way to come back to himself and reconnect with this culture.
And Sweetie ends up being the person who helps him do that.
This is such a fun, sweet little romance.
I love Sweetie as a character.
She's just a ball of sunshine.
And she's just trying her hardest to be herself and to be happy, and I love that.
Okay, the next one that I have here is The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta.
This is an amazing book kind of told in a verse.
And it is a story about this young boy named Michael who is a mixed race gay teen
living in London and all his life he's had to kind of navigate and come to terms with
his identity as a Greek Cypriot, but also Jamaican, but also being gay.
And as he's growing up, he's kind of discovering his sexuality and
he's trying to come to terms with that.
And then he discovers drag and he becomes the Black Flamingo.
And honestly, this is just like an out and proud, wonderful, amazing book and
it is just so tender and so poignant.
And our main character is just an endearing character like
many of the characters I've talked about earlier.
He is just so sweet and you are rooting for him the entire time.
But another thing that I love so very much about this book is the poetry.in it.
It is so direct but it's also so lyrical, and I highly recommend the audio book for
this because hearing the narrator kind of read the poetry aloud is just so
wonderful.
So yeah, overall, I just love this book.
Even though it's not pride month anymore, you should definitely be picking it up
regardless cuz it's such a short read and it's just so wonderfully done.
All right, the next one that I have here is The Love & Lies of Rukhsana Ali by
Sabina Khan.
This is one of my all time favorite books.
I think I've mentioned it before in an Epic Book Recs video.
But I want to mention it again, because it is just such a great book.
This is definitely a book that's a little bit more on the heavier side.
But it also features a main character who's just trying to be themselves,
trying to be happy with who they are, trying to be unapologetically them, and
trying to get everyone else in their life to accept them as they are.
And that is Rukhsana Ali, she's a young lesbian,
a Bengali American teen and she has not come out to her parents.
But when they kind of catch her kissing her girlfriend, who is her
secret girlfriend, they kind of freak out and they refuse to accept her as she is.
And so, they kind of cart her back to Bangladesh to kind of
get rid of the gay and arrange her marriage and just ignore who Rukhsana is.
And this is a book where Rukhsana is not only coming to terms with who she is, but
also trying to see that although there are a lot of people who don't accept her,
there are a lot of people in her life who will and who care about her as she is.
And this is a story of her trying to break down barriers and
trying to change the way of thinking that many of her family and
her extended family have kind of been ingrained with their whole lives.
I love this book so much and it's definitely one that will stay with you for
a very long time after you read it.
So I highly, highly recommend it.
And the last book is a fun kind of romcom-y book and that is Again, But
Better by Christine Riccio.
This is a really fun contemporary,
it follows a main character is actually 20 I believe she's in university.
She feels like she's kind of done college all wrong.
She feels like she's been too introverted and she hasn't made enough friends.
She hasn't put herself out there and she really wants to break this habit.
So she decides to take this opportunity to study abroad and
start this program that she's not actually supposed to be in.
The study abroad program is for creative writing, but she's currently in pre med,
and that's what her parents want her to do.
And while away on the study abroad, she's planning to kind of do college better,
again, but better.
And she's gonna put herself out there.
She's gonna make her friends, and she's gonna be her best self.
And this is the book of her trying to do that and kind of failing at some points,
but ultimately kind of coming into who she is.
This is such a fun book and romance is a really big part of it, but
I do feel like the main core of the story is our main character Shane kind
of coming to terms with who she is and trying to be her best self.
I highly recommend if you're looking for something on the older side of YA, or
if you wanted a book that kind of does some traveling because this does have
a lot of fun travel elements in it.
They're going through parts of Europe, so it's a lot of fun to read about.
And this also involves a little bit of a magical element like a teensy bit.
I think it just made for a really fun read overall.
All right, so those are all the books that I wanna talk about,
today for unapologetic main characters in contemporaries.
I love all these books.
I love the main characters in these books, because they're just so wonderful, so
endearing and they're all just special little snowflakes that I want the best for
in life.
But I would love it if you guys would recommend your favorite unapologetic
books, books where main characters are just trying to be themselves and happy.
And I would love to read them, so go leave me those recommendations down below.
And thank you so, so much for watching.
I'm Jananie, and
I will see you in the next episode of hashtag Epic Book Recs, bye.