School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-This series continues with LGBTQ+ modern-day retellings of classic tales. Ash, a contemporary Cinderella in Cinders, is harassed by her stepsiblings while trying to win a coding competition at school. In Charming, Char is mercilessly cyberbullied for her music. Each book follows the story of how the two of them meet and fall for each other online while using Ash's anti-cyberbullying app. Romeo and Juliet is retold in Romeo for Real and Just Julian. Romeo is a high school sports star who begins to explore his sexuality after meeting Julian, though his openly homophobic friends and family make him fear coming out as gay. Through his relationship with Romeo, artist Julian becomes involved in LGBTQ+ activism. While these story lines relate only loosely to their source material, the narratives pack a punch. VERDICT These modern romances, written at a fourth grade reading level, effectively tie in contemporary themes like bullying and social media while presenting relatable characters embracing their sexuality. © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A suburban Vancouver teen wants to make her mark online.After her cover of a Rihanna song goes viral following the lackluster performance of her beauty tutorials, queer, biracial (Danish/Asian Indian) Char Gill decides that devoting herself to her guitar and vocals will help jump-start her social media presence, even if it means abandoning other pursuits like the LGBTQ+ club at school. However, her school's pack of mean girls targets Char's social media and begins to troll her. Char discovers an app, SendLove, created to combat online bullying by drowning out hateful comments in a crowd of positive ones. Using the handle "Charming," she strikes up an online relationship with the SendLove moderator, "Cinders." Connecting through video conversations before meeting face to face, their relationship quickly becomes romantic. As Char becomes more involved with SendLove and Cinders, she takes stock of her life and does a self-designed internet detox. A companion novel, Cinders, details events from Ash's (aka Cinders') point of view. Ash is a presumably white teenager living with her stepfather and stepsiblings after her mother's death. A talented coder, she invented SendLove as an entry for a badly needed college scholarship. The books address homophobia and heteronormativity, dysfunctional families, bullyingboth face-to-face and cyberand the pitfalls of social media with realism and care. The girls' sweet romance helps each of them grow in confidence and learn to take emotional risks.Engaging stories that fill a need for reluctant readers seeking positive, inspiring stories of same-sex relationships. (Romance. 12-18) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
