Heartstopper Volume 5

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by Alice Oseman
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Others in the series: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4
Content: There is a handful of swearing, including a few f-bombs. There is also some fade-to-black sex. It’s in the Graphic Novel section of the bookstore.

It’s the end of Nick’s year 12 and Charlie’s year 11, and they’re starting to think about the Future. Not just the future together – will they or won’t they have sex (spoiler: they do) – but the actual future, since Nick is looking at going away to college.

It’s just the next stage of Nick and Charlie’s relationship – learning how to be individuals in a partnership, and learning how to become their best selves. I liked that there was a lot of communication going on: between Nick and Charlie, yes, but also between the parents and the kids and all the friends. It helps to have a good support system, especially when you, like Charlie, have an eating disorder that you’re trying to manage.

I wish I had read these back to back; although I do love being back with Nick and Charlie, I also find myself a bit disconnected from it all. I’ve had this one sitting on my TBR pile for weeks since it came out, and I wasn’t overeager to read it, like I was when it first came out. From what Oseman said, volume 6 will be the last one, and I can sense the story coming to an end. I have liked these, though, and I appreciate that they exist in the world.

Blood Justice

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by Terry J. Benton-Walker
First sentence: “Granny was dead, and no one gave a damn — a truth that Velntine Savant choked on for the entirety of her grandparents’ poorly attended joint funeral service.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Release date: April 23, 2024
Others in the series: Blood Debts
Content: There’s a lot of violence and a lot of swearing, including many f-bombs. It will be in the Teen (grades 9+) section of the bookstore.

Spoilers for Blood Debts, obviously.

There’s so much going on in this book it’s going to be hard to sum up. Let’s just say Valentina’s grandparents are dead, and she hates her parents and wants revenge on the Trudeau twins and get her power back, and will do anything to it. Clem has an undead (or mostly alive?) boyfriend that he’s been hiding from the world while he tries to figure out how to more alive him. Cris is Angry at Everything and Everyone and is taking Justice into her own hands. Adults are somewhere in there, but not doing much of anything. And there’s an unhinged evil god lurking around.

I was talking to co-workers about this one and this sentence came out of my mouth: “It’s like Riverdale, but with magic and set in New Orleans.” Honestly, that’s the most accurate description for this train wreck of a book. It’s so very soap-y and twisty and all the 16-year-old are acting like grown adults and like children at the same time. Everyone is always so full of Guilt and Secrets and Plots, it’s ridiculous.

And yet. I finished it. I am invested in this silly, overly dramatic, very Queer soap opera. I do want to know how it ends, though i think Benton-Walker could drag it out as long as he wanted to; much like Riverdale, Something is always happening to put the Teens in Peril. Why does it have to end? I do appreciate Benton-Walker tackling racisim, homophobia, the abuse by cops, and general corruption in politics. It’s a lot to deal with, but it’s a lot of a book, so it fits in well.

I think this one gets filed under: it’s a hot mess of a book and not much fun at all, but it’s compelling, and so it’s worth reading.

Audiobook: The Misfits

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by Lisa Yee
Read by Cindy Kay
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: It’s a fast-paced novel, and there are illustrations in the print version. Some intense moments may be scary to sensitive readers. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

Olvie Coben Zang has been an outcast her entire life. Her parents are too busy to pay her much attention, she doesn’t really fit in at school, she has no friends… the works. The only person who really saw her was her grandmother, Mimi, but she has passed on. And then, out of the blue, her parents tell her that she’s being transferred to a boarding school, RASCH, a unique school for unique kids. Once there, she’s lumped in with four other outcasts – James, who’s young but has an encyclopedic knowledge of words and history; Philomena (“just call me Phil”) who is a tech genius; Iggy, who has a bit of temper but a heart of gold; and Theo (TBH, I just thought of him as the White kid). Together, they form the Misfits, as part of an experiment to train kids as spies. Their goal, in the end: Catch the Bling King and get back the infamous, super expensive necklace of the school’s founder.

This was a lot of fun. I liked the mystery (I miscalled the ending!), I liked the characters – they were fun and interesting and sometimes silly. It was well-paced; I could see a kid falling into the book and plowing through it because it’s hard to put down. And Kay, as a narrator, is excellent. She definitely keeps the pace up as well as helping with voices to keep all the numerous characters (including the adults) straight.

I thoroughly enjoyed this and am looking forward to more in the series.

Audiobook: The Six

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by Loren Gush
Read by Inés del Castillo
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: There is some swearing, including a couple of f-bombs. It’s in the History section of the bookstore.

In the late 1970s, NASA changed its policy about including women in the corps; realizing (albeit slowly) that perhaps space travel shouldn’t be an all-boys club. In 1978 they accepted the first six women into the space program: Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon.

If you’re like me, you’ve heard of Sally Ride, the first woman in space, but the rest were relative unknowns. Grush weaves the stories of the six women together – a brief biography of their younger years, but mostly concerning their desires to go into space, and then their later experiences at NASA and eventually flying on the shuttles – seamlessly. The book has enough personal information to make the women feel like real people, not just Trailblazers and Pioneers and all that important stuff (which they were, don’t get me wrong). There was enough technical NASA stuff in the book to make it feel authentic without intimidating someone (like me) who is not STEM-inclined. And there was enough feminist stuff to make the reader realize what these six women were up against and how much they had to push to get the culture around NASA to change.

And del Castillo was a fabulous reader. She kept me engaged in the material and I swear she choked up a bit around the Challenger explosion in 1986. (Yes, that’s in there.) It’s not something I would have normally picked up, but I’m so glad I did.

Hogfather

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by Terry Pratchett
First sentence: “Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Others in the series: It’s part of the Death cycle in Discworld, but you can read it as a standalone.
Content: It’s Terry Pratchett. Do we really need to discuss content? It’s in the Science Fiction/Fantasy section of the bookstore.

It’s Hogswatchnight, and mostly everything is normal in Ankh-Morpork, with celebrations and everything. Except it’s not okay: the Hogfather has gone missing. And in order to save humanity (just go with it), Death has taken over the Hogfather’s duties. (Albeit very awkwardly.) Once Death’s granddaughter Susan realizes things are not right, she embarks on a journey to find out what happened to Hogfather.

I have been meaning to read this for years. I love it whenever I visit Discworld; Pratchett’s humor and observations hit the spot. I giggle, I cry, I am amused and delighted at the characters. It’s a maze of a book; I was sometimes wondering where the plot was going, but I trust Sir Terry and he did not disappoint. I adored Susan, and in the end, Sir Terry pulled off a remarkably delightful book.

My Best of 2023

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I joined StoryGraph at the beginning of the year, abandoning Goodreads after who knows how long. (They allowed me to import my data, which made me very happy!). At any rate, one of my favorite features of Storygraph is that they track your data for you! That makes someone like me, who likes to look at the numbers behind my reading, very very happy.

So, the numbers:

Middle Grade: 36
Young Adult: 21
Graphic Novels: 16
Adult Fiction: 45
Non-Fiction: 14
Total: 132

Number of those that were audiobooks: 50


Number that were Speculative fiction (not including graphic novels): 23
Number that were by BIPOC authors: 27 (20%; slightly better than last year, but still not great)
Number by Latine authors: 8
Number I reread: 5
Number I abandoned: too many to count, and I made a conscious decision not to blog about them this year

My moods, according to StoryGraph:

My top 10, not including Middle Grade, which will be revealed tomorrow when the Cybils finalists are announced.

System Collapse

In order, two each of adult fiction, audiobooks, YA, graphic novels, and non-fiction.

And the other fun thing is they track my genres!

My top genre was middle Grade with 39 books, and the bottom two were music (the BTS book) and crime (which tuned out to be really a mystery, but hey, I’m not complaining).I am surprised I read a lot more contempoary than SFF, but maybe I shouldn’t be?

This is kind of turning out to be an ad for StoryGraph, but I’ve really enjoyed it this year.

What were some of your favorietes? Did anything surprise you?

Monthly Round-Up: December 2023

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Not surprisingly, it’s been another Middle Grade-heavy month! That said, my favorite was this:

Bookshops & Bonedust (audiobook)

I liked it better than the first one, if only because more happened. It was just a fun, silly, delightful listen.

And the rest:

Graphic Novels:

The Great British Bump Off
Superman for All Seasons

Middle Grade:

Sincerely Sicily
Finally See
Dear Brother
Skating On Mars
The Lost Year
The Dark is Rising (reread, audiobook)

Adult Fiction:

Bride

YA:

Gwen & Art Are Not In Love

Stay tuned tomorrow for my best of the year!

A Couple of Graphic Novels

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The Great British Bump Off
by John Allison, and illustrated by Max Sarin
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There are panels showing poisoning. It’s in the graphic novel section of the bookstore.

The basic plot is that there is a Great British Bake Off-style competition and one of the competitors ends up in the hospital in critical condition from being poisoned. Was he poisoned on purpose? If so, who did it? Enter Shauna, medicore baker and armchair detective to solve this closed-room mystery.

This was ridiculous. There’s no way around it. It was silly, it was ridiculous, and it was dumb. But it circled around from being really stupid to being fun, especially if you (like I am) are a fan of the GBBO. I liked the parodies of the hosts, the challenges, and even the types of bakers that appear on the show. The ending was a bit forced and rushed, but I really didn’t expect anything else. For what it was, it wasn’t bad at all.

Superman for All Seasons
by Jeph Loeb, illustrated by Tim Sale
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There is some superhero-type violence. It’s in the Graphic Novel section of the bookstore.

In this series of four short stories, we follow Superman through each of the four seasons. From Kansas to Metropolis, each story is narrated by a different individual in Clark Kent’s life, as he learns to use his powers in the most effective way possible. That makes it sound trite, but this is really an excellent portrayal of Superman. I liked the retro-feeling art, and the way the stories were connected, building off each other. I think the authors really got the character of Superman, but also made him complex and not one-dimensional. I liked both Lois and Lana and how they influenced and were influenced by Clark. It’s a stellar graphic novel.

The Lost Year

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by Katherine Marsh
First sentence: “Dark Beast Ganon charged.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There is talk of starvation and the deaths of children. It’s in the YA section (grades 6-8) of the bookstore. I read this book for the Cybils, and this reflects my opinion and not that of the whole panel.

It’s spring of 2020, which means that Matthew is trapped in his home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s bored out of his mind, mostly because his great-grandmother – whom they call GG – has come to live with them and his mom is super strict about not interacting with anyone because of the pandemic. He has his Switch, until his mom decides that he needs more to do than sit playing games, and tasks him with helping GG go through her stuff.

When he finds a black and white picture of her and another girl, he slowly gets GG to open up about her childhood in Ukraine and the famine that plagued the country in the early 1930s. Told in alternating voices – we hear Matthew’s story as well as Helen’s, a first-generation American immigrant – and Mila’s – the daughter of a Communist official – stories.

I really liked this one. I liked the parallels between the early days of the pandemic and the Ukranian famine of 1932/1933. I liked how Marsh made each of the three characters come alive on the page, and made the historical parts relevant to today. And even though there is conflict, as a a reader, you can see all the various perspectives. In the end, after all, we’re all just trying to survive somehow.

It’s a good story, and one I think kids who like Jennifer Nielsen or Alan Gratz will enjoy.

Bride

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by Ali Hazelwood
First sentence: “This war of ours, the one between the Vampyres and the Weres, began several centuries ago with brutal escalations of violence, culminated amid flowing torrents of varicolored blood, and ended in a whimper of buttercream cake, on the day I met my husband for the first time.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Release date: February 6, 2024
ARC pilfered from the shelves at my place of employment.
Content: This is very, sweary, very violent, and very, very spicy. Quite a bit of on-screen interspecies sex. It will be in the romance section of the bookstore.

Misery is used to being, well, miserable. Having spent her entire childhood as the Vampyre collateral in the human world, she never really fit in with her people. And because she’s a vampyre, she doesn’t fit in with the humans, even though she’s been “passing” for a few years. And now, as she’s being “given” (generous word; forced? compelled?) to be the bride of the Were alpha, she figures it will just be another place she doesn’t fit in. In fact, the only person she cares about is Serena, her companion in childhood and best friend, who has gone missing. Misery is determined to figure out what happened to Serena, and she won’t let anyone – least of all her Were husband – get in her way.

The only other Ali Hazelwood book I’ve read is her YA Check & Mate, which was cute, so I really don’t have a frame of reference for her books. On the one hand, she’s doing some fascinating things with vampire and werewolf lore. I liked that she leaned into them being different species, and the politics of dealing between the three – humans, vampires, werewolves. I can see where she’s pulling things from – the idea of mates on the Were side, or how vampires drink pre-packaged blood – but I thought she had a fresh take.

The sex scenes were good, although, by the end, I had issues with the direction she was taking them. I just felt that Misery at the beginning was not quite the same character as Misery at the end. The best part of this one, though, was the secondary characters. They were a lot of fun and kept me going through the book. There was a pretty good twist I didn’t see coming, but it didn’t bother me. I thought it was pretty clever. i am guessing it’s going to be a series, based on the ending, and I do have to admit that I’m curious as to where Hazelwood is going to take the story.