WHY DID I LISTEN TO TIFFANY SLY LIVES HERE NOW BY DANA L. DAVIS?
I can always count on contemporary young adult books to be decent audiobooks. I don’t have to do double work of imagining a fantasy world while also listening to the plot. So, Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now by Dana L. Davis hit the sweet spot for me. PLUS, it is a book with a Black girl on the cover. AND! It was on Hoopla easily available to download and listen to. Straight up, I just love contemporary books via audio. I am happy to say that Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now absolutely lived up to my expectations.

WHAT’S THE STORY HERE?
Tiffany Sly is a sixteen year old Black girl who was living in Chicago with her mother. Unfortunately, her mother died of cancer and so she must go and live with the father she has never known. She ends up moving to California to live with her father, Anthony Stone. He’s a wealthy OB-GYN. Tiffany also discovers that she’s got four new sisters and a stepmother. However, she chafes against her father’s rules — he is a very strict Jehovah’s Witness. However, this may only be temporary for Tiffany. You see, another man who is much more similar to Tiffany is now claiming to be her father and he’s getting a paternity test in seven days. One week is not nearly enough time for her to make a decision about the test, but she’s going to find out regardless. Will she like the answer?

HOW DID I LIKE TIFFANY SLY LIVES HERE NOW?
So, I am not totally in the Book Internets world as much these days. Other bloggers and bookstagramers and bookfluencers could be shouting this read from the rooftops for all I know. I could be wrong? Anyways. THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD. I AM GETTING SHOUTY I LIKED IT SO MUCH. Listen, we need to read stories about Black girls. AND the cherry on top? Tiffany is so interesting and compelling and I just loved her. She’s got this wonderful taste in music. She has very strong opinions. Overall, she comes across as quite unique and also so kind. I also think that this book was well paced. Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now was EVERYTHING I wanted in an audiobook and I am so glad it was able to live up to my expectations.

HOW’S THE NARRATION?
The audiobook is narrated by the author and normally everyone who reads this blog knows I don’t care for that. THIS TIME IS AN EXCEPTION. Dana L. Davis is actually a good narrator. Part of what made me like Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now was that her narration was SO likable. She’s got a sort of young sounding voice — at least for narrating this book. It just worked. I found myself wanting to keep listening and find out what would happen next and how all would play out. So, okay, now I am a fan for life of Davis and truly cannot wait for her next book.

I wasn't a fan. I like what Davis is trying to accomplish, the questions of racism and prejudice it points out. We see TIffany's father judging the neighbors. There's discussion of many people of multiple races valuing people based on how dark their skin is. The inherent prejudice and judgement that can come with various religions. Its that point that becomes more of a sticky one for me. It paints Jehovah's Witnesses in a very negative light without ever attempting to understand their perspective. I have no problems with disagreeing wit ha person's belief system so long as you make an attempt to understand or at least respect those beliefs. That that doens't happen here.

Excellent teen read. While there are some unusual characters and situations, these only helped highlight the authenticity of the book.

Completely genuine experience of a girl trying to fit into a new home and a new school.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! Absolutely wonderful book. The author had such an intresting voice that makes the reader want to keep reading

Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now by Dana L. Davis is the story of a 16 year old girl who is sent to California from Chicago to live with her father, Anthony Stone, after her mother dies. Tiffany has never met her father and she knows nothing about him. Right before Tiffany is to leave for California another man show up saying he thinks he's her father. Anthony has a wife and four other daughters, and he is very rich and strict. Tiffany deals with her mother's death, worrying who's her father, fitting in, and missing Chicago. I really enjoyed this book, and look forward to reading more books by this author. I strongly recommended this book to both young adult and adult readers.

I received this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Oh my god. It kept me hooked til the very end. Stayed up til almost 3 AM to finish it! The anxiety rep was amazing, and as someone who also lost a parent at sixteen, the protagonist's feelings surrounding grief, etc rang so true for me.

After losing her mother to cancer, Tiffany Sly is forced to fly across the country to live with her biological Dad. Little does she know, she has four half-siblings and a new stepmother to get used to. When a mysterious man claiming to be her father shows up at her doorstep before she leaves to meet her new family, Tiffany finds out she has one week before this man will demand a paternity test. She has one week to come clean to her new family.
Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now addresses many social issues in depth for a young adult novel such as racism, religion and mental illness. Generally, I tend to stay away from books that discuss religion because it is one of those subjects that provoke strong opinions. Usually, these opinions tend to be either strongly for a certain religion or belief system, or strongly against. Although there are many discussions of religion, there isn't a strong pull in any direction. The characters' religions (or lack thereof) was never categorized into good and bad, right and wrong. For instance, Tiffany's new adoptive family is Jehovah's Witness, while Tiffany herself is an atheist. Eventually, Tiffany and her family begin to meet each other half way in accepting their differing beliefs.
Mental illness is another issue that is discussed throughout the book without being in-your-face. Tiffany has OCD and anxiety. She is afraid of getting into car crashes or plane crashes. Her anxiety is not given the entire spotlight of the book. Instead, it is a component of who she is, which makes her struggles with anxiety very relatable.
All in all, I really enjoyed this book. It was a page-turner and very engaging.

I had trouble putting my feelings about this book to words. Tiffany is such an engaging character that I can look over the flaws in this story. There were many different elements thrown into this tale. Tiffany lost her mother to cancer and is thrown into this new life with a man named Anthony Stone who she's never met. This new father of hers lives a life she's not accustomed to. He's a biracial man married to a white woman with four other daughters. He's a doctor living in Southern California in a rich neighborhood. But she's not sure he's actually her father after being approached by a man in her old city whose features very much resemble hers. And this man has vowed to come to California in seven days to make her take a DNA test.

My gripe with the story is too much happens in such a short amount of time. It feels more like 7 weeks have past rather than seven days with all the intertwined relationships during a time when most people would just be discovering the most basic things about each other. Anthony alone had so many rules, regulations, and extreme tendencies that he tied to his faith. I found it too soon for him to be realizing some hard truths about himself due to Tiffany's presence.

I enjoyed her friendship with Marcus but it developed far too quickly to the point. It was very easy to forget that only a few days had passed as they were written as having a very strong bond.

There were also many little side plot points thrown in for drama that were not properly followed up on. Some of which could not be followed up on in that time frame so they should not have been included. I found this book relied too heavily on Tiffany's likability as a character to sell a very complex story.

I received an arc via Netgalley and Harlequin Teen in exchange for an honest review.

This book features Tiffany Sly a 16-year-old girl who is forced to move from her Chicago home where she was born and raised to live in California with a dad she didn't know was more than a donor after her mother dies of cancer. Tiffany has some major things to cope with in her new home - she now has a dad, a step mom, and four sisters. And along with her new family come a whole lot of rules. Also, there's another man who thinks he's Tiffany's father.

This books is filled with information about different topics such as depression, anxiety, dealing with a dying loved one, leaving everything you know to live with strangers, the feelings and interactions between Black and mixed women, being forced to follow another religion, and choosing a friend described as different. I wasn't sure the author, or any author, could successfully cover each topic and do it justice, but she did.

Readers will clearly recognize the signs of anxiety and the main character's rejection of new rules. I recognized myself in Tiffany in many ways, such as suddenly being faced with a stepmother and siblings. The transition for her, and myself, was a rocky one that required patience and understanding on both sides.

While the author did a great job of covering all these topics, I found myself confused by the feelings of the main character Tiffany. She frequently switched her feelings from like to dislike and acceptance to not accepting without explanation. It jarred me on many occasions.

In addition, there were several instances where the author used the explanation of Tourette's to describe a character's behavior. As someone with Tourette syndrome, I felt her use of the disorder to describe the behaviors was incorrect. For example, talking a lot or wiping your forehead a few times (as she stated in the book) could be attributed to many other issues, and based on the specific wording she used, did not clearly represent the tics of Tourette syndrome. I do not know if Tourette's affects her life in any way, but the goal with this disorder, as all others, is to educate with accurate information.

“I’ve got seven days to come clean to my new dad. Seven days to tell the truth …”

Tiffany Sly’s life is about to change in a big way. She has just lost her mother to cancer and is about to be pulled away from the only life she has ever known. She is set to leave her grandma and move from her Chicago residence to live with her biological father in California, a father she just learned she had. That is a lot to process. Now throw this in, the day before she leaves she gets a knock on the front door and a strange man on her doorstep. This visitor claims to know her mother and tells her he thinks he may be her dad. This is enough information to make anyone freak out.

What I liked most about this book is how real and relatable it is. Dana Davis tackles real issues such as OCD, Anxiety and Autism with such elegant prose and grace. Tiffany Sly is a wonderful character who, despite her many challenges, manages to stay true to herself. She navigates her difficult situation and finds her place in a world she feels so completely foreign and alone in. This is an excellent, heartfelt story about friends, family and finding your true self along the way.

I read Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now in preparation for an interview with the author, Dana L. Davis. I found her writing style to be easily accessible and the story compelling. Below my interview with Dana:

Imagine you’re an actress who’s been in everything from 10 Things I Hate About You, Heroes, Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars. Now imagine adding author to your resume. Sounds a bit hectic, right? Well for Dana L. Davis, writing came as a natural progression in her career.

The author of Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now is passionate about changing the narrative facing people of color in film and TV.

“I was so tired of auditioning for stereotypical roles and shaking my head in confusion at the way some writers are writing black women that I decided if I really wanted change, I needed to BE the change I wished to see,” Dana told Cracking the Cover. “That ultimately guided me to start taking my writing to the next level.”

The next level was/is Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now. The young adult novel follows 16-year-old Tiffany Sly whose mother just passed away from cancer. After her mom’s death, Tiffany moves from Chicago to California to live with the biological dad she’s never known.

What Tiffany is about to learn is her father has four other daughters, rules that make your head swim and a strong devotion as a Jehovah’s Witness. The only thing that makes this new, super-strict home bearable is Marcus McKinney, a strange boy who lives across the street. Add to everything else, there’s another man who’s claiming to be Tiffany’s real dad, and he wants a paternity test to prove it.

Tiffany SlyDana describes Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now as a “coming of age story offering hope, love and laughter for all.” But there’s more to it than that. The book comes, Dana says, from her own personal experience with trauma.

“My daughter is on the spectrum of autism and I had to stop working to tend to her needs,” Dana said. “No one can understand the pain of dealing with a child with a disability … unless of course you’re dealing with just that. And I’m a single parent! The trauma of losing my career and everything I’d [worked]for along with the trauma of not knowing if I would be able to help her … it took a toll on me and I developed an anxiety disorder.

“I think if I had heard a message of ‘at some point life may break your heart … but you’ll be OK!’ when I was young, it would have served me so well. I wanted to tackle trauma with a young audience. Let them know that sometimes they will lose. But we need to redefine that word. It’s like getting fourth place at an Olympic event. You can call that losing if you want … but to me it’s winning big!”

Tiffany mirrors that anxiety disorder in Dana’s book. Anxiety disorders and autism are similar in how people can’t “see” them at first glance, Dana says. When you have autism and don’t appear to be “disabled” people expect different things of you.

“Anxiety is similar in that you don’t wear it,” Dana said “No one can tell. And yet if affects you in so many ways. And people can be so judgmental and unforgiving. I used to go to a park with a friend and would get tense and nervous when my daughter climbed ladders. Of course, imagining her plummeting to her death from a one-foot fall! And I do remember my friend’s eye rolls and annoyed mutterings of ‘She’s fine.’ It made me feel so alone and misunderstood.

“I wanted to bring light to anxiety in hopes to educate about it. And there was definitely a substantial amount of research that went into creating Tiffany’s personality, but as a sufferer of anxiety, I used my own experiences as well.”

Music is a part of Tiffany’s life that calms her, helps her feel grounded. Once again, Dana felt this was an important place to push against black stereotypes.
There isn’t a day that goes by where a Langston Hughes poem doesn’t go through my head. Whenever I read I, too, am America…I get chills. And yep. I just got teary thinking about it. —Dana L. Davis

“Not all black girls are the same, so we shouldn’t write them that way,” Dana said. “I wanted her to love a genre of music that people don’t necessarily associate with African-Americans. I thought about classical but that was too much like me since I’m a classically trained musician. I got my B.F.A in music from Loyola Marymount University. So, I chose rock ‘n roll! Thankfully, my dear friend, Travis Lee Stephenson helped me with my research. He is a talented guitarist and performs in a band around LA. He gets a lot of credit for Tiffany’s love of music!”

Dana hopes her writing will make an impact in the lives of young adults. “Young minds are so impressionable!” she said. “It saddens me to see celebrities with such a large platform and so many fans who are young. And all they say and do and tweet revolves around their hair or their clothes or their expensive purses. It’s almost like they don’t understand these young minds are forming and they have this amazing opportunity to contribute to the world. I am so passionate about connecting to people and making a difference. I always say if I can help one person … even one … then I’m so happy.”

Dana just started outlining a YA fantasy, and is currently working on edits for her second contemporary YA, The Voice In My Head, coming out next spring from HarlequinTEEN.

Following the death of her mother, Tiffany Sly is moving to California to live with the father she never knew. She's going from being an only child of a single mom in inner-city Chicago to a ready-made family and four new sisters in a wealthy Los Angeles suburb. Tiffany has to adjust to a completely new way of life while simultaneously grieving her mother and managing her anxiety and OCD. It's a lot to handle, to put it mildly.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book! At a glance it might seem like Tiffany's life circumstances have gotten 100% better, but in reality she has an awful lot to deal with. Her new home comes with a lot of stifling rules and religious commitments. Her new school is mostly white and the workload is intense. She's expected to play a sport, even though her passion is music. Even the weather isn't cooperating. Tiffany loves cool, rainy days, and hot, sunny southern California is not her cup of tea. Watching Tiffany navigate her new life had me commiserating and occasionally holding my breath. There's a large cast of characters, but everyone has a distinct voice and it's easy to keep track of everyone. All in all, a terrific debut, and I'll definitely keep an eye on Dana L. Davis and her future efforts.

This was such an interesting a page turning book. I was fully invested in Tiffany's life from the moment I started reading and I hardly wanted to put it down. I loved how real Tiffany felt and I felt very connected to her, especially in some of the descriptions of her anxiety. I really enjoyed this book and feel like it brings together a lot of complex issues in a great way.

Quite an inspirational family story. Tiffany Sly's life changes when her mom passes away and she has to move in with her dad who she has never met, in another state......whom she also then discovers might not actually be her real dad. Her new father is very religious and controlling. Tiffany is a very strong character in spite of everything she has to face--she has anxiety and OCD and is just trying to fit into her new life. The story take place over a period of seven days which I thought was interesting. It is an amazing story of acceptance, family & friends, religious beliefs, emotions and a little bit of suspense. Beautifully written--I loved it! Very touching, real story.

I'm always on the lookout for debut novels and with contemporary YA being my favourite genre, I knew I'd have to read Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now. The book definitely didn't disappoint and I can't wait to read more from Davis.

When Tiffany's mother passes away from cancer, she is sent to live in California with the father that she's never met or known about. The only problem is that the day before she was set to fly, another man appeared at her door claiming to be her real father. In seven days, she'll find out the results of the paternity test but for now, she has to adjust to her new living situation in California without anyone knowing about the test.

Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now definitely had an interesting premise and its execution was well done. The novel was really about family and moving on after grief. Tiffany was a very complex character and I think that Davis was able to write a teenage voice very well. I also liked that Tiffany struggled with anxiety and that it was definitely well explored. It's not often that YA novels see characters with therapists and medication for mental well-being and I think that's a very important thing to do.

The plot wasn't too predictable and I did enjoy the novel overall but sometimes Tiffany's humour was a bit of a miss for me or I found the novel start to drag on instead of flow naturally. Despite this, I still really enjoyed the novel and I really can't wait for Davis' next book.

Overall, Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now was a great debut. If you're on the lookout for new debut authors, you definitely need to add Dana L. Davis to your list.

Arc provided by NetGalley.

This book was all over the place, and not in a good way. It veered around a lot in tone and pacing and subject matter.

The strength of the book lies in the lead character, Tiffany Sly. After the death of her mother, she goes to live with the man she believes to be her father, while at the same time communicating with another man who ALSO believes he may be her father. She’s trapped and confused, still mourning the loss of her mother and bewildered by her new place of living and the sudden growth of her family. Her struggles and her voice, her anxiety and her character arc are well written and relatable. In the end, this book is about making peace with who you are and what happens in the world, and to always try and do the best you can by that. Surround yourself with people who know your true self and love you for it, not that want to change you. Sound good, right?

WRONG. This book also has a strong Cinderella vibe to it. I love a good story like that, where the character is stuck in these situations that they hate and where they finally break out and say how they really feel, and fight back. Tiffany isn’t afraid to do that. The problem is the side characters and the issues she faces. Her whole new family is Jehovah’s Witnesses, and her father tries to implement certain rules on her because of that, and she is not having it.

The book sets up the father as almost the villain of the story, and I’m supposed to believe he slowly changes throughout the book but I really didn’t see it; he just kind of veered back and forth between emotions and was also kind of a nasty person fairly often. Also, as a doctor, I can’t believe he would deny his daughter medicine for her anxiety, or there’s another instance where he craps on I guess psychiatrists? He’s basically like “I’m not filling my children with that garbage” like YOU ARE A DOCTOR YOU KNOW BETTER” if your personal beliefs get in the way please don’t be a doctor. The mother character I preferred, she has a more natural development but still her and almost all the other characters were one-dimensional.

This book is also really spiritual, which I was not expecting, with a lot of talk of God, both Christian and Jehovah. It was done fine I guess, it’s just not generally a topic I pursue in reading. Tiffany also has a friend she makes who I did NOT understand at all???? Like he was so weird the entire time and there are parts at the end where I was like ?????? WHAT ARE YOU. ARE YOU JEEBUS.

Only, this would have been a one star for me except a) I still finished it and b) I just really liked Tiffany’s voice. She’s a flawed but interesting person, she’s a nerd who cares about people, she’s not afraid to speak her mind, she struggles with anxiety and with life. I just wish someone had taken that character and saved her from this book and put her in a better one

Tiffany Sly is a true to life teenage girl, riding an emotional roller coaster. It was fun to take the ride with her. This is a book sure to be enjoyed by teenagers and adults.

This had some elements I really loved, but it had some elements I really hated too. First of all, I was super into Tiffany herself. Great character, really interesting. And I wished there were more of her! And more of her and London interacting. And more of HER. Just more. She felt half-baked because it didn't go into depth enough; the author just tried to pack too much in, so it left things undone.

I also really loved the neighbors, but I HATED HATED HATED all the philosophical energy/God stuff. That just wasn't for me. It didn't speak to me, it didn't intrigue me, and I simply disliked that whole subplot with Marcus. Meditation energy god blah blah blah. That seriously detracted from what was the true story here: Tiffany figuring out if she belongs in her new world.

And then, the paternity subplot. I mean, did we need it? I don't really think so. Or maybe we did, if you get rid of the bad sister or weird neighbor or autistic sister or one of the million other things going on. Just....take it down some. Phew.

Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for the ARC.