Frankly in Love by David Yoon
Hi, I am Sarah. I am fourteen years old and an avid reader; it is one of my favorite things to do. Inspired by authors’ creations of magnificent places and surprising havens built by simple letters, I aspire to be an author and, meanwhile, nurture the love to write.
Frank Li has two names: there’s Frank Li, his American name, which everyone calls him. Frank Li has seven letters, a lucky number in America. Then there’s Sung-Min Li, his Korean name, which has nine letters (a lucky number in Korea). Nobody calls him that.
Frank is a Korean-American senior in high school and self-described nerd. He has a nice, middle-class American life with his nice American name – and yet his parents still expect him to end up with a nice Korean girl from another perfect Korean family.
This poses a bit of a problem, since Korean-Americans make up about one percent of the population, twelve percent of that girls his age, leaving him with only one eligible girl about every three square miles. That’s not even considering whether or not he could even like said girl.
This problem gets even worse when he starts dating Brit Means, a girl from his class who is funny and nerdy, who makes him laugh like no one else and makes him feel better about himself. Brit Means, his dream girl… who is white.
As he manages his dating life under the fear of being disowned, he comes up with a plan with family friend, Joy Song, who has a similar problem. Together, they create a fool-proof fake-dating scheme to please their parents and go out with the people they actually like. Nothing could possibly go wrong… right?
David Yoon transitions beautifully between humor, young love, and powerful questions about family, race, and what is worth risking. He poses queries about the things that keep us apart, and in the end, whether they really matter that much when there are much more important things to cherish.
