Monthly Round Up: August 2023

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There’s nothing like a good vacation and then some Cybils reading to kick up your monthly numbers! My favorite this month:

System Collapse

When there’s a new Murderbot novel, it will always be my favorite. I love the series. As for the rest:

Graphic Novel:

Buzzing
Sunshine

Middle Grade:

Dad’s Girlfriend and Other Anxieties
The First Magnificent Summer
Race for the Ruby Turtle
Simon Sort of Says
Barely Floating (audiobook)
Lasagna Means I Love You
Morning Sun in Wuhan

Adult Fiction:

The Unhoneymooners
Business or Pleasure (audiobook)

Non-Fiction:

War and the American Difference
All In (audiobook)

What was your favorite this month?

Sunshine

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by Jarrett J. Korsoczka
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There are sick kids and talk of death. It’s in the Graphic Novel section of the bookstore.

In the companion to Hey Kiddo, Krosoczka depicts his experiences with Camp Sunshine, a place for sick kids – many of them terminally ill – and their families to go to get away from hospitals and being sick. Krosoczka volunteered for a week when he was 16, and he didn’t know what to expect when he first got there but ended up meeting incredible people and having his life changed for the better.

It was a touching and sweet graphic novel. I loved how Krosoczka depicted not only the other kids volunteering but also the kids and their families. He hits the highlights of the week he volunteered, and followed some of the relationships he kept afterward. It’s a good reminder that getting outside yourself and volunteering to help others is important. And it’s a good book.

Moning Sun in Wuhan

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by Ying Chang Compestine
First sentence: “It feels as though hours have passed since the waitress took my order.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There is talk of the COVID pandemic and the death of a parent. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) of the bookstore.

Twelve-year-old Mei and her father are just surviving since her mother died a year ago. They go to work and school, and even though Mei likes to cook, she doesn’t really find any joy in it. Then, in January of 2020, a strange new disease crops up in their town in Wuhan. Suddenly Mei is cut off from her dad and friends. So, she figures out how to put her talent for cooking and organizing to help her neighborhood out in the early days of the lockdown.

So, I wanted to like this one. I appreciate that stories are starting to be told about the pandemic and I appreciate it being told from the perspective of the place where COVID started. But this one was just kind of… blah. It lacked any real conflict, and even the anxiety surrounding those first days of the pandemic. I get that it’s for younger kids, but it just wasn’t great.

That said, it’s good that it’s out there.

Lasagna Means I Love You

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by Kate O’Shaughnessy
First sentence: “Dear Nan, You died on a Tuesday.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There is talk of death and dying, and the main character is processing grief. it’s in the middle grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

Mo has lived with her grandma, Nan, all her life. And since Mo’s mom passed when she was six, Nan has been her guardian and basically only family. So, when Nan suddenly dies, Mo is a bit unmoored. Even more so when her mom’s brother, Billy, refuses to take Mo in, and she ends up in the foster care system. Nan’s last advice to Mo was to get a hobby. By chance, Mo stumbles across a cookbook full of family recipes, which gives her an idea: she’s going to collect family recipes, learn to cook them, and hopefully find a family recipe (and a family) of her own.

I appreciate that this book is aware of its privilege: Mo is a white kid and gets taken into a pretty well-off white home. She does recognize that this gives her privileges she might not have had otherwise (or that her friends from her old neighborhood in Brooklyn don’t have). But, at its heart, it’s a story of found family. And that’s always heart-warming. I thought O’Shaughnessy was good at portraying grief in both a way that seemed accessible as well as believable. And I liked the characters that surrounded Mo. Sure, a kid opening a one-night-only flash restaurant on New Year’s Eve is probably pretty unrealistic, but hey: I liked the thought and the spirit and the community that it built. A solid read.

Audiobook: Barely Floating

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by Lilliam Rivera
Read by Victoria Villarreal
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Release date: August 29, 2023
Content: There are a couple of mild swear words. It will be in the Middle-Grade section of the bookstore.

Nat has been out-swimming kids at her neighborhood pool for ages. She uses the money to go with her friend to the Anime Con. But one day, she catches a performance of the synchronized swimming team the L.A. Mermaids and she’s hooked. The problem? Her activist parents think synchronized swimming is too white and too focused on appearance for Nat to participate in. The solution? Lie to her parents, get her older cousin involved, and use her money to join the team anyway.

This is going to end badly. (Mild spoiler, there, but you see it coming).

On the one hand: this was so full of representation! There’s a not-skinny Latinx girl at the center of it, someone who is strong and fierce and not the person you think of when you think of synchronized swimming. There’s a boy on the team! It’s made up of not-super-rich kids! And, yet I was super anxious the whole way through because Nat was making some Choices. I get the choices – she felt like she couldn’t do anything else because her parents, who said they were open-minded, didn’t want to listen to her. But ALSO, from a parent’s perspective: AAAAAAHHHHH really!? How did she not get caught sooner?? How clueless are you?! So, mixed feelings to say the least. I did love Villarreal’s narration, though. She was a delight to listen to and brought all the characters to life. Will kids like this? Maybe? I love that the main character is a non-white girl who doesn’t fit the usual swimming stereotype. And maybe kids will like all the subterfuge she goes through to get what she wants.

I hope it finds its audience if only so we get more books like this.

Audiobook: Business or Pleasure

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by Rachel Lynn Solomon
Read by Hathaway Lee
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: Oh, there’s sooo much in here. All the f-bombs, all the on-page sex. Very, very spicy. It’s in the Romance section of the bookstore.

Chandler is a ghostwriter who is unhappy with her life. So when she meets a guy in a bar after a failed book signing (the author she wrote the book for didn’t even recognize Chandler’s name), she has a one-night stand with him. However, it’s the worst sex she’s ever had. (Or at least had in a long time.) So, when she gets a gig ghostwriting for the C-list actor Finn Walsh, she’s shocked (and a bit embarrassed) that he’s the guy she just slept with. She agrees to take the job, and as they travel from con to con (he’s best known for playing a science nerd on a werewolf show) they get to know each other, and the truth comes out: he’s terrible in bed. He’s a unicorn of a man and wants to know how to get better, so Chandler agrees to give him detailed sex lessons. Practical experience. The problem is: how can she keep her heart out of it?

Oh, this one made me blush! I kept hitting the very detailed, quite graphic sex scenes while at the gym (I’m blushing because I’m exercising, really!). But, honestly? It’s a fun book. It’s super sex-positive, and Chandler stresses in her lessons that communication between partners is vital to having a good experience. I kind of felt like I should be taking notes! But, beyond that, I enjoyed the relationship between Chandler and Finn, and how they pushed each other to become better and more confident people. So, yeah: super spicy, and probably not for everyone. But ultimately, I quite enjoyed it.

Simon Sort of Says

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by Erin Bow
First sentence: “People are always asking why my family came to the National Quiet Zone.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There is mention of school shootings, trauma, and anxiety. It’s in the Middle-Grades section (grades 3-5) of the bookstore.

Simon O’Keeffe – the son of a Catholic deacon and an undertaker – has told a lot of stories about why his family moved to the National Quiet Zone, but none of them the real one: he’s the only survivor of a school shooting in Omaha, and his family needed to get away from everything. This is possible in a town where most electronics have been banned so that scientists can hear possible messages from space. This is only important because one of Simon’s new friends – Agate – wants to fake a message from aliens, so that the mom of another friend – Kevin – will feel a sense of accomplishment. That’s the idea, anyway. What this book is really about is the process of healing from trauma and coming to accept what has happened.

Oh this book was a delight. Funny – it genuinely made me laugh in spots – irreverant (Jesus Squirrel!), but heartfelt and hopeful. Yes, Bow deals with difficult subjects, but she does so in a way that is age-appropriate. I’m not entirely sure that Kevin’s helicopter scientist white mom and laid-back Filipino dad weren’t stereotypes, which is a downside. And the book was very white – it is a small town in Nebraska, but still. Otherwise, though, it’s a delight of a book to read.

Audiobook: All In

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by Billie Jean King, Johnette Howard, and Maryanne Vollers
Read by Billie Jean King
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: King talks about difficult subjects including sexism, discrimination, her affair, and eating disorders. It’s in the Sports section of the bookstore.

In this memoir, King writes of how she got into tennis, her struggles for equal treatment in the sport for women, her winning championships and being number one in the world, as well as her winning the infamous “Battle of the Sexes”. She talks about coming to terms with her sexuality as well as broadening her activism. It covers her life up to the present, including her marriage to her long-time partner Ilana Kloss.

I picked this one up not because I had any real affection for King, but because I was looking for something different to listen to and was in the mood for a sports book. I found it interesting – it’s not just a history of King’s life, it’s a history of women in professional sports, of the evolution of tennis in America, of the history of Women’s, Civil, and LGBTQ+ Rights. If I can say anything, it’s this: King has been around for a long time (she was born in 1943) and has seen and done and been involved in a lot. She wasn’t particularly fantastic as a narrator; I sped it up so she’d read at a speed that I could tolerate, but I did appreciate hearing the emotion in her voice when she talked about certain subjects. She was very frank about her life, her mistakes, her evolution, and her path to a very fulfilling life. I did like hearing about the other players on the tennis tour, especially when she got to ones I recognized (say around the 1980s), and I did enjoy hearing her view on her personal and professional battles.

It’s not my usual read, but I liked it well enough.

System Collapse

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by Martha Wells
First sentence: “Dr. Bharadwaj told me once that she thought I hated planets because of the whole thing with being considered expendable and the possibility of being abandoned.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Others in the series: All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Network Effect
Review copy provided by the publisher.
Release date: November 14, 2023
Content: Like all Murderbot books, there is a lot of violence and swearing (Wells is a master of the artfully placed f-bomb). It will be in the Science Fiction/Fantasy section of the bookstore.

The events of this Murderbot book pick up shortly after those in Network Effect: Murderbot and his humans are trying to help the colony of humans fend off the advances of an unethical corporation that’s trying to take over the planet. Things go badly, of course, and Murderbot has to keep his humans safe. Except there’s something wrong with it [it’s redacted]that is interfering with its ability to do just that. 

I really don’t have much new to say about this one. It’s just as smart, tight, and fun as the rest of the series. I will seriously go anywhere in this world that Wells wants to take me, and happily read every new Murderbot book. I love them so much, and the only problem is having to wait for the net one to come out.

The Unhoneymooners

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by Christina Lauren
First sentence: “In the calm before the storm – in this case, the blessed quiet before the bridal suite is overrun by the wedding party – my twin sister stares critically down at a freshly painted shell-pink fingernail and says, ‘I bet you’re relieved I’m not a bridezilla.'”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There is swearing, including multiple uses of the f-bomb, and an on-screen sex scene. It’s in the Romance section of the bookstore.

Olive Torres is sure of one thing: she’s unlucky. Her twin sister is the glamorous one, the successful one, the one who is about to get married to the man of her dreams. And Olive? She just lost her job, she has no luck in dating, and perhaps worst of all: she’s stuck in a florescent green bridesmaid’s dress. So, when everyone at her sister’s wedding gets food poisoning from the buffet, she’s encouraged to go on the non-refundable, non-transferable honeymoon by her sister. The catch: the best man, Ethan, whom Olive despises, has to go too. Determined to make the most of a vacation to Maui, even if it’s with someone she hates (and who hates her), Olive agrees. The thing is: the reality is sometimes vastly different from the perception.

Ah, your classic enemies-to-lovers trope (mixed up with fake marriage – they’re on their “honeymoon” after all – and only one bed) with two people who just loathe each other learning to actually get past perceptions and miscommunications and, well, fall in love. It’s a classic for a reason. I enjoyed the push and pull between Olive and Ethan, and thought their ups and downs were very realistic. I liked the chemistry they had, and the way Olive had to learn to trust herself, and not just fall back on the excuse that she’s “unlucky”. The only thing I wasn’t thrilled with was the fact that Christina Lauren is the pen name of two white women, but Olive and her family are most definitely Latinx. Not a god look, that. Even so, it was a fun little read.