Anna Tschetter
It took me a while to read this, not because it's not good because it's actually great, but because I was on vacation and felt like doing nothing. Not even reading! Weird!
Anyway, this is a great urban fantasy/cosmic horror with monsters and shifters and secret societies. If that's your jam, check this out!
I enjoyed this! I wanted to know more about Shani/Lynn/Kendra's secret network but I thought this was a sharp debut.
Breathtaking art and a cute story!! I wish sprites would come visit my house. I'd love to see some veggies sprites too. I be they'd be so cute!
I loved this! I was so pleased to see a genre book in the Printz lineup and this totally deserves it.
A mix of memoir and science, I think this really works. It was both so emotional and informative. I had heard a little bit about Chagas - thanks to the great podcast This Podcast Will Kill you! - but didn't know the full breadth and depth of the issue.
I think how Hernandez brings in the concepts of the “epi-divide” and how so much of healthcare in the US and the world is about your wealth and privilege, is SO important.
This was just gorgeous! A beautiful look into how relationships change and shift just like the people in them.
A sweet, funny, romance for teens who have good reasons to think love is stupid.
I do think it was crappy for Evie's mom to make her keep the secret about the affair from her sister and I think she should not have done that!!
This was great! A twisty thriller for those looking for new take on the Gossip Girl/Pretty Little Liars genre. It's also WAY better written than PLL!
This was fascinating and made me really grateful for the work of disabled activists. This is a perfect introduction to activism generally, and the history of the ADA for tweens and teens.
This was a great memoir reconstructed from childhood diaries for Raina fans! 9/11 hovers in the future of the first pages and it's fascinating to revisit it from the eyes of someone only a few years younger than me.
At first I struggled because some of the writing was very debut-novelly but then I got used to it! Props to the author for a great slow burn and finally giving us smooches in a giant robot! I'm intrigued to see where the second half of the story goes.
Like Jarrett's experiences I expected this to be dark but it ended up being sweet and life affirming. The ONLY reason I didn't cry was that I read it while being tattooed and I didn't want my artist to think they were making me cry.
This is the latest book I'm going to shout at people to read. It was so fascinating and some of the concepts, like “thought-terminating cliches” are going to stick with me forever.
Pick this up if you like learning about why and how cult leaders do their culty things but also if you are weirded out by things like MLMs, crossfit, and social media influencers.
I enjoyed parts of this but honestly, her parents' occupations as spies in Central American in the 90s put a damper on the enjoyment. That's fine! It just means it's not totally for me. But in general, I did appreciate her honesty about her experiences of feeling adrift and wishing for a “home.”
This was INCREDIBLE. I think Vo should rewrite all the classics! The writing is beautiful and dangerous like the demoniac liquor in the story. And Jordan - who was always intriguing - gets a real character and story. So, so good.
I liked but didn't love this. I'm putting it on my Raina Telgemeier readalike list because I think it will appeal to those readers even if they find it a little lacking in depth.
Some of the transitions felt a little rushed or unclear to me. Maybe a blank page or some sort of notation to show the passage of time would have been helpful. I also felt like I kept confusing some of the characters because they looked really similar. And some I just missed altogether! (Who is Beth? Her mom's girlfriend/wife? A babysitter? Unclear.)
Overall, I think older elementary and younger middle school kids will enjoy this.
Doug bought this for me as a surprise and it was such a sweet and darkly funny imagining of what goes on in a cat's mind. Between the boyfriends who are her toys, the dark portal of the door, and getting high on catnip Penny stumbles from ennui to existential crisis. Honestly, very relatable!
Ok, I really didn't think that I would love this as much as ASBW but I did. I loved that Naema got the chance to tell her side of the story and Morrow does such a great job of weaving in commentary about model minorities, online radicalization, terrorism, and who gets to tell their own stories. I shouldn't have doubted!!
I liked but didn't love this interpretation of The Thin Man in space. I think that my main issues with it is that you don't feel much real danger or tension for Shal and Tesla because, as happens in the book many many times, Tesla is able to get out of sticky situations by being rich. That's fine but it made everything a little less interesting after the second, third, fourth time.
I did love her lawyer, Gimlet, and the cocktail recipes, though!
I've decided the perfect beach reads are novellas because you can read them in one afternoon! This particular novella maybe isn't a great beach read. only because it's about climate change and the oceans rising . . . But that fits with my brand of not knowing what a “beach read” is.
Anyway, this was simultaneously a real warning about climate change and a hopeful look at the future.
There was a lot that I liked about this book. I appreciated the non-traditional true-crime narrative: happens when a person is found not mentally responsible for their crimes, life in a criminal hospital, and Brian's attempts to be released. I think it's really important for people who consume true crime to also learn about what happens to perpetrators. Obviously, Brian's crime of murdering his parents is horrific but so were some of the conditions in the mental hospital. It's a complicated situation.
What really bothered me about the book is at the very end the author is talking about another inmate at the hospital who is trans and she consistently deadnames her the entire time. When she does use her name the tone is really dismissive and rude about how she “lives as a woman.” She also seems surprised about how this transwoman seemed attracted to other women. Like, I dunno, have you not heard of lesbians/bi people?!
I really enjoyed the rest of the book and found it fascinating but this section at the end really soured it for me.
A fun murder mystery set on a creepy space station. If you like cute AIs - like ART from Murderbot - and the light corporate dystopia of the Expanse series this is for you!
This was super fun! I LOVE a “one last job” type of story and this fits the bill. I also really appreciated how the book tackled things like love and abuse and identity.
This absolutely deserves all the hype and buzz that it's received. It's beautifully written and handles really hard topics with sensitivity and honesty. It's funny that I finished this on Father's Day, a day I try to ignore since Ford has such a complicated yet loving relationship with her father, and I have a complicated and mostly nonexistent relationship with my dad. It gave me a lot to think about to have a woman who spent most of her life away from her father who did a terrible crime but still able to love him.