friendship

Audiobook: The Raven Boys

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by Maggie Stiefvater
Read by Will Patton
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: There is swearing, including a couple of f-bombs, talk of teenage drinking, and a murder. It’s in the Teen Bestsellers section of the bookstore.

I wasn’t going to write a post about this one, since I don’t have much new to say from my first review 13 years ago. Then I realized that even though I have reread this a couple of times, I finally experienced it in a different format, and that warranted mentioning. I’ve heard that Patton – who narrates the whole series – is a good narrator and that the audiobook is a good experience, but I haven’t felt the need. Until this year. I decided I needed Maggie’s stories in my life, and I was feeling a gravitational pull towards the Raven Cycle, so I decided to do the audio. And they’re right: Patton is an excellent narrator for this book (and I’m assuming the series – I’ve got Dream Thieves on hold already) and it’s an excellent way to experience Henrietta and Blue and the boys. I plowed through it because I didn’t want to stop listening (because good story + good narrator = a remarkable experience).

I’m glad I finally got around to listening to this one!

Audiobook: Kate & Frida

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by Kim Fay
Read by Kelsey Jaffer & Ines del Castillo
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: There are some emotionally charged situations, including a library fire in Sarajevo. It’s in the Adult Fiction section of the bookstore.

It’s the early 1990s, and Frida Rodriguez is in Paris to try and figure herself out. She wants to be a war correspondent, and she is trying to get someone to help her get into Sarajevo so she can cover the Serbia-Bosnia conflict. While she’s waiting, she writes to the best bookstore in Seattle (which isn’t Elliot Bay Books, but actually is) and Kate Fair answers her letter. Thus begins a correspondence between the two young women where they discuss books, food, life, romance, family, and everything else.

It’s another slight novel that really is more than it seems. There’s a lot of bookish references that I didn’t get – I really wasn’t reading what was popular in the early 1990s, not like now – but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy listening to Kate & Frida write back and forth. I was also in my 20s in the 1990s, and it all felt very, well, real to me. I also adored the narrators. Both women did excellent jobs bringing these letters to life, and giving both Kate and Frida more depth.

Thoroughly enjoyed this one.

Fresh Start

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by Gale Galligan
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy pilfered from the ARC shelves at work
Release date: January 7, 2025
Content: There is some online bullying and talk of periods. It will be in the Middle-Grade Graphic Novel section of the bookstore.

Ollie moves a lot because of her dad’s job and so she’s decided that nothing she does really matters. Embarrassing moment at school? Doesn’t matter; we’re moving soon. Fallout with friends? Doesn’t matter; we’re moving soon. Until her dad takes a job in Virginia (after being overseas for much of Ollie’s 12 years) and her parents buy a house: they’re going to stay put for a while.

Which means Ollie actually needs to adapt and figure out how to make friends and find her place in the world.

This one was super fun and charming. I loved Galligan’s illustrations, and I liked that she balanced Ollie figuring out how to fit in with people who had grown up together and stay true to herself. I loved the relationship Ollie had with her sister, Cat, and that they had some honest struggles with their parents. I liked that Ollie’s mom is Thai, and there was that cultural element as Ollie struggles with not being “Thai” enough.

It was just all-around enjoyable. Highly recommended.

The Teller of Small Fortunes

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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.

Grow Up Luchy Zapata

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by Alexandra Alessandri
First sentence: “It’s a well-known fact that Colombians living outside the motherland will find a way toward each other like magnets.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy pilfered off the shelves at work.
Content: There is some bullying. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

Luchy and Cami have been friends their entire lives – it comes from being Colombian in Miami and having parents who are good friends. But, the summer before sixth grade, Cami goes to Colombia and comes back different: she’s into make-up and boys, and wants to “reinvent herself” now that they’re in middle school. Except Luchy likes things the way they are. She’s content with herself and where she is, and she doesn’t want things to change.

But what starts as a change becomes a huge rift, and things escalate until they get out of control. How does Luchy figure out how to navigate middle school without her best friend.

I was talking to a librarian of a K-8 school in a nearby town at the store the other day, and we were lamenting how many middle-grade books had characters who have crushes in them. It’s all fine and good to write characters with crushes, but sometimes, you just need to have a story about kids who are friends and not make it about relationships. Thankfully, Alessandri stuck to the friendship element of the story (Cami has crushes, but it wasn’t a big deal to the story) and doesn’t go down the “who likes who” road. I’m not saying there’s not a place for that; I’m just a little tired of reading books where that is a main element. I like that this one focused on Luchy’s struggle with her heritage – her parents didn’t speak Spanish at home and so she never learned, and she doesn’t really feel connected to Colombia – as well as her friendship with Cami. It’s a good portrayal of the struggle that sixth grade and middle school often is, and I’m glad Alessandri didn’t gloss over the friendship struggles that come along with that.

A really solid middle grade book.

The Pumpkin Princess and the Forever Night

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by Steven Banbury
First sentence: “She ran.”
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Content: It’s a little long, and mildly scary at moments. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

Eve was in an orphanage, but she was incredibly unhappy. She had several failed escape attempts, but one Hallows Eve night, she ran away and straight into the path of the Pumpkin King. He was impressed with her spirit, and adopted her on the spot: he needed an heir, she needed a home. It was perfect. Except that she’s living and Hallowell Valley is a haven for the undead – witches, ghosts, gouls, vampires, and werewolves, and the like. She stubbornly makes her home there, and even makes a couple of friends. That is, until things go sideways, and it looks like someone it trying to take the Pumpkin King’s kingdom away. Can Eve and her friends figure out what’s going on before it’s too late?

To be honest: I thought this was a graphic novel when I picked it up. It’s not – just in case you were wondering. But it is a very cozy, very sweet little story of found family and learning to love and making good change where you’re at. I thought it was cute and charming, but I’m not entirely sure it’s going to be one that kids will gravitate to. Maybe certain kids, and I’m sure it would be a very fun Halloween read-aloud. But, I am not sure that it’s one of those books that kids are going to love. I might be wrong. At any rate, I thought it was a clever idea, well-executed, and very sweet in the end.

The Bones Beneath My Skin

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by TJ Klune
First sentence: “He sang along with the radio.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Release date: February 4, 2025
Review copy provided by the publisher.
Content: There is swearing, including multiple f-bombs; lots of violence; and on-screen sex. It will be in the Science Fiction/Fantasy section of the bookstore.

The thing I have come to believe, after having read 8 of the 11 books Klune has published (I didn’t finish the werewolf series), is that he is deeply interested in Humanity and how we express our humanness. In many cases he has hope: his characters are always flawed, but somehow they find their way to a Better World. Mostly that world is through found family because many of the humans in Klune’s books suck and are terrible people. But that’s the way of the world, isn’t it? We are lost souls, surrounded by people who want to stop us, hurt us, reject us, and yet we find our People and Make It Through and somehow find Happiness.

This one – even though it’s a republished book that Klune wrote in 2018 – is no different. The setting is different: It’s 1995 and Nate has just been fired from his job at the Washington Post. His parents have also died – it was a murder-suicide – and left him the family cabin in a remote part of Oregon. So, he heads out there and discovers two people – a man and a girl – in his cabin. He doesn’t kick them out., and that decision changes his life forever.

That’s the basic plot without giving too much away. (Saying it’s Stranger Things meets Close Encounters of the Third Kind but gay would be a decent elevator pitch.) It’s a good book – I think his later books are better, but that’s not to say this isn’t good – but it’s a weird one. I don’t think this one is going to be for everyone. It’s also coming on the heels of Somewhere Beyond the Sea, which is amazing, so there’s a lot to live up to. But if you’ve committed to reading everything Klune writes (and why haven’t you?) then it’s a good one. It’s more action-packed and less ruminative than his other books, but there are still quirky-charming characters and a love story at the center of it. It’s about finding family and home and happiness, and who doesn’t want to read about that?

So, while it’s not my favorite one of Klune’s books, it’s still a good one.

Magnolia Wu Unfolds it All

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by Chanel Miller
First sentence: “Magnolia Wu was almost ten.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: It’s heavily illustrated, short, and with lots of white space. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore, but I’d give it to a precocious younger reader as well.

While Magnolia likes her family’s laundromat, she feels like nothing ever happens. Then, the summer that she turns 10, she and her new friend Iris decide to return all the lost socks that have been left. What follows is an adventure as Magnolia and Iris learn about their neighbors in their New York City neighborhood.

It’s a cute little book, full of fun illustrations. There’s not much depth to it: Magnolia and Iris solve one little sock mystery after another while Magnolia learns the value of hardworking, caring parents, and Iris and Magnolia navigate a friendship.

Cute, especially for those beginning/struggling readers.

The Cookie Crumbles

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by Tracy Badua and Alechia Dow
First sentence: “Generally speaking, cookies don’t kill people.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There is talk of almost-murder, and there are some intense situations. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

Laila loves to bake. Lucy is a budding reporter. They both want to get into the prestigious Sunderland boarding school, and the cookie competition hosted by the school, with the grand prize of a scholarship, is the only way they can make it work. The plan was for Laila to bake and be brilliant and for Lucy to write and be brilliant. What they didn’t anticipate was one of the judges – Chef Remy – almost dying after eating one of Laila’s cookies. Now, they need to figure out who tried to kill Chef Remy (it wasn’t Laila!) – especially since there was a storm that wiped out all the ways to get into and out of Sunderland.

This was a fun little mystery. The stakes were high – a lot of the other kids had motives to hurt Chef Remy – but it wasn’t so high that it would scare younger kids. The clues were there to figure it out if you were paying attention (I did), but it was clever enough to keep me entertained. I liked that the authors conceived of a clever way to get parents out of the picture – it was kind of like a sleep-away camp for the competition – so that it wasn’t weird that the kids were running around the school by themselves. I liked the alternating chapters between Laila and Lucy, and I thought it was all done very well.

A really solid Middle Grade mystery.

The Thirteenth Circle

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by MarcyKate Connolly and Kathryn Holmes
First sentence: “There was an alien in Cat Mulvaney’s bedroom.”
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Content: There are some intense moments. It’s in the Middle Grade section of the bookstore.

Dani desperately wants her parents to take her interest in science seriously. Cat desperately wants her father to pay attention to her. And so both need to win the McMurray Youth Science competition and get into ScienceU. The problem: they’re working together and Cat wants to prove that aliens exist, and Dani knows that they don’t. It just so happens that every 13 years crop circles appear in a nearby field, and they’re due to appear this year. And Cat’s figured out when and where. All they have to do is gather evidence… and see whose theory is the solid one.

It’s a mild spoiler to say that this is solidly realistic fiction; there are, in fact, no aliens. But, Dani and Cat do uncover a conspiracy and they do end up realizing that working together is better than working against each other. I liked this one well enough; I liked how Dani and Cat would gather evidence and then work out hypotheses based on the evidence. It was unbelievable how much time these 13-year-olds spent running around the town late at night, but I can forgive that. And the whole conspiracy was a bit over the top, though it fit the story.

Will it be my favorite book this year? No, but it’s a good one.