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Category: 3 Stars

Hot Take: YA Is Good (feat. sisters, boats, Tarot cards, posh schools)

After a fallow period of YA reading, I’ve been absolutely tearing through new YA books this October. Hot take, YA is really good right now! Sometimes when I think about my own youth and the, like, three bookshelves worth of YA books my library had back then, and half of them were Lurlene McDaniel, and that was a good library system, I just feel very very happy that the youth of today have such an amazing profusion of great books. At least something is going right for the youths! The rest of the world is chaos and disaster but they…

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Review: The Angel of the Crows, Katherine Addison

tl;dr I liked a lot of things about The Angel of the Crows but a few other things, most notably how the book talks about asexuality, caused me to inhale sharply through my teeth and pinch the bridge of my nose for ten hours in a row So the matter as it stands is that I have never enjoyed a piece of Sherlock Holmes media, with the exception of Elementary, which I watched for two seasons. I would have watched a lot more of it if Natalie Dormer had been the co-lead with Lucy Liu. As a gesture of intellectual…

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Review: Upright Women Wanted, Sarah Gailey

Note: Upright Women Wanted is published by Tor, an imprint of Macmillan. Macmillan has established a policy of embargoing its ebooks to libraries. It’s a policy that hurts authors, libraries, and readers, and the American Library Association is sponsoring an initiative to promote fair library ebook policies. You can support that initiative here! A girl named Esther, fleeing the town that hanged her girlfriend for possession of illegal books, stows away in the wagon of a visiting group of Librarians. In part she’s drawn to their work — distributing Approved Materials for reading so people all around this postapocalyptic version…

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Police Stops, Brises, and Other Rites of Passage: A Romance Round-Up

Did I have the purest of intentions to read spooky books in honor of spooky season? YOU BETCHA. Did I end up just reading a shit-ton of romance novels in the month of October instead? INDEED I DID. I can always read spooky stuff in November, right? Here are the romances I’ve been putting in my brain, friends. How to Catch a Wicked Viscount, Amy Rose Bennett After an indiscretion at school that leaves Sophie and her three best friends with a reputation for scandal, she never expects to be accepted back into polite society. But when Charlotte discovers Sophie…

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Review: Pet, Akwaeke Emezi

Hands up everyone who read Freshwater and thought “When will Emezi grace us with a YA novel? That is clearly their metier.” Because I freely admit that I was not among your number. Freshwater was one of my best reads of 2018 — the writing was brutal and gorgeous, and I felt elated to be reading the debut of an author of Emezi’s talent, and to know that they had a whole writing career ahead of them and I would get to read all those books. But still, when I saw the announcement that Emezi would be releasing a YA…

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Review: When the Ground Is Hard, Malla Nunn

Adele Joubert is a good girl. Her white father pays her school fees at Keziah Christian Academy, and Adele is permitted in the ranks of the wealthiest girls at the school — until one year she isn’t. Suddenly she has lost her place among the popular clique, and she has to share a room with ferocious Lottie Diamond, who is unequivocally at the bottom of the school’s pecking order. But in living with Lottie, Adele slowly begins to realize the ways that power and injustice function in her world — and the ways she can fight it. I want to…

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YA Round-Up

It’s June and I have been reading some YA and I will be so honest with you: A lot of it has let me down a little bit. I’m going to start with the one that I thought unequivocally was terrific, and then I’ll work forward and we will get through this together. Genesis Begins Again was an impulse grab at the library, and I’m so glad I picked it up. It’s a YA book that feels written for young teenagers, and specifically for black girls. Debut author Alicia D. Williams is dealing with difficult topics, and she never talks down…

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Review: Love to Everyone, Hilary McKay

Despite the thing I am going to complain about later on, Hilary McKay is the contemporary children’s author I most wish had been writing when I was a little girl. When I’m sad, the books most likely to cheer me up are her Casson series (the first one is Saffy’s Angel and yes, you should read it immediately). Her latest, Love to Everyone, is an offshoot of her Binny series (which, yes, you should read immediately), the story of three children growing up in Edwardian England and then World War I. (Love to Everyone is called The Skylarks’ War in…

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Review: 84K, Claire North

I’ve been trying to recapture the magic of Claire North’s second novel, Touch, for three books now. Harry August was like Diet Touch, The Sudden Appearance of Hope was a bit boring, and The End of the Day dragged so much I didn’t finish it. “Ah well,” I said to myself, “so Claire North is a one-hit wonder for me. SO BE IT.” And then just when I thought I’d gotten out, she lured me back in with 84K, a dystopian novel in experimental-but-not-too prose about a man who leaves his comfortable life behind in favor of burning down the…

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May Romance Round-Up

Clear your schedules, I am going to talk about a book so entirely in my wheelhouse that it and my wheelhouse are basically coterminous. (That’s an exaggeration but not really.) I refer to KJ Charles’s latest book, The Henchmen of Zenda. Before I get into The Henchmen of Zenda, I need to confess that I have this weird soft spot for old-time British adventure novels. There’s no defense I can or should make about this. These are horribly sexist and racist books that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. I like the swashbuckling. So when I heard that one of my…

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