First Chapter Friday Recommendations About Online Life for YA Readers

We loved Namey’s A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow, and A British Girl’s Guide picks up three years later, from the perspective of Orion Maxwell’s younger sister Flora. (Lila, the protagonist of A Cuban Girl’s Guide, fell in love with Orion in the midst of her own chaotic international experience).

Orion and Maxwell’s mother has just passed away after suffering from early onset dementia, and Flora is a mess. The grief is bad enough, but she’s full of guilt for not being with her dad and brother when her mom died—she told them it was an accident, but in reality, she was out with her camera, intentionally avoiding her pain by crafting a carefully-cropped world full of only beauty.

And then there’s Gordon. He and Flora have been best friends for years, but when he tells her he has feelings for her, it’s too much for her to handle. One fight with her family later, and Flora is on a plane to Lila’s Cuban family in Miami, hoping to clear her mind and start anew, just like Lila did when she came to England three years before.

When Lila meets Baz, the son of a famous photographer and a social media influencer, she’s caught up in a complicated fake dating scheme with a very attractive guy who’s willing to help her sharpen her photography skills. Things get more complicated when Gordon shows up, but through the mess, Flora comes to understand herself better, repairs her relationships with her father and brother, and discovers the kind of future she wants.

The story is light, breezy, and fun (and full of Cuban culture), but it also deals with more serious themes about family, grief, self-discovery, and forgiveness.

The book will appeal to many students, but if you’re considering it for a First Chapter Friday recommendation, do be aware that there is some profanity in the first chapter.

We adore The Great British Bake Off here at Three Heads, so when we met Shireen Malik nursing her wounds from her breakup with her ex-girlfriend Chris by rewatching old episodes, we were hooked.

When Shireen learns she has been accepted as a contestant on the brand new Junior Irish Baking Show, she’s thrilled. That is, until she learns Chris is also a contestant and they’ve been paired together for their first challenge. Initially thrown, Shireen is determined to make the most of her experience, especially if it means boosting sales at her parents’ struggling donut shop, You Drive Me Glazy.

We were utterly delighted to meet the judges—Padma Bollywood (an expert in bread, of course), Maire Cherry, and the easily angered Galvin Cramsey (blending cooking shows here, but we’ll allow it)—and we loved following Shireen’s experience as a contestant. Naturally, there’s drama with the other contestants, particularly when Shireen finds herself increasingly drawn to Niamh, one of her competitors.

For the most part, the novel is just a lot of frothy fun, but it does touch on some important issues as well. Shireen (who is Bangladeshi) and Chris (who is Taiwanese) are the targets of ugly racist comments online, and Jaigirdar explains in her author’s note that she wanted to highlight the tension of living in a culture in which turning down food is seen as rude but fat shaming is also rampant, a tension Shireen experiences and which we’re confident many students will recognize.

Where is Amelia Ashley?

That’s the question raging across the Internet when social media influencer Amelia Ashley goes missing after a trip to Rome with her boyfriend, Josh. We begin the novel with Josh on his way home from Rome, frustrated that Amelia never showed up for their flight after storming off from their last lunch in the city. As news of Amelia’s disappearance hits social media, however, Josh quickly becomes the primary suspect in her disappearance, especially when bloody clothes are discovered in his suitcase.

De La Cruz’s thriller reminded us a lot of Gone Girl, with its “things-are-not-as-they-seem” twists and turns. We spend the first part of the story in Josh’s perspective, and he seems genuinely confused by Ashley’s disappearance, but the more we learn about the mysterious Amelia Ashley, the more doubts we have about him.

As the novel continues, we start to hear from other perspectives as we piece together what happens. We think this is definitely a book that will engage your students, especially if they’re fans of The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder or One of Us Is Lying. (We also like that it appeals to a new adult audience, but unlike A Court of Thorns and Roses, Fourth Wing, and Colleen Hoover’s novels, we’d feel comfortable recommending it.)

Moon Fuentez is tired of living in her sister’s shadow. Star is an influencer on Fotogram, the virgin model who has attracted followers by posting religious messages and repping purity culture. Moon, bigger, darker, not a virgin, and more interested in nature and tarot than in the Catholic church her sister and mom love so much, is the “bad one,” gossiped about at school and the target of abuse from their cruel mother, and she believes no one could love her for who she really is.

When Star gets invited to join a cross-country tour for Fotogram influencers, Moon is expected to give up her summer and go along as the merch girl (using her photography skills to take gorgeous photos of her gorgeous sister). This is pretty much the last thing she’d like to do, especially when the other merch worker, Santiago Phillips (whose brother, by the way, is the founder of Fotogram) takes an obvious dislike to her.

We weren’t surprised to discover the author is a poet since her prose is gorgeous, and Moon is open, honest, and witty, making it easy to follow her summer ups and downs and root for her. The novel touches on a wide variety of issues students will relate to (sexuality, family expectations and conflict, abuse, influencer culture, body image, self-esteem and insecurity, and trying to decide what you want for your future, apart from everyone else’s expectations). We really think students will be drawn to Moon’s voice and experiences.

Side note: The publisher identifies the novel as being for grades 10–12, which we definitely agree with. While not graphic or gratuitous, its frank discussion of sex, including in the first chapter, and use of profanity would make us reluctant to formally recommend this to younger students.

We would be remiss if we didn’t start this review with a warning that it is not for the faint of heart: there are some graphically violent death scenes in this novel.

That being said, wow, is it a page-turner! Set in the near future, McNeil’s novel brings us into a country much like our own, but where convicted criminals are sentenced to Alcatraz 2.0, a prison island where they are executed at the whims of an app called The Postman, and their brutal executions are livestreamed to the rest of the country, who follow and comment on the events (and their favorite executioners) as if it were the next season of American Idol or The Bachelor. (Are we dating ourselves here? Love Is Blind and The Circle?)

When 17-year-old Dee Guerrera wakes up on the island, convicted of a crime she didn’t commit, she’s determined to prove her innocence before she can be killed, but it’s going to take her a lot just to survive.

On the one hand, the novel feels like pure escapism: it’s a highly dramatic, action-packed story that we feel okay indulging in since it’s not real. At the same time, however, it’s kind of horrifying because it’s not hard to imagine a spectacle like this actually taking place in our entertainment-obsessed culture. Because of that, the novel isn’t pure fluff and could actually result in some really thought-provoking discussions amongst you and your students.

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While technology plays less of a role in this one than in some of our other recommendations, it’s very much a part of the world in this book, and any students who follow the British royal family will find aspects of it . . . familiar.

Wren Wheeler had looked forward to her school trip to England for years, carefully planning out every minute to mirror her older sister’s experience as closely as possible. But she spends the first half of it stuck in the hotel with the stomach flu, her best friend gets sick of Wren’s rigid itinerary, she misses her flight home while helping the (very attractive) Prince Theo escape from paparazzi, and she can’t get a new flight because a giant comet is headed to Earth and the world will end in a matter of days.

Desperate, Wren decides to take Prince Theo up on his offer of a favor. She’ll help him avoid the press (and the many Europeans trying to win the reward the Queen is offering for information on her missing son) if he takes her to Santorini, where she can use the royal family’s private jet to get home.

As Wren and Theo set off on their cross-continent adventure, the stakes (and emotions) are high, and Wren starts to realize the prince has secrets of his own, secrets that might prevent her from seeing her family one last time before the world ends.

The novel has lots of drama that will appeal to many students (and a pretty endearing love story), but we’d probably save it for high school students due to a (relatively mild) sex scene and the use of profanity (including in the first chapter, always nice to know before selecting it for First Chapter Friday).

For her senior project, Ro Devereux creates an app based on the childhood game MASH—you know, the one where a series of squiggles identifies your future home (mansion, apartment, shack, or house), career, city of residence, number of children, and spouse. Working with a family friend who happens to be a professor of behavioral psychology, Ro creates an algorithm that can predict people’s future with 93% accuracy, and when her cousin, a social media influencer, posts about it, the app blows up and a developer reaches out to Ro.

Hoping to avoid college and go straight into work as a software developer, Ro signs the contract (despite her father’s disapproval), and her role promoting the app takes over her life. Especially once there are enough users to activate the “match” element of the app. As part of her contract, Ro has to date her “match,” but when she discovers it’s her former childhood best friend Miller (whom she hurt a few years ago), things get messy.

As the months go on, the app takes on a life of its own, and Ro has to decide whether it’s something she wants to keep fighting for. And, of course, her “fake” relationship with Miller poses an entirely different set of complications to work out.

We really enjoyed this one, and it had a lot more depth than we were expecting. Not only do we see Ro work through messy relationships with her family and Miller, but the novel raises interesting questions about the ethics of technology, social media, and predicting the future that we found ourselves thinking about past the final page.

Be aware that there is profanity (especially in the first chapter) if you’re considering this one for First Chapter Friday, but otherwise, we think it’s appropriate for a wide range of young adult readers.

It took us way too long to get to this one, but we’re so glad we finally did.

Kiera Johnson is one of only a handful of Black students at Jefferson Academy, where she’s known for her academic success. What her classmates (and family) don’t know about her, however, is that she’s the creator of a massive multiplayer online role-playing card game called SLAY. SLAY is a password-only space where Black people can embrace their culture and be themselves, free from the racism and exhausting pressure to explain themselves or conform to society’s expectations. Kiera has carefully designed each card in the game to represent an aspect of Black culture that as many players as possible can relate to, and she is beloved by the SLAY community.

When a duel in the game leads to real-world violence, the murder of a young Black man, SLAY erupts into public consciousness as news pundits argue about whether the game is responsible for the violence and, much to Kiera’s shock, whether the game is racist since it’s only for Black people.

As Kiera wrestles with her own guilt and confusion and tries to protect the SLAY community as the safe, celebratory space she designed it to be, she must keep secrets from everyone around her, including her family (who she fears won’t understand her interpretation of what it means to be Black) and her boyfriend, Malcolm (who believes video games are detrimental to the Black community, and Black men in particular), and the stakes are raised even higher when an anonymous troll infiltrates the game, threatening to take away everything Kiera has worked so hard for.

The story is great—we really want to know what will happen to SLAY and to Kiera. But we also learned a lot about Black culture, racism in the gaming world, and the complexities, even within the Black community, of adhering to societal expectations. The debate over the ethics of the game made us think, and we’re confident it will do the same for your students. When we recommended this on First Chapter Friday in our own classrooms, we had quite a few students eagerly devour it.

Sonia Patil is very disappointed when her boss’s daughter doesn’t allow employees to dress in costume for the comic book convention going on at the bookstore next door. Not only has Sonia made her own superhero costume, but she was hoping to impress her crush James, who just so happens to work at the bookstore.

When she’s left alone to close the coffee shop at the end of the night, Sonia puts on her costume. At least she can wear it while she takes the trash out and walks home, right? But when she sees her crush faint and fall into the canal near their shops, she takes off at a run, rescuing him from drowning before running off into the night.

When the news hits the next day and the entire Internet is determined to identify the masked hero, Sonia is terrified. Her mother was deported back to Mumbai, and she’s living with her older sister Kareena. Sonia was born in the United States, but Kareena is undocumented, and Sonia cannot draw attention to her sister or their living situation.

Concerned about James, however, Sonia goes to his family’s restaurant to check on him and is mistaken for his girlfriend, a misunderstanding that becomes extra tricky when she starts falling in love with his older brother, Niam.

Reminiscent of While You Were Sleeping, Rai’s rom-com is a lot of fun, but it also explores family dynamics, the all-too-familiar angst of trying to muster up the confidence to be yourself, and the challenges faced by some immigrant families in America. In her author’s note, Rai writes, “I wrote the book I wished I could have seen on the shelf when I was younger. I hope that some of you see yourself in parts of it, too. If you don’t see yourself in it, that’s okay. Maybe you’ll see someone else in it, someone who lives in your community, or goes to your school, or works at your coffee shop. Maybe it helps you understand them a little better.” Isn’t this what we want most from the books we share with our students?

While the content is appropriate for a wide range of students, there is quite a bit of profanity in the novel, something to keep in mind when deciding if this works as a read-aloud on First Chapter Friday in your classroom.