Audiobook: The Truth According to Ember

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by Danica Nava
Read by Siena East
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: There is blatant racism towards Native people, as well as some swearing including a few f-bombs. There is on the page, pretty spicy sex. It’s in the Romance section of the bookstore.

Ember Lee Cardinal hasn’t been able to catch a break. She had to drop out of college because she used her college money to bail out her younger brother from jail, but he skipped bail so she lost the money. She’s working a dead-end job at a bowling alley in a less-than-desirable part of Oklahoma City. And all her applications for better jobs come back as rejected. So she decides to be creative: she exaggerates her qualifications and checks the white box instead of the Native American one. (Her dad is white, so it’s not a super big stretch on that one.) She lands a job as an accounting assistant at a tech firm where she meets Danuwoa Colson, the IT guy and fellow Native. He even seems to be interested in her as well. Things are looking up. But when she gets an unexpected (and unwanted) promotion to the Executive Assistant to the CEO and when a coworker finds Ember and Danuwoa in a bit of a compromising position (they were kissing on an elevator at an offsite conference), her lies begin to build and get out of control. With everything – her job, her life, the relationship with Danuwoa – at stake, will Ember be able to come clean?

This one was a ton of fun. There was a bit of second-hand embarrassment as Ember’s lies kept piling up, but I got why she kept doing it. The motivations were always there. Nava was great at making the spice pop as well as weaving in elements of what Native people have to deal with in the corporate workplace (it was SUPER cringe). I loved Ember’s best friend Joanna (not sure of the spelling of that, since I listened) and the way it was incredibly centered in Oklahoma. Additionally, East did an excellent job narrating, making all the characters come to life.

It ended up being one of those books where I kept driving just so I could keep listening, and there really isn’t any higher praise than that.

Four Weekends and a Funeral

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by Ellie Palmer
First sentence: “When I learn I’m still dating Sam Lewis, I’m at his funeral.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy pilfered from the ARC shelves at the bookstore.
Content: There is some mild swearing, as well as kissing and off-page sex. It’s in the Romance section of the bookstore.

Alison had a brief relationship with Sam. She was coming off a double mastectomy (as a cancer prevention measure), and she wanted a bit of adventure in her life. Sam – who lived life large – was it. It didn’t work out, but he never told his family that they broke up, and Alison found out at Sam’s funeral after a tragic accident. She is compelled to play along with the fiction that she was actually dating-dating Sam, and she and his best friend, Adam, get roped into cleaning out and fixing up Sam’s condo. The project gets off to a rough start: Adam is notoriously recalcitrant towards activities, and even though Alison tries to be cheerful around him, he’s just not warming up.

But, she still feels a pull toward him, and even though she’s still feeling all sorts of ways about her mastectomy, her and Adam’s relationship buds from friendship into something more.

It’s a sweet and light romance, with undercurrents of both grief and survivor’s guilt. While I really liked the relationship between Alison and Adam – there were some genuinely laugh out lout moments in the book – it was the side characters that really kept me reading. I liked Alison’s friends Chelsea and Mara, and the trivia night competitions, and just their friendship. And I feel like that while this is a romance, at its heart, it’s following the trend I’m seeing in romances: the real story is women figuring out how to be their best selves. Alison works through her survivor’s guilt, she embraces her true self, and only then can she and Adam have a deep, real relationship. And while it lacks spice, it is sweet, and there are bonus points for old (well 80s) romcom references.

I found it to be sweet, charming, and quite funny, which is a win in my book.

Audiobook: Buffalo Dreamer

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by Violet Duncan
Read by Ashley Callingbull
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: There are some tough subjects, including the residential schools, but they are handled in an age-appropriate way. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

Summer is looking forward to a relaxing summer at the rez in Alberta where her mom grew up. But this year, there is a change: they have discovered a mass grave at a closed-down residential school where Summer’s grandfather was forced to attend. Additionally, Summer is having vivid dreams about a girl who ran away from a residential school and walked through a blizzard to escape.

It’s not a long book or even a harrowing one. But it is a sweet story about respecting and learning history, even (or maybe especially) hard history. Summer’s mom and aunties doesn’t think she’s ready to learn the history, and her grandfather is hesitant to speak about it, but when Summer shares the dreams, they are more willing to admit that talking about the hard and painful history can be a healing thing. I also appreciated learning about Summer’s heritage and family traditions as we went along; Duncan was excellent at weaving the small details in with the larger story.

The narrator was excellent as well; I really love listening to books by Native authors in audio because I know I would have no idea how to pronounce some of the words. I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

Audiobook: Done and Dusted

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by Lyla Sage
Read by Aaron Shedlock & Stella Hunter
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: There is on-page, quite graphic sex. There is also swearing, including several f-bombs. It’s in the Romance section of the bookstore.

All Emmy Rider – the youngest of the three Rider kids – wanted to do was get out of her small Wyoming town and make something of herself. Which she did by going to college and making a name for herself on the barrel racing circuit. But, after a bad accident, she’s aimless back home at Rebel Blue, the family ranch, trying to figure out the next step. Enter in Luke Books, Meadowlark’s most eligible bachelor, and Emmy’s oldest brother’s best friend. He’s always been just annoying, but now – maybe he’s something more. Except for Emmy’s off-limits, because her brother wouldn’t take kindly to their being together.

Will that stop them? (We all know the answer to that question.)

We had Lyla Sage at the store over Bookstore Romance day, and I had the pleasure of working the event. It was a lot of fun, she’s smart and funny, and I found myself wondering if these were any good (especially since all the other romance readers at the store were raving about the books). And yes, yes they are. Well, it depends on what you mean by “good”. Are they high literature? No. Are they entertaining and sexy? Yes. And really, that’s all anyone really wants out of a romance book, after all. I did like the characters, and Sage is good at writing witty banter (almost a must for me in a romance book). It’s got a little bit of push and pull and some sexy scenes and it all came together quite nicely.

It was good on audio as well. Thankfully, the narrators realized that people from Wyoming don’t have an accent (we were worried about that), and they embodied the characters beautifully. It was entertaining and fun, and you really can’t want anything more than that in a romance.

Pony Confidential

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by Christina Lynch
First sentence: “Penny Marcus opens her front door to find Ed, the local sheriff’s deputy, on the doorstep.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!”
Release date: November 5, 2025
Content: There is some swearing, including several f-bombs, and some violence to animals. It will be in the Fiction section.

This one is going to be hard to sum up. It’s a dual narrative: Penny is arrested for a murder that happened in her presence 25 years ago, but that she says she didn’t commit. However, there aren’t any witnesses, so she’s in a hopeless place as her court-appointed lawyer tries to convince her to take a plea.

The other narrative is that of Pony, Penny’s, well, pony, from her childhood. Pony is bitter towards humans because Penny left him suddenly. But, over the course of Pony’s travels after being sold, he learned to forgive, and then decided to go find Penny. This part of the book is very loosely based on the Odyssey, and it’s sweeping and wild as Pony crisscrosses the country over years looking for Penny.

It sounds weird – and it’s nothing like what I was expecting when I started it. I think I was expecting something more like The Hollow Kingdom, or even perhaps the mystery that the jacket copy described. But, instead, I got a love letter to human-animal connection, as both Penny and Pony’s lives were changed by each other. It was sweet, it was funny at times, and it was just completely full of heart.

I absolutely loved it.

Monthly Round-Up: August 2024

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Where did August go? How is it already September? What has happened? I have no idea how we got here…

That said, I did have an absolute favorite this month:

A Sorceress Comes to Call

I love T. Kingfisher, and will read practically anything she writes (except for her horror, though I have been tempted). It’s such a good story. (We did a blind date with a book for August, and my blurb for this one was “Old Ladies being absolute badasses” and it sold quite a few. So. good.)

YA:

The Prisoner’s Throne
Ultraviolet
Arya Khanna’s Bollywood Moment (audiobook)

Graphic Novel:

The Deep Dark

Adult Fiction:

The Faculty Lounge (audiobook)
I’ll Have What He’s Having
The Seventh Veil of Salome (audiobook)
The Bloodless Princes

Middle Grade:

Drawing Deena
The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman

Non-Fiction

The Serviceberry

What was your favorite this month?

Audiobook: Arya Khanna’s Bollywood Moment

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by Arushi Avachat
Read by Nikhaar Kishnani
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: There is mention of mental illness, including depression, and some kissing. It’s in the YA section (grades 6-8) of the bookstore.

Arya’s senior year has been super complicated so far: she’s ben at odds with the school council president, Dean, since the year started; and her older sister has finally come home after three years to get married. It’s a lot to deal with, especially since she might have feelings for Dean. The question is: how is she going to manage everything.

Yes, it’s a fluff plot, and not a very deep book, but it was cute. The narrator was fun to listen to and there was enough to keep me entertained, My favorite part about it all, though, was the Bollywood references. I desperately needed a playlist (both audio and video) for the book, and was sad that I couldn’t find one.

So, no, not the best book out there, but a fun one.

Ultraviolet

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by Aida Salazar
First sentence: “Who invented love, anyway?”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There is some sexual objectification of middle-school girls by middle-school boys. It’s in the YA section (grades 6-8) of the bookstore.

At the start of eighth grade Elio Selis starts noticing changes. Specifically girls. There are other changes too, with his body and with his friends, but all of a sudden girls are on his radar. Camellia in particular. He most definitely likes her, and she likes him back. Things are perfect for a while – ultraviolet, Elio things – but then things go south. Camellia takes up with a guy that Elio thinks is trash, and his heart is broken. He discovers he has an undetected heart problem that needs to be fixed. His parents decide that he and his dad need to join a Circle as a way to express and learn about masculinity. It’s all very confusing.

In the afterword, Salazar says she wrote this for her son, once she realized that there weren’t many books out there depicting what it’s like for boys to go through puberty, to feel their feels, to explore what it means, and how to be a man, and she wanted to write one. Which she nails. I didn’t particularly like puberty or being 13 or eighth grade, but I think Salazar gets all the big emotions and the big feelings and the confusion that goes along with that time in one’s life. She handles it all with grace and with compassion: Both Elio and Camellia make mistakes as they try to figure out what “relationships” and “liking” and just what feeling feelings mean. And it’s wonderfully age-appropriate. It’s an excellent book to hand kids in the 11- to 12-year-old range, on the cusp of all of this, to help them navigate it. I’m not sure there are many adults who would buy this for their boys, but honestly: they should. It’s an excellent book about growing up, learning to be a compassionate and kind person, and how to navigate an incredibly confusing and difficult time of life.

The Deep Dark

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by Molly Knox Ostertag
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy pilfered from the ARC shelves at work.
Content: There is some talk of sex, and there is some swearing, including a few f-bombs. It’s in the Graphic Novel Section of the bookstore.

Mags hasn’t ever left the small California town she grew up in, for good reason: she has a secret that is preventing her from going. So, when her childhood friend Nessa shows back up, Mags is wary: she doesn’t want anyone to know her secret, mostly because people could get hurt. But Nessa is persistent, and Mags has a weakness for Nessa.

Of course, Nessa asks questions, which leads to complicated answers, and maybe Mags might be ready to share the secret she’s carried alone for her whole life.

I’m not doing the plot justice, here: Ostertag is a better storyteller than that plot summary indicates. She is good at characterizations, at creating chilling, but ultimately hopeful situations, and for bringing the monsters out in the open. You could look at this one on several levels: yes, it’s a monster story, but perhaps it’s a metaphor for the secrets we all have, and how it’s always better to share the secrets (but maybe not always, because there will be people who shun you for them). Like all of her books, this one is superbly well-drawn, and I loved the small details in the art that bring the characters to life.

Another excellent graphic novel from Ostertag.

The Bloodless Prince

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by Charlotte Bond
First sentence: “When the universe was young and dark, light existed inside an egg.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Release date: October 29, 2024
Others in the series: The Fireborne Blade
Review copy pilfered from the ARC shelves at work.
Content: There is some violence. It will be in the Science Fiction/Fantasy section of the bookstore.

Spoilers for the first, obviously.

Maddileh and Saralene have won the blade, killed the dragon, cheated death, and have gone on with their lives. Saralene is High Mage with Maddileh as her Champion. Except all is not well: both Maddileh and Saralene keep having disturbing dreams and they are becoming increasingly intrusive. Also: maybe the dragon is not actually dead. And: maybe the Tales of Old are not just stories, but actually true, and they need to travel to the underworld to bargain with the Bloodless Princes for their lives.

Much like the first, this slim novel packs a punch. There is so much world-building in so few words, it’s breathtaking. I love the dragon in the book – it’s different from the first in this duology and it fits with what we already know and expands upon it. Bond is an incredibly talented writer, both with her plotting and characterizations. I liked how the romance was understated until it wasn’t, how Bond never let anything get overdone, and how both Maddileh and Saralene stand on their own and know how to work together. It’s quite a brilliant little book.

All this to say: I’m probably going to read whatever Bond decides to write.