With Love Echo Park: a teen book that celebrates community and family
With Love Echo Park by Laura Taylor Namey is a teen book that celebrates community and family. Taylor Namey is the author of The Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow, which was a Reese’s book club pick, and A British Girl’s Guide to Hurricanes and Heartbreak, among other books.
With Love Echo Park by Laura Taylor Namey
- Published on August 27, 2024 by Atheneum
- Amazon editors pick for best YA novel
- Thanks to the publisher for providing a copy for review
Review of With Love Echo Park
I’ve enjoyed all this author’s books but this is my absolute favorite. Her prior two YA books have been fish out of water stories about teens who are living in another country (think Emily in Paris and check out my YA Books Like Emily in Paris post. AND my quiz on Which Emily in Paris Character Are You?
With Love Echo Park was (for me) the perfect YA contemporary book. It was a coming of age story, a family story, and a story about community.
Main character Clary is struggling with all the change in her life. Her beloved Cuban neighborhood, Echo Park, feels like it’s losing its character. (In her afterword, Namey discusses how Echo Park was a Cuban neighborhood, but back in the 1960s and 1970s, immediately after the Cuban Revolution in the late 1950s. I knew that many of these exiles ended up in Miami, but didn’t realize there was also a contingent in Southern California.
Clary also discovers she has a half-sister, something that stirs up lots of complicated feelings about her mother. Finally, Clary is fighting her more-than-friendship feelings toward the frustrating Emilio. Does she love him or hate him?
All Clary’s turmoil aside, this book just felt like a cozy hug. Yes, she’s going through typical teen growing pains, but she has a loving family, a supportive community, a diehard best friend, and an adorable love interest.
Highly recommend this book to fans of Emma Lord – check out my post on her interconnected story world, Stephanie Perkins (for those of you from the Y2K YA era), and Emma Mills.
