I see a lot of book covers every day working in a bookstore, so sometimes, they all start looking the same. However, the cover of Not Your Average Jo by Grace K. Shim is not one that melted into the blur. It caught my attention and I had to get my hands on it. Thanks to TBR and Beyond Tours, I got to check it out a little earlier than normal.
Not Your Average Jo [Buy Bookshop Amazon LibroFM] follows Riley Jo on her journey from Bentonville, AR to Los Angeles. She really wants to pursue music, but she’s not feeling the support from her parents. Riley makes a deal with her mom that if they let her go to a boarding school in Los Angeles that focuses on the arts, she’ll agree to stay in their hometown for college to save money. It’s not a great deal in the long term, but our girl is desperate to get out of a town that doesn’t know what to do with a Korean girl. When Jo gets to the school, she learns she’s part of a band that’s preparing to present to a record label, under the guidance of a former pop star. The problem: his son is also in the band and they’re both a bit on the sexist and racist side.
I’d been in a pretty intense reading slump when I picked this up and it became the first book I finished in about three weeks. Wild. It’s well-paced and moves along nicely. I thoroughly appreciated that the video scripts interspersed throughout the book are pretty accurate toward what someone on video production would actually use. (We use all caps for the audio side, but I get not doing that in a book form.)
This book deals heavily with teenagers facing racism and racial microaggressions. It shows a variety of ways people handle these uncomfortable situations and shows how you might not realize the implications of what you’re saying. If you aren’t ready to face that line of thought, then you should skip this book entirely. It is not subtle and I’m not here for people complaining about that aspect of this book. Especially after seeing “hashtag very Asian” in this book, which is a reference to a racially charged phone call against one of my friends and former co-workers, which turned into a national campaign. I literally screamed when I saw it and had to ask Grace about it when I interviewed her for the LiteraryHype YouTube Channel and Podcast.
Not Your Average Jo also heavily deals with family relationships and how different they are for everyone. Riley is the oldest child, and if you’re an oldest daughter like me, you know the perfection pressure is real. It was interesting to me to see the dynamic play out for Riley, as she pursued an artistic career instead of something parents tend to find more suitable and stable. Riley has different dynamic with her mom and dad and their ties to their cultural backgrounds. Just because they are both Korean doesn’t mean they are the same, and I love that the book highlights the “diversity within diversity”.
I really enjoyed this book and think it has so much value for teens of all races to read and discuss together.
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About the Author:
Grace grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma as one of two Korean-Americans at her high school (her sister was the other one). Today, Grace writes books with Korean-American protagonists that she wished she had read about as a teen. When she’s not plotting (the writing kind, not the world domination kind), you can find her wearing a Korean sheet mask, baking French macarons, and unintentionally killing houseplants & succulents. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband and three kids.
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