4.5/5
This was fantastic. I’m totally in love with Riley Redgate’s writing and I can’t wait to get my hands on her newest book. ( )

I loved this so much. Redgate is a really fantastic writer. This dealt with so many social issues so well, especially class and the idea of gender. And that romance! ( )

This book sounded (no pun intended) fun when someone gushed about it on my Goodreads feed. I waited patiently to be able to read it. So noted because I am not a patient person. I was so absorbed in it that I didn't realize I read a third of it in one sitting, only stopping because I needed to eat. Song lyrics are written out and sung in this, which I always find tacky. They're italicized with no slashes, which is not as bad as it could have been. Income, gender roles, and white kids being favored above everyone are discussed calmly by the main character, Jordan. She presents as male in order to get into a boys' a capella group at her performing arts academy high school, and goes by the name Julian. Jordan is a tenor, and women tenors...don't have a lot of opportunities, to put it nicely. She auditions, gets a callback, and the story is on its way.

Jordan's hard work at passing was convincing, and the things that are so hard--laughing in a way that makes it sound like you have more testosterone than you do, walking with a sock, sitting a new way--are handled well here. There's a part where she thinks deeply about whether she's appropriating trans experiences, which I appreciated. I liked the camaraderie between the boys! I like reading stories about performing arts schools and colleges, and I was definitely comparing the fictional Kensington, a high school, to Cornish College of the Arts, a real-life university in Seattle, Washington. I just double-checked its website and uh wow, it changed a lot since I looked at it two years ago. It now has a lower admission rate--less than eighty percent--and the -graduation- rate is available: less than a third of Cornish students graduate. Cornish gives out partial scholarships; they didn't the last time I checked.

Performing arts schools and universities are institutions that charge what could easily be a down payment on a house (20K) per quarter or semester (Cornish charges 50K a year), and you have to audition every semester or quarter to stay in school. Hence the one-third that graduates Cornish. If you don't make it, they are under no obligation to keep you, and I hope you have a backup plan. This is approached, but it's so far into the book that I rolled my eyes and thought, "finally." She auditioned -three times- and they still kept her, likely because they needed to fit certain (tokenization) requirements. That was a dig at them, not at her. My heart sank often for Jordan. The sense of competition present in these schools was not in this book. I do not count the vicious acts between the a capella groups in this. Those are student groups--I'm referring to competition between one another in any declared major. I understand that wasn't the point of the novel, but--c'mon. You set it in a performing arts academy!

My favorite character was Mama. I was cheering for Jordan/Julian, but was always hoping Mama would be on the page. The book dragged, but I'm not sure what could have been cut to make it go faster, so. It had a HEA which was cheesy but I was so excited about one of the characters carrying around a whiteboard that said "Vocal Rest" on it that I wasn't as irritated as I could have been. ( )

DNF @10%
I did not come here for a pity party fest.
Find myself exceptionally sceptical and miffed.

What's wrong with community theatre? Look, she supposedly comes from poverty or very close to it. Why is she thinking about experience (for college) from rich person POV? Why not go for something outside of school? Are they located in the wilderness or something?

Also, please explain to me how a twitchy mouse is going to pull off a lion's swagger - without any acting skills.

Annoyed and not impressed.

FINAL VERDICT : AVOID ( )

This book did a lot of things really well and two things only okay. It’s a well-written YA novel, with a strong cast of characters and good humour. The music and the friendships were great, as was Jordan’s slowly becoming more confident in herself and realizing she’d gotten in over her head.

There’s a lot of diversity too—not just bisexual Chinese-American Jordan, but another East Asians, a fat black kid, a gay Sikh, other gay characters, a disabled man, even a kid with dyslexia! Redgate also brings up financial inequalities and the tensions and shame those can bring up. She does a good job addressing the assorted injustices and microaggressions her characters face too, without turning the book into an issue novel.

However, there’s one element of the diversity that Redgate falls a bit short on, and that’s the queer aspects. To get it out of the way first, Jordan’s first few attempts to work out or declare her bisexuality are met with “but shouldn’t you know already?” and not much of the counter-argument that not everyone just knows. Like, it’s there as subtext, I just felt it should’ve been more obvious. (Caveat: not bi.)

Similarly, there are obvious parallels between Jordan passing as Julian and trans people transitioning, except that for Jordan it’s not nearly so serious—all of which is addressed in the book, though briefly, and Jordan’s “I’m doing it anyway” reaction to the parallels is a Poor Teen Life Choice™ that again, isn’t countered as well as it could’ve been. (Caveat: not trans.)

Overall, Noteworthy is cute and fun and a good opener for further conversations on gender, injustice, and poverty, but it never felt overly fresh or different from other teen boarding school novels and it fell a bit short on calling out any of the issues in the story. That said, I’d give it a very solid 7/10 except that the problems with the bi/trans stuff dock it marks.

Warnings: Possibly not the greatest choice if you’re trans, but not the worst either. Biphobia, fatphobia that may double as anti-Black racism, systematic ill-treatment of the poor and disabled.

6/10 ( )