When I was a kid growing up on Long Island in the late ’70s, certain smarty-pants types were happy to share their knowledge of Asia. If you told them you were Chinese you might get the tried-and-true “Ching-chong!” If you were Japanese, maybe you’d get an “aah-so!” But when I explained that I was Korean, I would get a pause, then a confused look. One boy even asked me, “What’s that?” See, that’s how invisible we were. Nobody had bothered to come up with a good racial slur!

Fast-forward to 2019 — with its bulgogi tacos, K-pop, snail slime masks and Sandra Oh memes — and Koreans are the new purveyors of cool. Korean-Americans are making a mark on American culture, and the Y.A. universe is no exception. Jenny Han’s trio of novels about the half-Korean teenager Lara Jean Song Covey (“To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” et al.) has reached near-canonical status among teenage girls. And now three new novels by Korean-American authors are spreading the news that K.A. teenagers have more on their minds than getting into Ivy League schools. (Although, let’s be honest, SAT anxiety is usually lurking there somewhere.)

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Maurene Goo (“The Way You Make Me Feel”) has built a following with her breezy, pop-culture-savvy romantic comedies, all featuring Korean-American teenage girls as her protagonists. Her fourth novel, SOMEWHERE ONLY WE KNOW (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 336 pp., $17.99; ages 14 to 18), is her most charming to date, a modern retelling of “Roman Holiday.” Instead of Audrey Hepburn’s princess on the lam in Rome, we have Lucky, a 17-year-old K-pop star playing hooky in Hong Kong. The Gregory Peck character, meanwhile, is Jack, a good-looking, conflicted 18-year-old whose traditional Korean-American parents want him to be a banker, not a photographer.