Review: "Loveboat Forever" by Abigail Hing Wen

Loveboat Forever by Abigail Hing Wen
Published November 2023 via HarperTeen
★★★

A fun addition to the Loveboat universe—in Loveboat Forever, Pearl is in Taipei for the summer to wait for an Internet cancellation to die down. A pianist by training, this is her first real chance to spread her wings, to try out new instruments and connect to parts of her identity that she's never really given much thought.

I enjoy this series but am not convinced that the book was better served as part of a series rather than a standalone. That is...Pearl is at a summer program for teenagers...but she more or less does whatever she wants. Skip class? No problem. Sneak out? No problem. Take a day trip? No problem. Take an overnight trip? No problem. We see her go to a language class maybe once, and a music class once or twice, and...mostly she's off doing her own thing. It just leaves me wondering why she needed to be in Taipei as part of a quasi-academic program rather than, e.g., spending the summer in a cousin's spare room or something.

A side note: This is one of many recent books that is trying to be gender-inclusive (hurray!) but flubs by having the POV character immediately identify girls as girls, boys as boys, and nonbinary people as people—never a moment where the POV character goes wait, I'm not sure I got that right. What's interesting to me here is that it's Pearl's mother who is most realistic about it: late in the book, Pearl's mother misgenders Pearl's friend Hollis, and Pearl corrects her. "Oh," she [Pearl's mother] says, looking confused. "They/Them. I'll try to remember" (376). And I love that—we need more of this sort of moment, not more instances where characters walk into a room and immediately and correctly identify everyone's gender.

(While I'm off on a tangent, should I note that I found at least four places suggesting that the book was not proofread? Tsk tsk. Not the author's fault, but a major publisher should know better.)

At any rate...it's a fun book, but I'm glad to see that the author's next book seems to take place outside the Loveboat universe.