Drama Queens in the House

December 16, 2013
Williams (Escaping Tornado Season) puts her theater background to good use in this novel about a biracial girl struggling to find her footing in life. Though Jessie Lewis was heavily involved in her parents’ renowned theater company growing up, she was too busy avoiding the spotlight and helping out backstage to foster her own potential. Now that she has graduated high school with no immediate college plans—despite being the youngest valedictorian in the school’s history at age 15—it’s her chance to discover her true passions. The only problem: family drama keeps getting in the way, including her father’s affair-turned-committed-relationship with a man, her “religious fanatic” aunt Loretta’s obsession with Arma-geddon, and her mother’s refusal to talk about her collapsing marriage. Williams’s writing style takes some getting used to—words written in all capitals and Jessie’s parenthetical asides can throw off the rhythm of the story. But readers with an interest in performance will particularly enjoy watching Jessie rediscover her confidence as well as her talents. Ages 12–up. Agent: Jill Corcoran, Jill Corcoran Literary Agency.

January 15, 2014
Jessie's world revolves around the Minnesota theater company her parents co-founded, so she's considerably shaken up when she surprises her dad, Mark, in a passionate embrace with Brad, the company's costumer. Mark, who's black, moves out, the theater goes on, and Jessie adapts to her reconfigured family. Less resilient, her mother, Una, who's white, dives into an affair with the company's other co-founder. Her dad's family excepted, Jessie's world is white. (Jessie, 15 and a high school graduate, belongs to the burgeoning biracial-genius category.) Sensing her gifts lie in writing and directing, Jessie breaks with tradition and enrolls in a writing workshop instead of helping with theater summer school. Sexual orientation, coming out and celebrating progress toward marriage equality are central to plot and theme; characters are explicitly gay, straight or, like Jessie herself, undecided Then in a puzzling development that feels borrowed from another narrative, race, until now carrying little emotional or thematic weight, replaces sexual orientation as the catalyst for her development. Sexual orientation gets savvy, sensitive treatment, but the presentation of race is clumsy and simplistic. Previously effervescent and self-confident, Jessie now struggles with a self-limiting belief, racially nuanced, that she can't dance. Since readers know Jessie has no ambitions to act or dance, why does it matter? An initially fresh, original narrative swamped by tired tropes and conventional resolution. Pity. (Fiction. 12-16)

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April 1, 2014

Gr 9 Up-Life is pretty great for Jessie Jasper Lewis. Only 15, she's an early high school graduate, and her friends and family at the Jumble Players Theater surround her with their wacky hijinks. Jessie's theater family is throwing her a big bash for her graduation when her world suddently falls apart. She witnesses her father cheating on her mother with the costume designer, who is a man. This secret strains Jessie's relationship with her mother and causes her to question every relationship in her life. To make matters worse, when her father finally comes out, her aunt Loretta, a religious zealot predicting the end of days, severely judges Jessie's family and sends CLP (Church of the Living Prophesy) people to their door at all hours. The novel brings up several important questions of identity: What does it mean to be biracial? How does a teenager come to process and accept a homosexual parent? Unfortunately, unnecessary asides take readers away from the action-they do not reveal crucial information about the character or move the story forward. Ironically, there is too much drama in Drama Queens in the House in the form of too many characters with a mound of problems that lead readers away from truly connecting and caring about the protagonist.-Krishna Grady, Darien Library, CT

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2014
Grades 7-12 Sixteen-year-old Jessie Jasper Lewis is an only child: brilliant, biracial, and the heart of her Minnesota theater family. Having finished high school early and with no plans, she tries cleaning up her increasingly messy home life. Jessie realizes her dad is gay after she walks in on him kissing the costume designer. She manages to create space for him and his boyfriend in a house filled with people who don't have an actual home base, including two cousins (one who was kicked out at age 12 for being gay) and her mother's best friend. There are great gossipy, juicy details, but what makes Williams' first prose novel work is the terrific sense of family of choice, as the community comes together, despite betrayals and misunderstandings, to support one another. Williams' strong theater background shows in her easy, informative description of theater life, from improv games to analysis of Moli're. Jessie is a wonderfully rich character: clever, capable, and self-aware while hanging onto some blind spots for dear life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)