Driving Kate Hattemer's The Feminist Agenda of Jemima Kincaid is one of the best kinds of righteous indignation: the kind served with gallons of humor.
It's April of narrator Jemima Kincaid's senior year of high school, and as one-third of the Chawton School's Senior Triumvirate, she's partly responsible for organizing the prom. Not a fan of the sexist tradition of guys asking girls, Jemima comes up with the idea of the Last Chance Dance: using a match-making website set up for the purpose, students can privately submit the names of all the kids with whom they would consider attending. As Jemima explains to her Latin class, "The new prom system makes it so girls don't have to wait around for guys to ask them out. It gives girls choice. And power." But if Jemima is such a good feminist, then why, when she learns that her best friend Jiyoon Kim asked out her crush object, does Jemima find herself thinking that Jiyoon was being a little... forward? And why did she overlook Jiyoon when she was scouting around for a junior who could run against the loathsome Mack Monroe for the following school year's Senior Triumvirate? Does the fact that Jemima is sure that Jiyoon will lose, despite--make that because of--being the better candidate, make Jemima something arguably as bad as a bad feminist: a bad friend?
In her third YA novel, Hattemer covers much territory (first sexual experiences, flawed parents, white privilege), lots of it through the cheeky dialogue of precocious private school kids. If some of these kids are too smart for their own good ("I'm concerned that your ironic yo is becoming a real yo"), they are never too smart for the reader's good. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author