2020
This is How We Fly is YA novel, set in the real world, narrated in the first person by a girl who just graduated high school and spends her last summer before college learning to playing quidditch in the park.
Ellen has a White father, a Latina mother who died when she was young, and a Latina stepmother who she increasingly finds herself fighting with. Ellen is a vegan and a feminist. She is Very Online, in a way that seems to amplify both her frustration at the state of the world, and her sense of IRL social isolation.
Ellen also, at least 4 or 5 times throughout the book, wonders if she's really happiest being a girl who's a tomboy, or if ... ? (She doesn't actually think these words, but I gather that she's considering if a nonbinary or transmasculine identity would feel more authentic.) This is something I haven't seen before in a character who does not eventually come out as trans.
Meanwhile, Ellen's stepmom wants a respectable daughter who eats the same food as the rest of the family, dresses in appropriately feminine attire, and doesn't keep picking fights about social injustice.
After an especially nasty argument, Ellen's dad grounds her for the rest of the summer. The one exception is that she's allowed to leave the house to go play sports, which even includes letting her follow up on an invitation to play real-world quidditch, based on the fictional game invented by JK Rowling for her Harry Potter novels.
Ellen definitely needs to get out of the house, where she does chores, gets in fights, and spends most of her time doomscrolling Tumblr. She feels like her family doesn't want her and can't wait for her to move out of the house. She thinks her high school friend Xiumiao is ditching her to make news friends with people who'll be going to the same college, and even that best friend Melissa, who invited her to quidditch, would rather be friends with the other players than with her.
Author Anna Meriano represents Ellen's feelings naturalistically, but also lets the audience see that she might not understand her own situation completely correctly. In each case, Ellen feels torn between wanting to get closer, wanting to respect the other's desire for space, and feeling resentful and pushing away as well, and ends up enacting a complex mix that worsens each of the relationships she wishes she could improve.
Through the twice-weekly quidditch practices and skirmishes, Ellen learns to get in touch with her physical body and to enjoy using it competitively. She begins making new social connections with teammates and some friendly rivals. She gets the satisfaction of doing something well (which also carries over to trying harder at her summer project of clearing out the garage.) And she even makes a couple romantic connections with some cute, kissable quidditch guys.
All the strands of Ellen's story come together during the big, summer-ending regional tournament. She kind of two-steps-forward one-step-backs her way through her problems, making almost all of them worse while also finally asserting herself as an independent young person, and finally communicating honestly with Xiumiao and Melissa, both the cute boys she's kissed, and her dad and stepmother.
Compared to Loveless, which I use as a point of comparison mostly because they're both realistic contemporary YA, I think This is How We Fly has both more complex and more authentic emotions. Meriano is unafraid to let Ellen be flawed, and I physically cringed from her fights with her stepmom. Ellen responds to what she thinks other people are thinking, and they respond to her responses, which often results in a worsening dynamic.
I feel like Meriano got this one in just under the wire. It came out in 2020, but must have been finished earlier, and the book shows a time right before the weirdness of that first pandemic year, and before JKR descended from flirting with transphobia to becoming one of its loudest proponents.
I liked Harry Potter, and perhaps even moreso, I liked the creativity of the Harry Potter fandom, with its 'wizard rock' bands and its real life quidditch teams. It's both disappointing that Rowling does not accept trans people, sad to see the once-thriving HP fandom collapsing, frightening how much power Rowling has to share her message of hate, and also deeply weird that she often adopts a male pen-name (Robert Galbraith) to share it.
Ellen has a White father, a Latina mother who died when she was young, and a Latina stepmother who she increasingly finds herself fighting with. Ellen is a vegan and a feminist. She is Very Online, in a way that seems to amplify both her frustration at the state of the world, and her sense of IRL social isolation.
Ellen also, at least 4 or 5 times throughout the book, wonders if she's really happiest being a girl who's a tomboy, or if ... ? (She doesn't actually think these words, but I gather that she's considering if a nonbinary or transmasculine identity would feel more authentic.) This is something I haven't seen before in a character who does not eventually come out as trans.
Meanwhile, Ellen's stepmom wants a respectable daughter who eats the same food as the rest of the family, dresses in appropriately feminine attire, and doesn't keep picking fights about social injustice.
After an especially nasty argument, Ellen's dad grounds her for the rest of the summer. The one exception is that she's allowed to leave the house to go play sports, which even includes letting her follow up on an invitation to play real-world quidditch, based on the fictional game invented by JK Rowling for her Harry Potter novels.
Ellen definitely needs to get out of the house, where she does chores, gets in fights, and spends most of her time doomscrolling Tumblr. She feels like her family doesn't want her and can't wait for her to move out of the house. She thinks her high school friend Xiumiao is ditching her to make news friends with people who'll be going to the same college, and even that best friend Melissa, who invited her to quidditch, would rather be friends with the other players than with her.
Author Anna Meriano represents Ellen's feelings naturalistically, but also lets the audience see that she might not understand her own situation completely correctly. In each case, Ellen feels torn between wanting to get closer, wanting to respect the other's desire for space, and feeling resentful and pushing away as well, and ends up enacting a complex mix that worsens each of the relationships she wishes she could improve.
Through the twice-weekly quidditch practices and skirmishes, Ellen learns to get in touch with her physical body and to enjoy using it competitively. She begins making new social connections with teammates and some friendly rivals. She gets the satisfaction of doing something well (which also carries over to trying harder at her summer project of clearing out the garage.) And she even makes a couple romantic connections with some cute, kissable quidditch guys.
All the strands of Ellen's story come together during the big, summer-ending regional tournament. She kind of two-steps-forward one-step-backs her way through her problems, making almost all of them worse while also finally asserting herself as an independent young person, and finally communicating honestly with Xiumiao and Melissa, both the cute boys she's kissed, and her dad and stepmother.
Compared to Loveless, which I use as a point of comparison mostly because they're both realistic contemporary YA, I think This is How We Fly has both more complex and more authentic emotions. Meriano is unafraid to let Ellen be flawed, and I physically cringed from her fights with her stepmom. Ellen responds to what she thinks other people are thinking, and they respond to her responses, which often results in a worsening dynamic.
I feel like Meriano got this one in just under the wire. It came out in 2020, but must have been finished earlier, and the book shows a time right before the weirdness of that first pandemic year, and before JKR descended from flirting with transphobia to becoming one of its loudest proponents.
I liked Harry Potter, and perhaps even moreso, I liked the creativity of the Harry Potter fandom, with its 'wizard rock' bands and its real life quidditch teams. It's both disappointing that Rowling does not accept trans people, sad to see the once-thriving HP fandom collapsing, frightening how much power Rowling has to share her message of hate, and also deeply weird that she often adopts a male pen-name (Robert Galbraith) to share it.
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