Noteworthy
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A New York Public Library 2017 Best Books for Teens selected title!
It’s the start of Jordan Sun’s junior year at the Kensington-Blaine Boarding School for the Performing Arts. Unfortunately, she’s an Alto 2, which—in the musical theatre world—is sort of like being a vulture in the wild: She has a spot in the ecosystem, but nobody’s falling over themselves to express their appreciation. So it’s no surprise when she gets shut out of the fall musical for the third year straight. But then the school gets a mass email: A spot has opened up in the Sharpshooters, Kensington’s elite a cappella octet. Worshiped . . . revered . . . all male. Desperate to prove herself, Jordan auditions in her most convincing drag, and it turns out that Jordan Sun, Tenor 1, is exactly what the Sharps are looking for.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jordan Sun is an alto at a performing arts boarding school that rewards sopranos with big parts and altos with nothing (Jordan is also Chinese, something she suspects doesn't help her land roles either). Fed up, she tries out for a prestigious all-male a cappella group, the Sharpshooters, doing her best to pass as a boy. The group loves her voice, and soon Jordan is living a double life as Julian and realizing how much she enjoys it. Throughout, Jordan digs into questions about gender, sexuality, bias, and privilege ("What had I ever gotten out of being a girl, anyway? What did I even like about it?... I wasn't skinny, I wasn't pretty, and I didn't care about any of it as much as I was supposed to"), eventually opening herself up to a newfound, empowering fluidity. Redgate (Seven Ways We Lie) vividly captures the world of a cappella, and she uses Jordan's soul-searching as well as her family's financial struggles, which linger in the background to bring freshness and substantial depth to a gender-bending/mistaken identity plot that has a long history in literature and theater. Ages 13 up.
