Book Review: Throwback by Maurene Goo

Publisher’s description

A Gen Z Korean American girl gets stuck in the ’90s with her teenaged mother in this fresh, funny adventure full of heart, humor, and time-crossed romance. Perfect for fans of Mary H.K. Choi, Morgan Matson, and Nicola Yoon.

Being a first-generation Asian American immigrant is hard. You know what’s harder? Being the daughter of one.

Priscilla is first-generation Korean American, a former high school cheerleader who expects Sam to want the same all- American nightmare. Meanwhile, Sam is a girl of the times who has no energy for clichéd high school aspirations. After a huge blowup, Sam is desperate to get away from Priscilla, but instead, finds herself thrown back. Way back.

To her shock, Sam lands in the ’90s . . . alongside a 17-year-old Priscilla.

Now, Sam has to deal with outdated tech, regressive ’90s attitudes, and her growing feelings for sweet, mysterious football player Jamie, who just might be the right guy in the wrong era.

With the clock ticking, Sam must figure out how to fix things with Priscilla or risk being trapped in an analog world forever. Sam’s blast to the past has her questioning everything she thought she knew about her mom . . . and herself. One thing’s for sure: Time is a mother.

Brimming with heart and humor, Maurene Goo’s Throwback asks big questions about what exactly one inherits and loses in the immigrant experience.

Amanda’s thoughts

You know what would rule? Being able magically go to high school, just for a bit, with my mom as a teen or my own teenage son. I think it would be fascinating. I could be a senior in 1968 like my mom was, or a senior in 2023 like my son will be. As it is, I was a senior in 1995, just like Priscilla in this book. I figured I’d enjoy this story just from that fact alone. I loved seeing the 90s through Sam’s modern eyes. She’s constantly calling out the many, MANY microaggressions, the homophobia, the racism, the sexism, the bullying, and so on. And a chance to see both her mom and grandmother in a different light? Well, that makes surviving a few days in the 90s tolerable.

Sam and her mom, in the modern era, don’t get along, don’t understand each other, and don’t value the same things. Sam finds her mother insufferable. And, sure, that’s all very typically teenaged of her, right? But they are not coming from the same place, something the time in the 90s illuminates for Sam. Her mom, Priscilla, as a teenager just wants to fit in. As one of the very few Korean kids at school, Priscilla puts on her best costume (or armor, as Sam thinks of it), a very studied approach to seeming cool, confident, like everyone else. Priscilla wants to be the envied all-American girl high school queen bee. And for Sam, who is coming from a different time, she can’t understand why there can’t be an overlap between Priscilla’s real self, her real identity, and how she wants to experience high school. She has always thought of her mom’s ability to compartmentalize as “Gen X immigrant-kid-assimilation lizard brain” but now, seeing her mom as a teen, she has to rethink that, that maybe it’s more like survival mode. Her mom just wants to be accepted, to be seen as powerful, to have the ability to reject others before they can reject her. It’s a lot for Sam, who obviously only previously knew her mother as “her mother” and not any other version of herself. Her mom was seen as “other” in a way Sam didn’t understand or relate to. For her mother, assimilation was survival, and as off-putting as Sam finds that, that was the reality for Priscilla.

Unlike other time travel stories, where characters have to be concerned with not altering any aspect of the past as it will alter the future, Sam is very clearly on a mission to alter some parts of the past to hopefully fix how things are in the future. And, of course, although that starts out as her mission, what she learns while living in the 90s is more important than any changes she could make.

An entertaining and, certainly for Sam, illuminating read about life in the 1990s and what it’s like to see someone through a different lens.

Review copy courtesy of the publisher

ISBN-13: 9781638930204
Publisher: Zando
Publication date: 04/11/2023
Age Range: 14 – 17 Years

Filed under: Book Reviews