This Time Will Be Different

 

Stars: 4 Family, history, racism, conforming versus fighting

My Thoughts:

This female centered book is a coming of awareness story with CJ who is a generation below the model minority generation of her nisei mother. Readers can look at this story through different lenses. There is the racial lens around CJ's issue with her mother working for the same family that stole many of the properties and businesses from Japanese during the WWII internment. To CJ, her mother is a sell out. 

There is also the lens of the daughter who does not feel she can live up to her mother's ambitions and expectations. In Joy Luck Club style, CJ is never good enough.

Then there is the family business and friend to lover lens going on in the failing floral shop. 

Whichever lens readers use, CJ comes out with a different awareness of herself, her family, and her world. The bottom line is, it's complicated. 

From the Publisher:

The author of the Asian Pacific American Award-winning It’s Not Like It’s a Secret is back with another smartly drawn coming-of-age novel that weaves riveting family drama, surprising humor, and delightful romance into a story that will draw you in from the very first page.

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.

Publication Information:

Author: Misa Sugiura

Publisher: Harper Teen (June 9, 2020)

ISBN-13: 978-0062473455

Paperback: 416 pages

Grade level: 8-12