Book Review

A Story Featuring A Capella & Crossdressing — Noteworthy by Riley Redgate {Book Review}

Noteworthy by Riley RedgateTitle: Noteworthy
Author: Riley Redgate
Publisher: Amulet Books
Release Date: May 2nd, 2017
Standalone/Series: Standalone
Genre: Young Adult – Contemporary

Goodreads link

My rating in stars: 4,5 stars
My rating in words: Loved it!

What it’s about:

A cappella just got a makeover.

Jordan Sun is embarking on her junior year at the Kensington-Blaine Boarding School for the Performing Arts, hopeful that this will be her time: the year she finally gets cast in the school musical. But when her low Alto 2 voice gets her shut out for the third straight year—threatening her future at Kensington-Blaine and jeopardizing her college applications—she’s forced to consider nontraditional options.

In Jordan’s case, really nontraditional. A spot has opened up in the Sharpshooters, Kensington’s elite a cappella octet. Worshipped…revered…all male. Desperate to prove herself, Jordan auditions in her most convincing drag, and it turns out that Jordan Sun, Tenor 1, is exactly what the Sharps are looking for.

Jordan finds herself enmeshed in a precarious juggling act: making friends, alienating friends, crushing on a guy, crushing on a girl, and navigating decades-old rivalries. With her secret growing heavier every day, Jordan pushes beyond gender norms to confront what it means to be a girl (and a guy) in a male-dominated society, and—most importantly—what it means to be herself.

My thoughts (spoiler-free):

“Monday morning was the worst possible time to have an existential crisis, I decided on a Monday morning, while having an existential crisis.”

Let me start by saying that this was one of my most difficult reviews to write lately. Not because I’m feeling conflicted about Noteworthy. Not because I needed to get my thoughts in order. No, this was difficult because my heart was all “fdhjzkzhfdkjhqks” and excited and gushing all over the place and really, what are words again?

So suffice it to say: I LOVED this book. I loved this so much that I finished this in a day, despite still being in the after-effects of a horrible reading slump. This adorable, inspirational and just overall fantastic book blew that slump away, just like that. It was funny, it was cute, it was relatable, it was real, it was romantic and it was just about everything I’ve been looking for in a YA contemporary.

Why do I love Noteworthy so much? Let me count the ways!
(I’ll try to keep the unintelligible gushing to a bare minimum, but I can’t make any promises)

The plot. I mean, I have a thing for the girl-pretends-to-be-a-boy plot. I just can’t say no that that trope. Combine that trope with music, more specifically a capella, and I’m literally jumping up and down and screaming in excitement. This story has been pitched as Pitch Perfect meets She’s The Man, which are two of my favorite feel-good movies. And I’d like to add the kdrama You’re Beautiful to that list, which also features a girl crossdressing as a boy and entering the music world. Noteworthy definitely has something from all of the above, but in my view it even still exceeds all of them, because on top of the great and entertaining plot, it still has so much MORE. Which I’ll get to in my following points.

A great and relatable main character. Jordan is a Chinese-American teenage girl who comes from a poor family, an all-consuming broken relationship and is struggling with a lot of things, such as moving on from her past, figuring out her sexuality and how she’s going to reach her dreams. She was such a great, well-written and well-rounded main character. I loved her personality and her dry wit made her one of my all-time favorite characters.

The humor. Noteworthy is so full of humor – from Jordan’s dry wit to the hilarious situations she gets herself into, to the conversations between the Sharpshooters which will have you snorting despite yourself.

The diversity and representation. Where do I begin? There is so much diversity in all sorts of ways, from different races to different sexualities, and a lot of important topics get raised. Jordan’s crossdressing gets her to guiltily but also respectfully consider the big differences between what she’s doing and what transgender people struggle with. But it also touches on topics such as the narrow confines of femininity, the American health care system and education/ scholarship system, biphobia, … All of these important topics get adressed throughout the book in a respectful and natural way.

The friendships. I just totally saved the best for last. Not to say that my other points are not amazing and worth gushing about, but there’s just something about epic friendships and group dynamics that gets my heart fluttering. I ADORED the friendships in this book. The Sharpshooters are such a real, amazing and fun group of friends. They have their issues and their fights, but despite their many differences they also have eachothers’ back and are there for eachother through it all and it was so awe-inspiring to watch. Not to mention the hilarious group chats!

Overall, I think I have reached my limit for the moment of speaking coherently about this lovely book. Read this if you need a boost. Read this if you need a laugh. Read this if you want real, relatable characters. Reads this if you love epic friendships. Read this if you love music. Read this if you even remotely enjoyed Pitch Perfect, She’s The Man or You’re Beautiful. But for whatever reason, I can only recommend you to read this.

Favorite quotes:

“It was impossible to feel alone in a room full of favorite books. I had the sense that they knew me personally, that they’d read me cover to cover as I’d read them.”

“It was a weird day if figuring out you were bisexual made up the least of your mental turmoil.”

“I meant to ask Erik to say something to Victoria, to follow what had happened at the dance, but I couldn’t settle on the right words. An apology for fleeing, sure, but then what? ‘I only think of you as a friend’? ‘I think we should see other people’? ‘It’s not you, it’s the fact that I’m secretly a girl who sacrificed a foot and a half of perfectly good hair to the dark gods of a capella’?”

“The world had told me what becoming a man looked like: conquering one thing or another, one way or another. Becoming a woman, as far as they’d told us, looked like blood.”

“There was something deeply screwed up about that attitude. There is no world where “you’re wrong” is an acceptable answer to “this hurts.”

“With so many queer kids at Kensington, people sometimes got weirdly comfortable, like they had a free pass to say anything they wanted about sexuality. I guess it was tempting to stick a rainbow-colored “Ally” pin on your backpack and call it a day, as if that were the endpoint, not the starting line.”

“Femininity had always felt inaccessible to me—my best attempt at it had always been putting on makeup and pretending to be more patient and graceful than I actually was, mostly for my mom’s sake. Sometimes in middle school, feeling awkward had become my default. Because I wasn’t patient. I wasn’t graceful. I was prematurely tall, I wasn’t skinny, I wasn’t pretty, and I didn’t care about any of it as much as I was supposed to. Square peg, meet round hole.”

Have you read Noteworthy? What did you think about it?

20 Comments

  1. This sounds so good! I mean, who doesn’t love Pitch Perfect? I really love the quotes you picked out. That first one about favorite books – I mean, isn’t that how we all feel as readers? And I really like the one about feeling awkward about femininity. I can relate to this one a lot, I’m not a girly-girl and I feel really awkward about a lot of girl things, like makeup and dresses.

    1. I ADORE Pitch Perfect and must have seen it already ten times or so… but I liked Noteworthy even more so that’s saying something 🙂
      Yes, I really related to both those quotes as well! A lot of the MC’s thought processes were super relatable and I think that’s part of the reason why I loved this so much (and why I had trouble selecting only a FEW quotes, haha 😉 )

  2. I loved this one too!! So many things about it were great and I think you hit them all!! Glad you enjoyed this too. Great review!!

    1. Ah happy you loved this one too! It’s true, it just has soo many great things going for it and I definitely hope more people will still pick it up 🙂

  3. I definitely want to read this one. It’s been on my wishlist for a while now so I’m definitely going to need to scoop it up soon. It looks like it has so many things that I love in stories: great friendships, diversity, great main character…and who doesn’t love a book with some humor. Great review!

    1. Thanks so much, Julie! If you love all those elements, then I don’t think you could go wrong with Noteworthy 🙂 Hope you’ll enjoy it when you get to it!

  4. Ah, I’m really glad that you enjoyed this book! I definitely think it’s one of those contemporaries that can be the Big Ones if it’s given the right attention and promo. I loved how it tackles so many different issues without ever seeming preachy, and I loved all the characters. I also could totally see a sequel in the works, and I just have my fingers crossed that we’ll get to see more of these characters somewhere, somehow. Great review! 🙂

    1. Thanks so much, Aimal! And you’re so right, this could totally become one of the Major Contemporaries! At least, I do hope it will, because it was really such a gem of a book that more people should be reading 🙂 And OMG, I would be so up for a sequel if there would be one so I’ll keep my fingers crossed for that as well 🙂

  5. I’ve heard nothing but great things about this book and how cute and diverse it is, so I am so glad to see you enjoyed it so much too! Thanks for sharing and, as always, fabulous review! <3

    1. This book definitely has been getting a lot of rave reviews, but I can only agree wholeheartedly with them 🙂 Thanks so much!

  6. Yay, so happy to see that you loved this one!! It was so good. I loved how fun and cute it was whilst discussing super important issues. Great review, Lindsay ♥

    1. It was amazing! And yes, I loved how it discussed all those important issues while still being cute and fluffy and not sounding too preachy. Thanks so much Lauren!

  7. I am so glad you loved this one! it’s been on my TBR and I have seen glowing reviews everywhere so I think I should pick it up haha
    It sounds so good and diverse, and I am in the mood for contemporaries lately so I think that’s god’s calling lol

    1. I’d definitely recommend to pick this one up! I also picked it up because of so many rave reviews everywhere and I can only agree completely with them 🙂 And ESPECIALLY if you’ve been in a contemporary mood, I think you’ll really enjoy this one.

  8. I think this is the year of well written diverse contemporaries!! For a girl who has read only Fantasy all her life I sure am adding contemporaries by the dozen to my TBR! I hear so much about this book on the blogosphere and so glad you loved the book (Thanks for exploding my TBR by the way 😛 )AND OMG SO MUCH DIVERSITY!! I NEED this book, like yesterday 😛 Great review Lindsey <3

    1. I COMPLETELY RELATE! I think I may have read more contemporaries this year so far than I did fantasies… what’s going on??? Haha, but it’s okay, there have been indeed been some pretty great contemporaries this year 😉 Definitely recommend this one to add to your never-ending TBR (you’re welcome and I’m sorry 😉 )

  9. I’m really happy you enjoyed this book so much! I read it a little while ago and loved it just as well – the characters, this little tight group of friends, I loved it so, so much. It was a lot of fun to read while tackling on many important issues, which I really enjoyed. Great review! 🙂

    1. Thanks, Marie! Yes, I saw so many bloggers who absolutely adored this book and I just had to read it myself 🙂 And it TOTALLY lived up to the hype, because it was amazing! A great little friend group is always the way to my heart, and then the important issues, balanced with the humor, it’s just <3<3<3

  10. Oh, this sounds fantastic! Pitch Perfect is one of my favorite movies so I feel like this is a book I would love too. I hadn’t heard of it before either so thanks for putting it on my radar. 🙂

    1. I’m so glad that I was able to put this on your radar 🙂 If you love Pitch Perfect, then I have no doubt that you’ll enjoy this one as well! At least, I hope you will 🙂

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