Becca
A sweet little fantasy picture book about how nothing will ever feel good enough if we don't feel like we are good enough, as is. Good for perfectionistic kids (and adults) who grow frustrated when they don't immediately excel at something.
Colorful and expressive illustrations full of frogs. Nothin wrong with that. It reminded me a bit of Owl House, [b:Princess Princess Ever After|30025791|Princess Princess Ever After|Kay O'Neill|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1461784181l/30025791.SY75.jpg|50430951], or theTea Dragon series.
I wanted to read this ahead of an upcoming author visit. It is a pretty book about how bold and assertive girls are often called divas, but that label can wrongly indicate high maintenance or unkindness. Instead, girls should own and never dull their “sweet fire,” confident that their fierce passion is a force for good, not the other way around.
It's an interesting book, but I wondered about reclaiming the term “diva” itself, instead of insinuating that the descriptor may fit others, and has an inevitably derogatory connotation. I'm also extra sensitive to the idea that girls and women are uniquely tasked with nurturing potential in others, instead of themselves. That is definitely a me thing.
Delightfully interactive, a perfect read-aloud book. I thought the illustrations were adorable. Different parts of the book reminded me of Lilo & Stitch, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, and the pink blob from Disney's Treasure Planet. All good things.
One of my favorite books of the year, full of flawed and compelling characters making their best out of limited and at times terrifying circumstances. Read beautifully on audio by Elle Fanning.
Margo is a young single mother whose talents and interests have always been confined by her economic background. The book is about her desperately trying to get a handle on life with a baby, surrounded by eclectic undergraduate roommates, a professional wrestler father, and a mother whose new relationship teeters atop stacks and stacks of lies.
She stumbles into OnlyFans (I just googled whether that was one or two words on a work computer without thinking), and sex work becomes a uniquely flexible and lucrative avenue for her to provide for her family. Still, people in her life judge her harshly for viewing this as her best option, questioning her judgment and fitness as a mother.
The book is really a story about how money (or lack thereof) ties directly into the consequences for your actions. If you have exorbitant wealth, nothing is illegal — you can mess up, slack off, be callous and cruel and selfish, and face minimal if not zero repercussions.
But if you lack financial and social supports, you can make one mistake, have one bad day, and that's it. Sometimes something even happens adjacent to you, in your general vicinity, and that's enough. You are condemned, cooked. This is definitive, permanent proof that you are undeserving, unworthy, depraved, reckless.
Margo's greatest challenge (and this is a competitive category), is to be brave enough to believe she deserves love, happiness, and success, in a world eager to punish her for who they believe she is. She is my hero and I love her. Really great book. Really great writing. Really great book.
For fans of [b:Fierce Femmes|32279708|Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars|Kai Cheng Thom|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1480517872l/32279708.SY75.jpg|52903547], [b:Interior Chinatown|44436221|Interior Chinatown|Charles Yu|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1639073843l/44436221.SX50.jpg|69005176], [b:Belly Up|35128563|Belly Up|Eva Darrows|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1527451038l/35128563.SY75.jpg|56448240], Juno, and [b:My Year of Rest and Relaxation|44279110|My Year of Rest and Relaxation|Ottessa Moshfegh|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1597676656l/44279110.SY75.jpg|55508660].
A childhood favorite I revisited for the first time in decades. The pictures are hilarious and the colored pencil style is charming. The word choices are descriptive. Stellaluna is appropriately enthusiastic about mangoes, which are probably the best food that exists. The story contains themes of the issues with and pressures of assimilation, rediscovering your roots, and forging strong, genuine bonds despite and across huge differences.
Is it too late to become a volcanologist?
A great primer on volcanoes for young readers that taught adult me more than I care to admit. How volcanoes form islands but can also cause tsunamis, the Ring of Fire around the Pacific tectonic plate, how Earth's underwater volcanoes nurture life deep in the ocean where it's usually cold and dark, well beyond sunlight. How volcanoes on other planets can erupt with ice instead of lava. Love the “megaphones of magma” turn of phrase.
The illustrations are stunning and full of movement. I like how the text moves to the side to let them shine. Very good book. Five stars despite the ominous “WHAT IS COMING” messaging peppered throughout the book jacket.
I had read excerpts of The New Jim Crow before, but this was my first time reading the book in full.
The New Jim Crow is a seminal text. If you have people in your life (including yourself) struggling to understand racism as structural, this is a good place to start. Prepare to be bombarded with facts that will make you incoherently angry.
Alexander compels the reader to understand not just how certain cultural assumptions result in systemic institutional violence, but also that those assumptions are anomalous. Society doesn't have to function the way ours does now, and in fact, we are the cruel outliers.
If you're looking for in-depth research about modern iterations of white supremacy in the United States, read this book.
A lovely, bright picture book about finding predictability and comfort in the minutiae of our vast, chaotic world. The pictures are stunning and I liked the font.
This would have spoken to my anxious kid heart, as someone who can still get overwhelmed by the big picture and needs to refocus on immediate surroundings or details to calm my nervous system. There is more info about patterns and activity ideas in the back of the book. I was most pleasantly surprised by the text linking the concept of patterns to the consistent love all children should expect and deserve to receive.
What a truly wild life Adolphe Sax had. Who knows if the saxophone would have been invented if his father had not left him be? But also, maybe this ten-year-old boy would have been poisoned fewer than three times. Perhaps even zero times.
Even without the assorted tribulations of Adolphe's life, this was a fascinating book about how strong negative reactions to change are, and also how quickly those attitudes can change. Culture and demand are slippery things, and this is a really well-done tribute to an instrument and its inventor, with endpapers featuring dozens of famous saxophonists to boot. As 1) an adult 2) who does not think or care about saxophones at all, I was enamored.
A coworker loved this and just yesterday I cackled at this image, so I thought this picture book about perfectionism might be good to page through.
And what an absolute delight. Mira captures the struggles of feeling preemptively embarrassed and reluctant about not being naturally gifted at everything. She learns about practicing on your own, and how sometimes the most judgmental audience of you is you, but that can be challenged when we are brave enough to still be vulnerable. She also comes to understand you don't have to excel at something to enjoy doing it, or for it to be worth your time.
I loved the color scheme, motif, how Mira and the other kids are drawn, and the careful but simple underlying message. So sweet, I want to buy it for all my friends' kids.
My father asked, “Won't they fly away?”Sido shook his head slowly, the key swaying at his side. “This is their home.”
I'm a little ashamed to admit that this is the third or fourth book about Palestinian history I have picked up in recent months, but the first I've finished. But not that ashamed, because this was quite good. Imagine living somewhere where you can pull fresh baked, still warm bread up a rope directly into your kitchen. Paradise.I think this is an accessible, not too scary, but also not too romanticized, primer for little ones. It reminds me of [b:Love in the Library|57699005|Love in the Library|Maggie Tokuda-Hall|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1618184466l/57699005._SX50_.jpg|90381116], and maybe also [b:Watercress|54502238|Watercress|Andrea Wang|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1646343526l/54502238._SX50_.jpg|85066060] and [b:A Different Pond|34137106|A Different Pond (Fiction Picture Books)|Bao Phi|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1489605385l/34137106._SX50_.jpg|55174398].
A funny existential book with scarce words that somehow covers a lot: how experience limits knowledge, how little minds come up with big questions, the bravery and determination it takes to face the unknown, and chicks pipping. Very cute illustrations, too. I enjoyed this far more than I thought I would, and I think kids would too.
Who needs [b:The Yellow Wallpaper 99300 The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories Charlotte Perkins Gilman https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327909237l/99300.SY75.jpg 1467808] when you have The Woman in Me?I hate how many celebrity memoirs I've read this year despite proclaiming I am not a celebrity memoir person. But I cannot get around the fact that this was so, so good. You know what is the opposite of so, so good? The Spears family. And also the paparazzi. And also Justin Timberlake. And also Kevin Federline. And also Ryan Seacrest. I've spoiled specifics below, but I would go back to college to teach a gender studies course with this as the text. Major themes include bodily autonomy, financial independence, privacy, and carceral approaches to mental illness.Britney Spears talks about the tumultuous environment of her childhood home, with a simultaneously overbearing yet absent alcoholic father. She talks about generations of abuse, including sending (multiple) women separated from their children away to psychiatric institutions that hand out lithium like free candy.Entertainment media zeroed in on Britney's virginity, yet called her a slut for the way she dressed. People had contempt for Britney when she was a skinny young teenager, saying she wasn't a good role model. It's almost like people were angry at themselves for finding Britney so desirable. They were agitated to their core that she was so successfully hot to them.Once she became pregnant for the first time, the narrative shifted to cast her as slovenly, unstable, unfit, and irresponsible. Once her body became less desirable to the masses, people villainized what those changes to her body meant: motherhood. When she was still a child herself, she was a threat to everyone else's kids. When she became pregnant, she was a threat to her own kids.Either way, Britney says it best: “People seemed to experience my body as public property.”She underwent an unsafe and painful abortion she did not want, and in return the man whose baby she was ready to have lied to the world about her being unfaithful to him. It was her fault when she got cheated on, and it was her fault when he lied about her cheating on him. Man after man rides her coattails to success only to feel threatened by what they were capitalizing off of the whole time.All of this is easier to talk about than the conservatorship because holy shit the conservatorship. Suddenly I cannot talk about this anymore it is too grim. Very good book though.Well-written and devastating. Michelle Williams' narration is excellent. For fans of (I realize this is a weird mix) [b:I'm Glad My Mom Died 59364173 I'm Glad My Mom Died Jennette McCurdy https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1649286799l/59364173.SY75.jpg 93537110], [b:Betty 48564330 Betty Tiffany McDaniel https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1572992238l/48564330.SX50.jpg 73891626], or [a:Taylor Jenkins Reid 6572605 Taylor Jenkins Reid https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1645653842p2/6572605.jpg].
So many friends loved this that I was a little worried it wouldn't live up to the hype. But it sure was a cozy perfect book.
Viv is an orc barbarian whose life was “supposed” to be shorty and bloody. But she decides she actually will not be doing that. She turns her back on her former life and opens up a coffee shop. And that's it. She wants to run a coffee shop. The book is perfect.
I really love how Baldree glorifies quitting. I am exuberantly passionate about quitting. Don't get me wrong; I think commitment and follow-through are admirable. But I reject the notion that quitting is always the weaker option. In Viv's case, I think it took more work and courage to leave than to stay.
Quitting is a standout for me, but there are other compelling themes that stick out:
• Viv leaves empty space in conversations. She makes herself wait and really listen.
• Letting people help you and carry you, even when you feel like you are a burden and undeserving.
• Subtly yet effectively, Baldree shows that being open-minded about different cultures can better our lives and lead to innovation and progress of society as a whole.
• The depiction of what work can be. Day-to-day drudgery can feel mindful, peaceful, even romantic. Hands-on, physical labor can feel gratifying. And most of all, having a good boss improves your life in all areas. Viv never hesitates to back up Tandri when she's being harassed, springs for Thimble's dream kitchen setup, and defers to how Cal would solve problems. Not only does she trust everyone to excel in their respective niches, she also redistributes wealth and power in the end. This is the future liberals want.
Alright that's enough of this sappy review. Suffice it to say, I thought it was swell. It made me more interested in consuming both the fantasy genre and cinnamon rolls than I ever have been before. Baldree reads the audiobook and his narration is perfect.
I'd recommend this to fans of a wide slew of things, including [b:The Secret Lives of Church Ladies|51582376|The Secret Lives of Church Ladies|Deesha Philyaw|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1596947858l/51582376.SY75.jpg|76186482], Murderbot Diaries, [b:The House in the Cerulean Sea|45047384|The House in the Cerulean Sea|T.J. Klune|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1569514209l/45047384.SY75.jpg|62945242], [b:Mooncakes|44774415|Mooncakes|Suzanne Walker|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1565183719l/44774415.SY75.jpg|57982519], [b:Bloom|39073387|Bloom|Kevin Panetta|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1561136420l/39073387.SX50.jpg|49462918], the Nevermoor series, Dimension 20, and We Bare Bears.
I like that the flaps you lift are made of felt for durability and softness, I like how delighted little kids are by their own object permanence, I like the inclusion of a mirror. P swell p swell indeed.
I like that the flaps are large and easy for little hands to lift, the rhyming text, and the dead-eyed stares of the fish. The pop-up effects are cute, too.
The moving pop-ups are cool, but I did not like how the see animals looked soft, but the book is not touch-and-feel. It's no Pop-Up Peekaboo Ocean, as I am sure everyone agrees.
DNF @ 67%
I couldn't do it anymore, there are dozens of unimportant characters, it's all telling instead of showing, constant puns and descriptions of the same food or another local business, life is simply too short to finish this one.
A squeaky clean, carefully non-partisan overview of the American electoral process. Teaches kids about the importance of being an engaged citizen and turning out to vote, even when it feels like your individual ballot is insignificant.
Cute cover and tabs, but I did not love this. More wordy than I thought, weird highlights on the police and also the actual real life Priddy Books publisher, multiple burglars and lost pets. There are animals scattered everywhere, so sometimes I expected a past page or flap to contain the missing pet, but there was no connection made.
ETA: I am back with two more gripes. The flaps are hard to lift, and there is no ending page.
Colorful and interactive. I really liked the opposites page. I also like that the images are photos instead of illustrations.
Love the illustrations. Love the cat saying goodbye to its prized possessions which were largely spiral toys shoved under furniture. Love the cat returning only to wreak new, lesser forms of havoc. Cats are menaces and when mine dies I will also die.
Perfectly fine. Of course it cannot improve on the original, but I can see it being a festive touch and the metallic and glittery presents and tree topper were very eye-catching.
Has everything going for it [b:Where's the Penguin?|38398955|Where's the Penguin?|Ingela P. Arrhenius|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1522541148l/38398955.SX50.jpg|60055649] does, but the felt shapes blend more into the environment, and none are white (which can make the shape behind show through a bit).
My only (teeny tiny) hang-up is the use of the word hare instead of rabbit or bunny, but I guess kids are being read this rather than picking it up on their own, so if a parent prefers a more common term in the US, they can say something different instead.
Excellent. I preferred the focus on one animal to the Ocean and Under the Sea titles from this series. The book walks little ones through the lifecycle of frogs. The frog faces are very good and the pop-ups are dynamic.