Audiobook: Let it Glow

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by Marissa Meyer and Joanne Levy
Read by Gabi Epstein & Rebecca Soler
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: There is the relative safety issue of the girls switching places that some parents might have a problem with. Also, one of the grandparents in the story has a fall and ends up in the hospital. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

Aviva Davis wants to have the perfect Hanukkah, something which her not-very-observant Jewish family doesn’t seem to do. She wants everything perfect from the menorah to the latkes. And while she wants to participate in the pageant her grandmother’s retirement center is putting on, she’s not sure she’s quite qualified to be the Jewish representation. Holly Martin is just at the retirement home because her mom is trying to convince Holly’s grandpa that he needs more help than they are able to give him at home. Holly has no intention of being a part of the pageant, but then she stumbles on Aviva, who is a carbon copy of Holly. They’re both adopted, they both have the same birthday, they both look alike… is it possible they are twins?

From there, the plot spins out in a very Parent Trap-like direction: Aviva and Holly trade homes to experience what the other holiday is like (Holly celebrates Christmas), while trying to figure out if their parents knew about being twins and just didn’t tell them. It’s a lot about blood family versus adopted family,

This was a very sweet holiday story, made better by the narrators, who were just amazing. I liked how they brought both Holly’s and Aviva’s personalities to life, how they made all the improbabilities of the whole situation make perfect sense. It was charming and adorable, and I enjoyed every minute of the audiobook.

Audiobook: Bone of the Bone

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by Sarah Smarsh
Read by the author
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen on Libro.fm
Content: There is talk of sexual assault and swearing, including a few f-bombs. It’s in the Kansas section (I think? It’s kind of everywhere right now.) of the bookstore.

This book is a series of essays Smarsh wrote for other publications, spanning from 2013-2024. They hit upon all her usual subjects: class divide, political issues (especially ones here in Kansas – both Brownback and the 2017 special election in Wichita made an appearance), and the rural-urban divide all made an appearance.

And that, in the end, was my problem with the book. At the beginning, I thought it was smart and relevant and interesting… but as the essays went on, I realized that Smarsh really only has one thing to say: rural people are not a monolith and they deserve respect and political attention. Which is a good thing, to be sure. But, a whole book where each new essay is a re-hashing of something she said in the previous essay gets tedious. On the one hand, I’d rather people be reading this than Hillbilly Elegy; on the other hand, I’d rather they be reading Poverty by America than this. And honestly, if you want to read a Smarsh book, read Heartland.

I did bail on this one after about listening to 3/4 of it. Smarsh is a fine narrator of her own work, I just got tired of the same thing over and over. Maybe, if she decides to write a work of long-form journalism, I’ll read that. This one wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t absolutely enamored with it, either.

The Bletchley Riddle

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by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin
First sentence: “First things first: a riddle.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy pilfered from the ARC shelves at work.
Content: There are some intense moments, and talk of a small crush. It’s also a bit on the longer side for middle grade books. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore, but is probably for the older end of the age range.

Lizzie Novis is supposed to get on a boat to America to be with her grandmother because London is evacuating in preparation for Hitler’s invasion. Except she believes her mother is not dead and wants to look for her, so she evades getting on the boat and heads to Bletchely Park (or rather, the address she has for her brother which turns out to be Bletchley Park) to be with her brother Jakob, who has been working at the top-secret code-breaking facility.

Once there, Lizzie has the unwelcome job of trying to convince Jakob of her belief that their mother is still alive, and part of that is finding proof. All the while, Jakob is part of the team that is trying to figure out the codes for the Enigma machine so they can break the coded transmissions they’re getting from Germany. And Hitler’s army is on the march, coming closer to Great Britain. It’s all a lot to handle.

I have been selling this book for months solely on the basis of the authors’ names. Seriously: any book written by Sepetys and Sheinkin HAS to be good, right? And, dear reader, it was. Of course it was. They just have a way of writing historical fiction and history that makes it seem exciting, that brings it to life. And this book – with spitfire Lizzie and anxious, concerned Jakob, plus the rest of the cast of kids and code breakers – did exactly that. It was fun, intense, often funny, and a page-turner. It didn’t exceed my expectations, which were admittedly high, but it did absolutely meet them.

And you can’t ask for more than that.

Monthly Round-Up: November 2024

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It’s the end of another month – almost another year – and I’m finding it hard to fathom where this year has gone. Crazy to think that we’re almost a quarter of the way through the 21st century! (Oh, wow, that was a lot to fathom there.)

My favorite this month was the last one I read:

The Hedgewitch of Foxhall

It was close though between that and The Listeners. Just read them both. As for the rest:

Young Adult:

Twenty-four Seconds From Now (audiobook)
Heist Royale (audiobook)

Adult:

Sourcery
Lost and Lassoed (audiobook)
The Listeners
The Teller of Small Fortunes

Middle Grade:

The Wildcat Behind Glass

Graphic Novels:

Speak Up, Santiago
Sword of the Champion
Dear Dad

What was your favorite this month?

The Hedgewitch of Foxhall

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by Anna Bright
First sentence: “I was seven years old when I met wild magic.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There is some violence, including talk of violence done to women. And there is a slight romance. It’s in the Teen (grades 9+) section of the bookstore.

Ffion is a hedgewitch in a remote village in Wales; she lives off the earth and people’s goodness, because she shuns the ways of the Foxhall coven, which she thinks has gotten too big and powerful, and neglects the needs of the poor and downtrodden. And when her familiar, Cadno the fox, gets caught in one of the Foxhall’s sacrifices for a spell, Ffion is livid. Livid enough to team up with Prince Tal, who arrived at the coven asking for their help to do his father’s bidding – destroy the wall that they believe is hindering Welsh magic. Tal has his own reasons to be there: he and his half-brother Dafydd, are in a competition to win the throne after their father, the king, is foretold his death by his court magician. Whoever can bring magic back will be the next king.

It’s obviously not quite as simple as all that, but that’s the basic gist. What I kept thinking though, is that it felt so much like Diana Wynne Jones’s early work, full of lore and mythology and Welsh magic and grounded in nature and the mystical. This one has an elegance about it that pulled me in and kept me reading. I loved Ffion as a character, and I liked the way Bright wove magic and folklore through the book. I liked the tension between Tal and Dafydd, and have to admit that Bright surprised me with the direction the book takes. It’s not what I expected at all.

And I simply loved it.

The Teller of Small Fortunes

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by
First sentence: “On the day the Teller of Small Fortunes came to Necker, the village was in an uproar because the candlemaker’s would-be apprentice had lost all the goats.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy pilfered from the ARC shelves at work.
Content: There is some violence. It’s in the Science Fiction/Fantasty section of the bookstore.

Tao is just a teller of Small Fortunes. She is alone, except for her horse, traveling from village to village telling only the things that are small. She told, once, a Big Fortune, and she’s still paying the cost. She doesn’t want company, until she stumbles across a couple of adventurers, out looking for the lost daughter of one of them. And then, they pick up a baker and a magical cat, and Tao’s life has suddenly become complicated.

I picked this one up because I wanted something cozy, and this looked, well, cozy. And at first, I was liking it. I liked that Leong brought in racism and suspicion of the Other, and the idea that Tao – born in one country but raised in another – never quite fit anywhere. But, it kept going and it kept being just cozy without much weight to it (though I think Leong tried), and then I got 2/3 of the way through and realized I just didn’t care anymore about Tao or her companions or their Quest. So I skipped to the end to see if the daughter was ever found, and called it good.

I’m sure this will be comforting and lovely to many people. I’m just not one of them.

Audiobook: Heist Royale

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by Kayvion Lewis
Read by: Jade Wheeler
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Others in the series: Theives’ Gambit
Content: There’s people breaking the law (obviously) and talk of underage (for America) drinking. It’s in the YA section of the bookstore.

When we last left Ross, she came in second in the Gambit, which is not what she wanted. She’s had work over the past six months, but she still has the threat of someone wanting to kill her family hanging over her head. And then there’s the rivalry over who is going to run the Organization. Ross – and her friends – get roped into another gambit this time on teams and for the control of the Organization. Who will take the ultimate prize?

I’ll be up front: while this was fun, it wasn’t as fun as Thieves’ Gambit. That one was new, original, and a lot of fun. This one was almost a re-hashing of the first one. There were moments – at one point, they infiltrate a high-end casino in Moncao and there’s an intense moment when the owner catches Ross and tries to catch her out on cheating (but he doesn’t). That was very satisfying. But, because of the title, I was expecting a heist or a long con – something like Heist Society or Oceans 11 – and I just didn’t get that. That said, the narrator was excellent, and she kept me interested, even when I stopped caring about Ross and her relationship to her mother or her friends. I’m just not entirely sure the Thieves’ Gambit needed a sequel.

And maybe that’s where the problem lies.

The Listeners

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by Maggie Stiefvater
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Release date: June 3, 2025
Review copy provided by the publisher.
Content: There is some fade-to-black sex and talk of Nazis. It will be in the Adult Fiction section of the bookstore.

The story goes like this: Maggie announces that she’s got a book out in June, that it’s published by Viking. She then posts, saying (much more Maggie-like) that she announced too early. But, by this time, I figured out that Viking is published under Penguin, and I emailed our Penguin rep asking if there are ARCs and if can I have one. He emailed back saying that it was super early, and maybe… though later, when I saw him in person, he admitted I caught him off-guard because he had no idea about the book. At any rate, her editors were looking for people to read early manuscript copies, and he gave them my name. Eventually (a month after he told me all this!), the book came in the mail to the owner, who then asked if I wanted it. I had a fangirl moment “Ohmygod, ohmyGod, OHMYGOD, YES!” (she laughed at me) and then took it home and read it practically in one night.

This won’t be a real review; I will want to read it again when it comes out, to get more out of it, to enjoy the cover (that’s just a placeholder there), and to write a real review. But know this: if you like Maggie’s work, you will like this one. The magic is subtler than in her other books, but it’s all very much Maggie. And the characters are so fascinating, so complex. And there are so many little turns of phrase that just melted my heart and caught my fancy. It’s going to be a good one.

I can’t wait for others to get to read it!

Audiobook: Lost and Lassoed

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by Lyla Sage
Read by: Jason Clarke and Samantha Brentmoor
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Others in the series: Done and Dusted, Swift and Saddled
Content: There’s quite a bit of swearing – these characters don’t hold back – and a lot of on-page sexytimes. It’s in the Romance section of the bookstore.

It is well established that Gus Ryder and Teddy Anderson do not like each other. They’ve been at each other’s throats, barely civil for years. So, when Gus needs a babysitter for his daughter while her mother is away in Jackson Hole, the last person he wants is Teddy. But Teddy is freshly out of a job because the owner of the boutique she works at decided to sell out and close, and she needs not only the money, but something to do. And who doesn’t love Riley? She’s adorable. What starts as an uncomfortable truce grows into something more over the summer – but what happens at the end, when Camille comes back? Will Gus and Teddy stick? Or will they go back to sniping at each other.

I may have cowboy romance burn out, because I wanted to like this one more than I actually did. I think part of it was Clarke’s narration: his Gus voice was so low and gravelly that I had to crank the volume up just to hear him (I’m not one for deep voices, I guess). Which was more annoying than it should have been. But, while I like enemies to lovers a lot, this one lacked banter. I think it’s because the bulk of the enemies-to-lovers tropes that I like took place in the previous two books, and that just left the resolution for this one. Which kind of left me flat. I wasn’t thrilled with the way Emmy ended up in this one – she was quite self-centered, which you could blame on planning a wedding – and I disliked some elements of the way Sage wrote Teddy and Emmy’s friendship. I did like Teddy and Riley together; that came off as genuine, sweet, and fun.

I think it was me, though. I like cowboys and trucks and rural Wyoming well enough (shoot, those are my people, as my grandmother would have said), but maybe I need a break from them for a little bit.

The Wildcat Behind Glass

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by Alki Zei
Translated by Karen Emmerich
First sentence: “Winter Sundays are the most boring days of all.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: It’s a little long and talks bluntly about fascism. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

It’s 1936 in Greece and all Melia wants is to run and play, listen to their grandfather tell stories about his “ancients”, and hang out with her sister, Myrto. But, it’s 1936, and the adults are all concerned about the rise of fascism and the overthrowing of the king. It really doesn’t help when their older cousin Nikos ends up in hiding because he’s wanted by the government. Or, when, in the fall, they go to a public school for the first time (they were homeschooled before), and Myrto gets sucked into their school’s phalanx, which is kind of like the Hitler Youth Program. Melia doesn’t quite know how to process everything.

And, honestly, after finishing this book, neither do we. It was initially written in 1968, and you can feel that when reading it. It’s a lot of everyday stuff happening, and not a lot of conflict and resolution. In fact, the book just kind of ends, and peters off without any real resolution. (Well, spoiler: Nikos gets away, but that’s about it.) Also, a bone to pick with the marketing: the back reads as if the titular wildcat- a taxidermied cat in Melia’s house – was magical and took them on adventures. It’s not. I wanted it to be. But there is no magic adventures here. I think the author wanted to tell Nikos’s story, but someone told her that it would be better if you made a young girl the protagonist and so she did that. Nikos was a much more interesting (and less whiny!) character. Oh well.

At least it wasn’t terribly long.