Name: Frankly in Love
Author: David Yoon
ISBN: 9781984812223

<h2>Overview</h2> <p>David Yoon's debut novel follows Frank Li, a Southern California teenager who answers to an American name at school and a Korean name, Sung-Min, that almost no one uses—least of all his own parents. Frank has grown up fluent in the rhythms of American adolescence but only loosely connected to the language and expectations of his family's heritage, a gap that becomes impossible to ignore once he falls for Brit Means.</p> <p>Brit is smart, funny, and exactly the kind of partner Frank didn't know he was looking for. She is also not Korean, which puts her outside the narrow set of partners his parents have quietly assumed he'll choose from. Rather than confront them directly, Frank enlists Joy Song, a family friend facing the same unspoken rule with a boyfriend of her own, and the two strike a bargain: pose as a couple for their parents' benefit while secretly dating the people they actually want to be with.</p> <p>The arrangement works until it doesn't. As Frank's double life grows harder to maintain and an unexpected crisis forces his family's carefully managed world to crack open, he's pushed to examine not just what he owes his parents, but what he actually understands about love, loyalty, and his own sense of self.</p> <h2>A Coming-of-Age Story About Identity Between Worlds</h2> <p>Beneath its romantic-comedy setup, "Frankly in Love" is preoccupied with the quieter friction of growing up between cultures: the small daily negotiations of a child translating for immigrant parents, the unspoken hierarchies within an immigrant community, and the particular loneliness of feeling like an outsider to both the culture you were born into and the one your family carries with it. Yoon, writing his first novel after a career as a graphic designer, uses Frank's voice—wry, self-aware, occasionally self-deluding—to let these tensions surface through humor rather than lecture.</p> <p>The novel also sits inside a broader conversation about how YA fiction handles interracial dating, model-minority expectations, and the pressure many second-generation teens describe feeling to perform a version of themselves palatable to both their family and their peers. Frank and Joy's scheme is played for comedy, but it's also a structural illustration of how prejudice—whether it's racism from outside the community or bias within it—shapes choices that ought to be purely personal. Critics have noted that the book resists easy resolution, declining to let any character, including Frank himself, entirely off the hook for the assumptions they carry.</p> <h2>Why Frankly in Love Has Been Challenged</h2> <p>Much of the scrutiny directed at the novel centers on its frank treatment of teenage romance, including scenes depicting physical intimacy between Frank and his girlfriend as their relationship develops. Objectors have pointed to this content as inappropriate for the younger end of the young-adult readership, arguing that the sexual material goes further than is necessary to tell the story.</p> <p>A second line of objection concerns the book's unvarnished look at race and interracial relationships: some challengers have taken issue with the novel's portrayal of tension around dating outside one's ethnic community, reading its candor about prejudice—both the racism Frank's family has faced and biases within their own community—as content better left unaddressed in a school setting. Combined, these concerns have made the novel a recurring target in disputes over which depictions of teen relationships and racial honesty belong on library shelves, with challenges recorded in 3 states and 7 districts tracked in this catalog.</p>

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Banned in Schools

Banned or challenged in 3 states across 7 school districts.

Frankly in Love

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Banned in Schools

Florida 3 districts

Iowa 3 districts

Tennessee 1 district