It’s time for another Calendar Girls Books post, and this month our prompt is Best Book with a Mother/Daughter Relationship. And let me say, this was a tough one! I didn’t realize, until going through my ‘read’ list on Goodreads, how many of the books that I’ve read do not contain good mother-daughter relationships! So, either the relationships are bad ones, the mother is absent, or the mother is dead. I was definitely able to narrow my list down due to that, though, and after getting stuck on deciding between my top 2, finally made a decision! Keep reading to see my pick!

Hosted by Katie @ Never Not Reading and Darque Reader Reads, “Calendar Girls is a monthly blog event created by Melanie at MNBernard Books, and Flavia at Flavia the Bibliophile, and will now be hosted by me, Katie. It is designed to ignite bookish discussions among readers, and was inspired by the 1961 Neil Sedaka song, Calendar Girl. Just like the song, each month has a different theme. Each blogger picks their favorite book from the theme, and on the first Monday of the month reveals their pick in a Calendar Girls post. Make sure to post back to the hostess’s post, and I will make a master list for the month. The master lists allow everyone to see the other Calendar Girls’ picks and to pop on over to their blogs. Thus, we all get to chat about books and even make some new friends!” — Katie

Title: American Panda
Author: Gloria Chao
Type: Fiction
Genre: YA, Contemporary, Romance
Publisher: Simon Pulse (Simon & Schuster)
Published: February 6, 2018

An incisive, laugh-out-loud contemporary debut about a Taiwanese-American teen whose parents want her to be a doctor and marry a Taiwanese Ivy Leaguer despite her squeamishness with germs and crush on a Japanese classmate.

At seventeen, Mei should be in high school, but skipping fourth grade was part of her parents’ master plan. Now a freshman at MIT, she is on track to fulfill the rest of this predetermined future: become a doctor, marry a preapproved Taiwanese Ivy Leaguer, produce a litter of babies.

With everything her parents have sacrificed to make her cushy life a reality, Mei can’t bring herself to tell them the truth–that she (1) hates germs, (2) falls asleep in biology lectures, and (3) has a crush on her classmate Darren Takahashi, who is decidedly not Taiwanese.

But when Mei reconnects with her brother, Xing, who is estranged from the family for dating the wrong woman, Mei starts to wonder if all the secrets are truly worth it. Can she find a way to be herself, whoever that is, before her web of lies unravels?

THANK YOU FOR READING MY CALENDAR GIRLS POST! HAVE YOU EVER READ ANY OF THE BOOKS THAT I HAVE SELECTED FOR THIS MONTH’S PROMPT? IF SO, WHAT DID YOU THINK? AND IF YOU HAVEN’T READ ANY YET, ARE THEY ON YOUR TBR LIST? PLEASE SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS IN THE COMMENTS BELOW, WHETHER YOU’RE A CALENDAR GIRLS BOOKS PARTICIPANT OR NOT!