For fans of Jenny Han, Jane Austen, and The Great British Bake Off, A TASTE FOR LOVE is a delicious rom com about first love, familial expectations, and making the perfect bao.
A TASTE FOR LOVE
by Jennifer Yen
Razorbill/Penguin Young Readers, February 2021 (voir catalogue)
To her friends, high school senior Liza Yang is nearly perfect. Smart, kind, and pretty, she dreams big and never shies away from a challenge. But to her mom, Liza is anything but. Compared to her older sister Jeannie, Liza is stubborn, rebellious, and worst of all, determined to push back against all of Mrs. Yang’s traditional values, especially when it comes to dating. The one thing mother and daughter do agree on is their love of baking. Mrs. Yang is the owner of Houston’s popular Yin & Yang Bakery. With college just around the corner, Liza agrees to help out at the bakery’s annual junior competition to prove to her mom that she’s more than her rebellious tendencies once and for all. But when Liza arrives on the first day of the bake-off, she realizes there’s a catch: all of the contestants are young Asian American men her mother has handpicked for Liza to date. The bachelorette situation Liza has found herself in is made even worse when she happens to be grudgingly attracted to one of the contestants; the stoic, impenetrable, annoyingly hot James Wong. As she battles against her feelings for James, and for her mother’s approval, Liza begins to realize there’s no tried and true recipe for love.
Jennifer Yen lives in Houston, Texas with her family. By day, she stays busy with her work as a doctor, splitting her time between academia and private practice, specializing in child and adolescent psychiatry. By night, she is a passionate writer dedicated to working on her next book, with hopes of bringing a little magic into the world of each of her readers.
« Guilders work. Foundlings scrub the bogs. Needles bind. Swords tear. And men leave. There is nothing uncommon in this city. I hope Errol Thebes is dead. We both know he is safer that way. » In a walled city of a mile-high iron guild towers, many things are common knowledge: No book in any of the city’s libraries reveals its place on a calendar or a map. No living beasts can be found within the city’s walls. And no good comes to the guilder or foundling who trespasses too far from their labors. Even on the tower rooftops, where Errol Thebes and the rest of the city’s teenagers pass a few short years under an open sky, no one truly believes anything uncommon is possible within the city walls. But one guildmaster has broken tradition to protect her child, and as a result the whole city faces an uncommon threat: a pair of black iron spikes that have the power of both sword and needle on the rib cages of men have gone missing, but the mayhem they cause rises everywhere. If the spikes not found and contained, no wall will be high enough to protect the city–or the world beyond it. And Errol Thebes? He’s not dead and he’s certainly not safe.
Seventeen-year-old Abby Schoenberg isn’t exactly looking forward to the summer before her senior year. She’s just broken up with her first boyfriend and her friends are all off in different, exciting directions for the next three months. Abby needs a plan—an adventure of her own. Enter: the letters. They show up one rainy day along with the rest of Abby’s recently deceased grandmother’s possessions. And these aren’t any old letters; they’re love letters. Love letters from a mystery man named Edward. Love letters from a mansion on Nantucket. Abby doesn’t know much about her grandmother’s past. She knows she was born in Germany and moved to the US when she was five, fleeing the Holocaust. But the details are either hazy or nonexistent; and these letters depict a life that is a bit different than the quiet one Abby knows about. And so, Abby heads to Nantucket for the summer to learn more about her grandmother and the secrets she kept. But when she meets Edward’s handsome grandson, who wants to stop her from investigating, things get complicated. As Abby and Noah grow closer, the mysteries in their families deepen, and they discover that they both have to accept the burdens of their pasts if they want the kinds of futures they’ve always imagined.
Jingle Jangle, qui sera diffusé sur Netflix cet hiver, sera la première comédie musicale produite par la plateforme. Le film raconte l’histoire de Jeronicus Jangle (Forest Whitaker), un excentrique fabriquant de jouets qui invente des objets fantaisistes et merveilleux. Lorsqu’un ancien protégé (Keegan-Michael Key) le trahit, Jeronicus se referme sur lui-même et seule sa petite-fille, la brillante et aventureuse Journey (Madalen Mills), pourra sauver la situation grâce à une invention magique remarquable qui pourrait bien changer leur vie. Parmi les acteurs du film, nous retrouverons aussi Phylicia Rashad, Anika Noni Rose et Keegan-Michael Key.