Firekeeper’s Daughter (Book Review)

I’ve had Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley on my TBR since I first saw the cover, which is striking and beautiful and unlike any other cover I’ve seen. Since book covers often follow trends (remember the post-Hunger Games YA landscape when every book had a circle on the cover? Or that truly terrible period of time when covers almost always had character’s torso with the top of their head cut off? Lookin’ at you, City of Bones), seeing something that stands out so drastically—the color! The shapes! The butterfly! The Rubin Face!—is always exciting, particularly when it’s this visually pleasing. I put it on my list and then for some reason it never quite made it to the top even as I kept seeing rave reviews. Still, you can only see a beautiful cover like that so many times before picking it up. 

What’s it about?

Daunis has just graduated high school, but her ambitious college plans have to be deferred after the one-two punch of her uncle’s death—apparently an overdose/relapse—and her grandmother’s stroke. The only thing that takes the sting off the decision is that now she and her best friend Lily can take classes together at the local college… and Daunis gets to help welcome new boy Jamie into the community. But Daunis is warned that bad things come in threes, and it proves true: Lily is shot and killed by her ex-boyfriend right in front of Daunis, and Daunis becomes involved in an FBI investigation into the laced meth that has made its way into Daunis’ neighborhood as well as other native communities. 

How’s the audio?

I listened to the audiobook, which is read by Isabella Star LaBlanc. For the most part, I enjoyed the performance. Unlike a lot of narrators I’ve listened to, LaBlanc doesn’t do a distinct voice for every character. Rather, she has a couple of dialogue voices that she employs for all the characters, one for the men and boys, one for the women and girls, and one for the elders or anyone else making a grand statement. This works fairly well for the most part; LaBlanc flawlessly reads all the various languages included, and her intonation is expressive. I never lost track of the dialogue or the characters. My only complaint is that the voice she often uses for the elder native characters has a strange, slow cadence that struck me as a bit stereotypical.

What’d I think?

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

It’s hard to know how to rate this book. The parts that are good are excellent. The parts that aren’t good don’t make any sense. I love the way Boulley dives into Ojibwe culture and the way that Daunis advocates for victims and her community when those around her want to look only for the worst. That being said… the focus on romance is frustrating, and the dramatic ending only works if you accept that the villain’s motivations and decisions are puzzling at best, at worst nonsensical and calculated for drama. The atmosphere, the cover, and the culture would give Firekeeper’s Daughter four and a half to five stars, but the romance and the conclusion take it down steeply.

First things first: the way that native culture takes center stage is fantastic. In Firekeeper’s Daughter, Boulley faces on the beauty and struggles unique to the Ojibwe community. Daunis is knowledgeable about traditional medicines. She is a Jingle dancer. She comes from a family of Firekeepers, and we see these ceremonies multiple times in the novel. Ojibwe language appears throughout Firekeeper’s Daughter (and, since I listened to the audiobook, I got to hear it spoken, which was extra special). Daunis has nothing but love for her community, and that shines through Firekeeper’s Daughter. I felt I learned a lot with this novel. I love it when fiction shows me people and parts of the world that I don’t know about, and this was unquestionably my favorite part of Boulley’s novel. 

Other Birds (Book Review)

Like most quote-unquote “literary” books that I read, I read Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen for book club. I haven’t liked a lot of the book club books; personally, I think whomever choses the books for Barnes and Noble could do a loooooot better. I’ve actively liked maybe three of their picks in the last three/three-and-a-half years. Every time I start a new one, I’m trepidatious. Is this going to be something great like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow or The Vanishing Half, or is it going to be torturous experience like Florence Adler Swims Forever or Matrix? Other Birds landed somewhere in the middle. It was fine. I was a little bored at times, but on the whole it was a nice book. If I’d picked it for myself, I might have been disappointed. Right off the heels of Mercury Pictures Presents, however, Other Birds is a relief. 

What’s it about?

After Zoey is rushed out of the house by her father and step-mother, she moves into a room her late mother left for her on a small island. The Dellawisp is an unusual residence, home to a number of unusual people who have been handpicked by the mysterious author Roscoe Avanger, whose novel put this island on the map. In addition to Zoey there’s Charlotte (an unemployed henna artist running from her past), Mac (a chef perpetually covered in cornmeal), Frasier (who has a strange obsession with the unusual birds that run amok on the premises), Lizbeth (a busybody and a hoarder), Lucy (Lizbeth’s sister who never leaves her room), and Oliver (who ran away from the Dellawisp first chance he got). When one of the occupants dies the night Zoey arrives, she becomes convinced that there’s more to this little community than first meets the eye.

What’d I think?

I generally love magical realism, and I once saw Other Birds described as Only Murders in the Building meets [something else that I haven’t read and don’t remember]. I went in very optimistic, and at first it seemed like this was going to be a win for me. Unfortunately, that Only Murders comparison fits the description of the novel better than the novel itself. Other Birds is not a murder mystery. It teases that for a bit, but discards that idea fairly quickly for neighborly bonding. It is also decidedly not a comedy. It’s not that it tries to be and fails: it’s a very sincere novel that makes no attempt at humor. Not everything has to be funny, but it’s a very odd choice to compare an earnest novel to a famously hilarious murder mystery comedy. Comparisons to well-known and well-liked stories is always a boost, but I think it does a disservice to the novel being comp’d if the comparison titles prime the reader to expect something that won’t be delivered. 

The First to Die at the End (Mini Book Review)

You wouldn’t know it from how late this review is compared to this novel’s October 4 release date, but I was massively excited to read The First to Die at the End by Adam Silvera. Silvera is one of my favorite writers, and even though I would rather have had the last book of the Infinity Son trilogy, I was pretty psyched for this one. I preordered it so that I would get the nifty hourglass, and I got the chance to sit in on a chat that Silvera did with Barnes and Noble booksellers. Usually the author talks are over my head, but I have a reputation for being a massive Adam Silvera fan (and, more specifically, for pushing History is All You Left Me on anyone who even alludes to liking sad stories) so I got invited. It’s always super fun to “meet” favorite authors (even if it was virtual and I was off-screen and silent the whole time so he didn’t actually even know I was on the call until after the fact when I tagged him on Instagram in my excitement), and listening to his enthusiasm made me even more excited for a book I was already pretty excited for. 

What’s it about?

Set in the same universe as Silvera’s massively popular TikTok sensation They Both Die at the End, The First to Die at the End takes place as Deathcast is first launching. The world is conflicted about this new death-predicting technology. Some, like Orion—who has a life-threatening heart condition—welcome it: knowing the day of their death gives them a freedom on every other day, allowing them to shed a lot of the doubt and uncertainty that they carry on the day-to-day. Others, like Valentino—whose ultra-conservative parents believe that Deathcast is sacrilegious and evil—are more skeptical. Still, for better or for worse the world is certainly going to change following the launch. For Orion or Valentino, the world is going to end. After a chance meeting/flirtation in Times Square, one of the boys receives the very first Death Cast call and together the boys decide to make the most of the hours they have left. 

What’d I think?

I liked it. What did you think I was going to say after that introduction? That I didn’t like it? Come on. As in his previous novels, Adam Silvera expertly taps into common anxieties and emotions and creates a deeply heartfelt and heartbreaking story. The premise of The First to Die at the End is inherently more tragic than They Both Die at the End, in my opinion. Dying young isn’t a bundle of laughs, obviously, but for me personally the idea of outliving a loved one is far scarier. They Both Die at the End duplicates its central trauma: both Rufus and Mateo are young men cut down far too young. The First to Die at the End replicates that but introduces a second tragedy: how do you live when someone you love has died? This tragedy adds a whole score of new questions for Silvera to play with. Do you still give your heart away when you know it will be broken? How to you cash in the gift of life when it comes at the expense of someone else? Is it easier to live life to the fullest when it’s your last day or when you have countless days to come? 

Dark and Shallow Lies (Book Review)

To be totally honest, the premise of Dark and Shallow Lies by Ginny Myers Sain didn’t really catch me. Setting-heavy fiction isn’t something that particularly appeals to me, and the witchy small-town Louisiana setting is a major selling point of this one. Still, I had to read it for work so I did. Considering that the last two books I had to read for work were All of Us Villains by Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, Dark and Shallow Lies had a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, I’m not sure it did. It’s fine, but it’s nothing to write home about.

What’s it about?

Grey was born in La Cachette, Louisiana, a town full of psychics and secrets, but after her mother’s death she lives with her father and returns to La Cachette only in the summertime. This summer is different, however; her best friend (and “twin flame”) Elora has disappeared and is presumed dead even though no body has been found. Grey, spurred on by what are possibly psychic visions of the night Elora disappeared, becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of Elora’s disappearance… and, with it, the drownings of two other children a decade before. 

What’d I think?

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

I liked the setting. As I said above, I don’t personally care all that much about setting. I’m not a visual person and I’ve moved often enough that to me, one place is pretty much like another. Even with that in mind, I can see that Sain did a good job with La Cachette. The town’s closeness and culture absolutely inform the story, and give it a distinct feeling. The mysteries could not occur in the same way anywhere else, because they are tied inextricably to both the magic of the town and the tight-knit, claustrophobic community. The thin lines between truth and fiction further feed the confusion, and Sain’s brief inclusion of Cajun culture and Louisiana dialect are welcome.

I liked the pacing. I expected Dark and Shallow Lies to be a fantasy novel, but it reads like a thriller. I thought the magical powers were going to play a bigger part, and while they’re important they contribute more to the overall vibe than the plot. As Grey investigates Elora’s disappearance, she uncovers secret after unsettling secret, many of which ask her to reevaluate the things she knew best: the intentions of people she loves, the lore of her town, even her relationship with Elora. The story builds bigger with each chapter, and there’s never long between twists, meaning that this is a novel that keeps you reading. I wanted to read through this quickly because book club was looming and I hadn’t even started that book yet, but I was able to make it through this one in a day and a half because it is so fast-moving and exciting.

I didn’t like the obviousness of some of the false leads. This point doesn’t need much farther elaboration, but I’m going to give some anyway. Grey chases down some leads that I could tell immediately were red herrings. I always like when the author lays a track that the reader can follow if they’re paying attention, but this was a little too easy. One of the biggest *gasp here* moments was something I’d predicted in the first few chapters, and I was unshakably onto the most suspicious players long before Grey turned any attention towards them. I narrowly missed predicting the actual murderer, but I’ll get into that in the marked spoiler section.

All Our Hidden Gifts (Book Review)

Since I work at Barnes and Noble I try to make a point of reading at least one of their monthly picks. I don’t always do it, but when I do I tend to go for the young adult choice because that’s both my section at work and because it’s what I read by choice. I occasionally go into it reluctantly, like last month when I made a rare foray into horror. This month, though, the book already appealed to me: it’s a fantasy novel full of magic and magic that touts a nonbinary love interest and has some beautiful cover art. I don’t know if All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’Donoghue would have made it to the top of my TBR if it hadn’t been a monthly pick, but that put it on my radar and I read it very happily.

What’s it about?

Maeve is a bit of a problem child. Her siblings are all major overachievers, and she’s struggling even at the expensive private school her parents sent her to in an attempt to straighten her out. She’s not much better with her social life, having semi-recently thrown over her best friend to try to climb the social ladder. Things change when she finds an old deck of tarot cards while cleaning out the school basement for detention. Maeve has an uncanny ability to memorize and interpret the cards, and her readings become something of a novelty at school until, goaded by her new friends and under pressure to maintain her nebulous new popularity, Maeve does a reading for her ex-best-friend Lily that goes sideways when Maeve draws an unfamiliar card and in the heat of the moment wishes that Lily would disappear.

What’d I think?

I really enjoyed All Our Hidden Gifts. I was first struck by the voice. Maeve is a great protagonist, and by that I mean she’s a little bit terrible but very compelling and somehow, at the end of the day, someone you can root for. When we first meet her she’s in detention for throwing a shoe at a teacher, and she’s hilariously unrepentant. Her voice flows freely, letting the reader easily sympathize with her while being fully aware that this is a girl who makes very questionable decisions. One of my biggest pet peeves with fiction is when writers can’t quite figure out how to keep a character’s POV without buying into all their shortcomings; I want to be able to tell that something is intended as a character flaw, and not something that the author is excusing. O’Donoghue never has to step out of Maeve’s voice to moralize her decisions, but she also never gives the impression that we’re supposed to agree with everything that Maeve does. It’s a hard line to walk, and I really appreciate when it’s done well.

Anthem (Mini Book Review)

Can someone please check on whomever chooses the book club reads for Barnes and Noble? I hope they’re okay. Because you can only pick so many stories about doom, despair, and sexual abuse before it becomes a disturbing pattern. Noah Hawley’s Anthem is yet another immensely depressing, psychologically scarring book that—while well-written and thoughtful—tricked me into thinking I hate reading. Listen: I like fiction that asks me to reflect on the real world. I like stories to have a point to make or a moral thesis or an interesting observation about humanity. What I don’t like is when a book is so bleak that it reminds me of the worst bits of the real world without anything hopeful or entertaining to offset it. Anthem is, among other things, about a flux of suicides caused by young people losing any remaining hope in the future. It does a terrifyingly good job of illustrating why there isn’t much hope for the future, but is less successful in other areas.

Honestly, I almost wish that Hawley’s writing was worse. When a bad writer asks you to imagine the worst possible future, it’s easy to say that will never happen or humanity is better than that. But Hawley describes a possible post-pandemic and post-Trump future far too well. He makes it far too easy to think this could happen, and almost tips into this will happen. And when the this is an epidemic of suicides and hopelessness and increased political divides, shootings, and bombings and the imminent threat of civil war, it’s more than a little upsetting. It feels too real, and it is not something that I want to be real. It’s a future that I’m already scared enough is coming. I read because I want to get away from the worst of the real world. I enjoy fiction that asks me to wrestle with the flaws of the world; I dislike being made to drown in them. 

And drown I did. There’s nothing like getting suddenly hit with a laundry list of reasons to be pessimistic about the world, prepared by a character who, in the wake of his sister’s suicide, gets put in an institution for the clinically anxious. It’s a depressing world, made more so by feeling so real, and then we’re asked to view it through the eyes of someone even more than usually sensitive to it. 

Still, I was doing okay for the first half of the book. I had to take mental health breaks. I watched some comparatively optimistic TV shows—Grey’s Anatomy, Dickinson—and soldiered on. It’s not an enjoyable book, but it is good. It lost me in the second half, which gets significantly more surreal and drifts in several directions, but overall it is good (and the first part, while irredeemably depressing, is excellently written).

The Nobleman’s Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks (Book Review)

Several years ago, spurred on by a multitude of positive reviews by book bloggers, I took a chance on The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee. I specifically remember picking the book up, reading the first few pages, thinking this doesn’t seem like my thing, and then buying it anyway. It often takes me a bit to get into my favorite books, and I had seen rave reviews from people whose opinions I nearly always agreed with, so I figured it was worth the shot despite my not-so-hot first reaction to the cover and first three pages. It was definitely worth the shot. It ended up being my second favorite book from that year,* which is particularly notable since I read it in January, meaning that it made a strong positive impression on me and then held onto it for twelve months (and 2018 was a great reading year for me; that was the year I discovered Leigh Bardugo, Adam Silvera, Madeline Miller, and Taylor Jenkins Reid, who have all become favorites).

*beat only by Six of Crows, which has kept the coveted ‘Audra’s current favorite book’ title for going on four years now, which is an impressive streak. 

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue is a singularly charming book. It has a little bit of everything going on. It’s a queer historical romance settled into a swashbuckling adventure story and sandwiched into a bildungsroman with some magical realism thrown in for good measure. Most impressive about it, though, is the titular gentleman Monty, who is a riot. He’s exactly my favorite character type. If a book has a quippy, irreverent guy who uses his jokes and poor impulse control to mask his insecurities and secret self-loathing… sign me the heck up. Monty is a great protagonist because he’s lovable enough to root for, but he makes so many ludicrously terrible decisions that he feeds the ridiculously fun plot in the most delightfully frustrating way. And his character development is great, taking him from a shallow, selfish cad who makes questionable decisions for all the wrong reasons to someone who thinks a little more, cares a little more, and makes questionable decisions for all the right reasons. All this to say I totally fell in love with this story. Mackenzi Lee immediately went on my I will all read her stuff list. 

When the sequel to Gentleman’s Guide, The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy was released, I read it immediately. It is a decidedly different book. Because it is helmed by Monty’s decidedly more levelheaded younger sister Felicity, both the narration and the direction of the story are different. Monty is driven by poor impulse control, romance, and a proclivity towards juvenile antics. Felicity is mature and single-minded, if a bit egotistical. Monty is a rich lord to whom doors open until he screws things up. Felicity is a woman who will do anything to force open the doors closed to her by her sex. She gets in trouble by being overambitious and demanding opportunities the world does not want to give her, and as a result Lady’s Guide is a lot more deliberate than the novel that came before it. It is, however, equally fun. Felicity goes to sea with pirates and ends up on a scientific mission for sea monsters, so the overall effect is just as wildly adventurous.

And that brings us to The Nobleman’s Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks, the third and final novel in this series. Unsurprisingly, it follows the final Montague sibling. I knew that it would have a different feel than either of the first two books because that’s how this series works, but beyond that I had no guess. Felicity is a major character in Monty’s book, so when it was her turn for a starring vehicle, I already had an idea of who she was as a character. Not so for Adrian, who was an infant when we last saw him. Up until this book, he was more plot device than character. Because Monty’s father had another son, he could disinherit Monty. I don’t even remember if Adrian even had a name back then. He was just “the Goblin,” a yowling baby whose existence was a metaphorical axe hanging over Monty’s head. So I was excited, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into for this one.

So what was I getting myself into?

Adrian’s severe anxiety has always gotten in the way of his entering politics and fighting for a better world in the way he’s always hoped. When he receives the personal effects of his late mother, who suffered from the same anxiety, he becomes obsessed with the half-broken spyglass she was obsessed with before him. His investigation of it leads him to the brother he never knew he had, and he decides to throw caution to the wind and travel across the world to the search for the remains of a shipwreck that he’s certain will have answers about his mother’s sudden death.

What’d I think?

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

The House in the Cerulean Sea (Book Review)

I heard a lot of great things about The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune before I read it. My sister-in-law recommended it to me. I saw it compared to The Umbrella Academy. A coworker told me that it’s like a more-diverse Harry Potter. V.E. Schwab wrote a blurb for it. Barnes & Noble picked it as the fiction novel of the month for January. So clearly this was one I needed to read.

What’s it about?

Linus Baker is a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He’s been there for years, and since he has a reputation for keeping his head down and falling in line, he is selected for a particularly difficult case. The higher ups send him to report on an unusual orphanage that houses six particularly strange children, one of whom is the antichrist.

What’d I think?

A/⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The first word that comes to mind when describing The House in the Cerulean Sea is “wholesome.” Because it is categorized as a fantasy novel, I expected a very different kind of story. Fantasy tends to be rather plot-driven, with an obvious villain or a threat to all of humanity. The House in the Cerulean Sea takes a different approach. You definitely could not classify it as anything but fantasy—very few of the major characters are actually human—but the overall shape of the story is more akin to a bildungsroman or even a romance. The main character leaves an unfulfilling life to take a trip. There, he meets people who change him for the better, and he has to reconcile the old ideas he had about his life with possibilities that have been opened to him for the first time. It’s a family story more than anything else, and it feels like a romance, except filled out with fantasy trappings where romances often have my personal pet peeves like instalove or pointless drama caused by easily avoidable misunderstandings.

Actually, it’s remarkable how much I loved The House in the Cerulean Sea considering that it does flirt with storylines I often dislike. I usually dislike fictional children, and The House in the Cerulean Sea has six. When Linus first arrives at the island and meets the children and their two caregivers—Arthur, the head of the orphanage, and Zoe, an island sprite—I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to keep track of everyone. It’s a bit overwhelming to meet eight characters within the span of a chapter or two, but Klune does it brilliantly. Linus is overwhelmed, and the reader is right there with him. Also, we get a brief insight into each character, and the more time Linus spends time with each individual, the more they build off those first impressions. Of course, by necessity, some of the characters are expanded slightly more than others, but by the end even the children with the least pagetime feel like fully-fledged individuals. They’re also childlike without being annoyingly so.

Kind of a Big Deal (Book Review)

This cover–designed by Aurora Parlagreco and illustrated by Ana Hard–is the best part of the novel. The second best part? The graphic novel chapter, drawn by Samantha Richardson.

Shannon Hale’s Kind of a Big Deal should have been my perfect book. It’s about a Broadway-loving girl whose amazing high school life led her to believe she’d make it big in the real world; when she doesn’t, she moves to a small town and stumbles across a bookstore with magical books that literally suck her into their pages. If that wasn’t written specifically for me (or people like me, whatever) I don’t know what was. I mean, there’s even some Greek mythology thrown in there for some good measure. I was so sold on this book before I even started it. It would have to majorly underperform to be able to underwhelm me.

C/⭐⭐⭐

Unfortunately, it does underperform. Kind of a Big Deal feels less like one cohesive novel and more like a collection of discarded drafts. Protagonist Josie finds herself in a number of different stories–including a bodice-ripper, a graphic novel, and a post-apocalyptic YA dystopia, among others–and there’s only the barest attempt to tie the stories back to her real life. The only real takeaway from them is that her love interest is always played by her ex-boyfriend, indicating that she’s still in love with him. This could have been a brilliant storytelling move if these forays into fiction had told me something deeper about Josie, but they… don’t. Very occasionally, there will be a slight moment that ties back into Josie’s real life, but those are few and far between. They feel like afterthoughts. Some of Josie’s books feel like they’re supposed to be humorous parodies of existing genres, but those unfortunately fall flat as well. Josie spends a significant amount of time in a YA zombie romance that exists, apparently, to lampoon bad YA paranormal romances. The problem with that is that the reader has to read a bad YA paranormal romance for nearly fifty pages. It’s less a parody than an example. The same is true with the other genres. Josie’s magical journeys don’t illuminate any parts of her character, and they don’t have a whole lot to say about the genres being parodied, either. It’s hard to figure out their point. I did like the graphic novel bit, though. The illustrations are delightful.

Cemetery Boys (Book Review)

Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas was Barnes and Noble’s teen book club choice for October, which means I’ve been seeing it everywhere. It’s gotten very good reviews, it’s got a very interesting cover, and the summary sounded really interesting so I figured I’d pick it up whenever it became available at the library… which thankfully didn’t take too long.

A/⭐⭐⭐⭐

I’m not actually associated with the teen book club, which I have mixed feelings about. I love YA a lot more than books targeted towards adults, which means that the books that I do read for work rarely interest me all that much whereas the YA ones are almost always something I’d likely pick up on my own. But I also live in Texas, and from what I’ve experienced both firsthand and from overhearing the YA discussions… it’s probably a good thing I don’t facilitate. A major reason I love YA is how diverse it is, and there are a lot of conservative people here. My book club read The Pull of The Stars and Leave the World Behind recently; the former has a lesbian couple and the latter mentions one, and both novels are by queer writers. Even this tiny bit of engagement was bewildering for the (straight, white, middle-class, female) group. I got the impression they thought they were reading something taboo and instead of actually engaging with the novel’s content (both novels had real points to make about societal norms and homophobia), they decided that it was more fulfilling to just gape I can’t believe it’s not heterosexual… or maybe it is? for like twenty minutes. The YA group, upsettingly, doesn’t seem much better. Apparently they once decided to skip the corporate-chosen book because the summary sounded gay boring. For the record, the book was Loveboat, Taipei and it is extremely straight. The protagonist is Chinese, though. I don’t know if that had anything to do with the group’s reticence. I hope not, but I suspect it did.

The point being, I can’t imagine reading a book like Cemetery Boys with one of those groups. Its queerness, its Latinx-ness* is so baked into every part of the novel that I’d be afraid to hear the group’s hot takes.

*For the record, I know some people don’t like the ‘x’ at the end of Latinx. Personally, I like the gender-neutrality of it, but I acknowledge that this is not my culture so it’s in no way my call. That said, Aiden Thomas uses it throughout Cemetery Boys, so it feels appropriate to follow suit for this review.

I loved getting to read it on my own. Hopefully some of those I can’t believe it’s not heterosexual people read it—or something like it—and manage to get over some of their deep-seated biases, but I’m selfishly glad that I don’t have to sit there with a customer-service-approved fake smile and nod like, “Yes, it is wild that a Latinx, trans author wrote about a Latinx, trans character. Great insight, Karen.”

Cemetery Boys actually illustrates really well why fiction should be more diverse. It’s not about ticking boxes. It’s not even just about representation, although that alone is enough reason to need more of it. It’s because diversity increases and deepens the stories we can tell. Cemetery Boys follows Yadriel, a young man desperate to prove himself to his family by undergoing a ritual that will prove both his magical power and his maleness. He tries to solve the mystery of his cousin’s sudden, violent death both out of an obligation to his family and because doing so will guarantee him the recognition and respect that is currently denied him. There is no version of Cemetery Boys that could exist if Yadriel were white or cisgender (let alone both) because both the plot and the emotional beats are tied so closely to his culture and identity.

Burn (Book Review)

Patrick Ness is one of my all-time favorite writers. A Monster Calls is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I am endlessly amazed by Ness’ creativity and pure talent. All his books are extremely different (The Rest of Us Just Live Here is a hilarious meta take on fantasy; And the Ocean Was Our Sky is essentially Moby Dick from the whales’ perspective; Release is at once a contemporary coming-of-age and a fantasy retelling of Mrs. Dalloway; and A Monster Calls is about a young boy making sense of his mother’s imminent death), but they’re all absolutely amazing. I’ll read literally anything he writes, but I was especially excited for Burn because I adore fantasy and I’ve been on a major fantasy kick lately. I was not wrong to be excited, because Burn is vaulted over my high expectations.

A/⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

What’s it about?

In an alternate universe, dragons have lived alongside humans for as long as anyone can remember. They’re feared and disliked, but there has long been a truce. Having fallen on hard times, Sarah and her father are forced to hire a dragon for some cheap farm labor. She is unaware that a teenage assassin, a member of a dragon-worshipping cult, is coming to kill her and that the hired claw has come because of a prophecy that predicts that she will save the world.

What’d I think?

This book is just so good. I shouldn’t be surprised by how tightly plotted, well written, and thematically surprising it is considering Ness’ phenomenal body of work, but… wow. There is a lot going on in Burn. There are a lot of characters and they all have complex emotional journeys, but the balance is masterful. Sometimes books with large casts and a revolving POV have dead spots where one character can’t hold interest as well as the others, but that’s absolutely not the case here. The storylines all click together like puzzle pieces, and they are all sufficiently interesting even before they come together.

Burn takes place in 1957, during the Cold War, and Ness makes excellent use of the historical period. The threat of nuclear war is a major part of Burn; humanity threatens itself so thoroughly that dragons are way down the list of secondary concerns. One of the major themes of the novel is humanity’s great potential for violence and destruction; kindness, love, empathy… those are choices people make even when up against great pain and danger.

The tension with the Russians isn’t the only product of the era present in Burn. Sarah (who is biracial) and her best friend Jason (a Japanese-American whose mother died in an internment camp) spend their lives dodging the racist attentions of a local sheriff. Nelson is living out of his car after being kicked out of his home by homophobic parents. Nuclear war is not the only destruction humanity is capable of; there’s a lot of ugliness and violence even in the day-to-day, and the little scenes of people triumphing over discrimination are nearly as triumphant as the obvious fantasy-protagonist-saving-the-world moments. If anything, they’re more affirming. Of course I want Sarah to save the world, but on an emotional level I care more about her getting the upper hand against Deputy Kelby and about Malcom confronting and coming to terms with his religious brainwashing.

Blue Lily, Lily Blue (Book Review)

I got really into Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Cycle this month. A friend recommended it to me a while ago but I put it off because I’d disliked one of Stiefvater’s earlier books. Then, because I’ve been really craving a new fantasy series, I gave The Raven Boys a shot. I liked it enough to read the second book, The Dream Thieves, which got me obsessed. I got the remaining two books from the library so I wouldn’t have to wait between them and read them back-to-back. Even though this is technically a review for Blue Lily, Lily Blue, I read The Raven King so immediately afterward that it’s entirely possible that there is some unintentional bleed.

Anyway, here we go.

What’s it about?

Blue Lily, Lily Blue picks up shortly after the events of The Dream Thieves: Maura is gone, having left to look underground for Blue’s father Artemus. She’s been gone far longer than expected, and Blue is worried. Meanwhile, Gansey is still searching for Glendower, Adam is honing his powers, and the Gray Man’s ex-employer has arrived in Henrietta to cause trouble.

What’d I think?

By this point in the series, I love the characters and it’s enough to merely spend time with them in their world. This is always a good thing, but particularly because the main plot in Blue Lily, Lily Blue feels the teensiest bit irrelevant. It’s not bad. In fact, I found it quite compelling while I was reading. In searching for Glendower, Gansey finds another cave. He, Blue, and Noah specifically put a lot of effort into obtaining access to said cave, which leads to the introduction of a few new characters who—at least in my opinion—never really pay off. I expected Gwenllian to have a much larger impact than she did, at least in The Raven King if not in Blue Lily, Lily Blue. I was adequately shocked by her discovery, but in retrospect I do sort of wonder what the point is. Yeah, she helps Blue with her powers some, but… she had more potential than that. I was surprised and a tiny bit disappointed.

Thankfully, that’s the only disappointment. I have mixed feelings overall about the revolving door of villains in this series, but Blue Lily, Lily Blue gets it absolutely right. Some of the series’ baddies are very effective and others I found lacking. Barrington Whelk from book one was okay. Neither antagonist from book two is truly villainous: Kavinsky wasn’t a good guy, for sure, but he was more dark mirror than villain, and he was a fascinating character. The Gray Man was hard to take seriously as a bad guy because of how ridiculously forthright he was about his murderous occupation, and works better now that he’s hero-adjacent.

Piper, though. Is it weird that I love Piper? Although she’s initially introduced merely as Greenmantle’s wife, she eventually supersedes him. So many movies and books give mob bosses ditzy blonde girlfriends who don’t do anything but stand to the side and look pretty, and I was fully prepared for Piper to fill that trope. Because that’s what mob boss’ girlfriends do: slouch a little, whine a little, and add some arguably unnecessary sex appeal to the proceedings. Piper emerging as an unexpected evil badass was a thrilling surprise. Greenmantle isn’t bad, as far as villains go, but Piper blows him out of the water and having read the whole series I can say with full information and full confidence that Piper is the best villain of the bunch.

The Dream Thieves (Book Review)

After seeing it repeatedly recommended, I finally gave The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater a try and now I’m glad I did. I mostly enjoyed it. My overall impression was that it has a lot of promise but doesn’t entirely capitalize on it because it leaves its most interesting characters on the sidelines and never quite achieves narrative urgency. Even though I liked The Raven Boys, if you had asked me at nearly any point in the middle of it whether I planned to continue with the story, I likely would’ve said I was going to quit after one. Then the last page happened, and I changed my mind and got The Dream Thieves from the library almost immediately. Now I’m reporting back to say that I was right to do so, because The Dream Thieves is a marked improvement.

Spoilers for The Raven Boys, by the way. It’s hard to discuss a sequel without discussing at least in passing what happened in the first book. Mild spoilers for The Dream Thieves will be indicated.

What’s it about?

The Raven Boys are still searching for the ancient king Glendower, and after the showdown at the end of book one, when Adam made a mysterious sacrifice to awaken the ley line, sailing is a little less smooth. Tensions between Adam and Gansey make themselves known, Blue questions her position in the group, and Ronan falls in with dangerous company as he juggles secrets and tries to make sense of his magical dreams. Meanwhile, a hit man rolls into town and Blue’s fatal crush on Gansey becomes impossible to ignore.

What’d I think?

I suspected that this series would get better in later books, and I was right. The very end of The Raven Boys indicated that Ronan—who had previously been a constant but mysterious presence—was going to carry more of the main narrative going forward. There’s nothing wrong with Gansey, per se, but he always interested me the least of the four Raven Boys, and Ronan interested me the most. Gansey is an eccentric rich boy with an expiration date. He’s fine, but nothing about him is drastically different than any other YA romantic hero. His desires, particularly from his POV, are very low stakes. He wants to find Glendower because he wants to find Glendower. Yes, he had some kind of mystical vision, and yes, he’s fated to die… but his vision feels like a storytelling shortcut to get him to care about Glendower, and it’s difficult to get too fussed about the impending mortality of a character who has already died once and brushed it off like it was nothing.

The other three boys, though. I love the other three. Stiefvater seems to realize how much more Ronan, Adam, and Noah have going on because she lets them step out of Gansey’s shadow and shine on their own merit. Their increased prominence is what makes The Dream Thieves an infinitely better book than The Raven Boys.

The Raven Boys (Book Review)

A friend recommended that I read The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater about a year ago, but I largely ignored the suggestion because I’d read Shiver and absolutely hated it. Like, hated it hated it. It’s one of the most sarcastically negative reviews that I’ve ever written. But I was promised that The Raven Boys is good, and one of my coworkers—who likewise disliked Shiver—told me Raven Boys is better. That still wasn’t enough, but then I started seeing people comparing Raven Boys to Six of Crows. I saw enough raves for both books in the same breath that I decided to give Maggie Stiefvater another chance because I figured there had to be more to those comparisons than close knit crew obsessed with black birds.

What’s it about?

Blue comes from a family of psychics, but she doesn’t have any psychic power herself, except that her presence makes psychic readings louder to those who can hear them. One mystical night, when helping her aunt view the spirits of those due to die within the year, Blue sees the spirit of a boy called Gansey. Her ability to see him indicates that he is either her true love or she will be the one to kill him. Since Blue has long known that her kiss will cause the death of her true love, she decides that it’s for the best that she avoid Gansey. Since Gansey attends a snootily rich school that Blue disdains anyway, she doesn’t think this will be difficult. But she didn’t anticipate that Gansey—along with his friends Adam, Ronan, and Noah—would rope her into a search across ley lines for a mythological king whose discovery would grant them a wish.

What’d I think?

The Raven Boys is indeed a thousand times better than Shiver. It is, however, nowhere in the league of Six of Crows. My issue with Shiver is that it’s built around  a painfully bland, uninspired hetero love story. It’s that old “he was a boy/ she was a girl/ can I make it any more obvious?” storyline with nothing more significant than mutual attraction. The Raven Boys has more going on, but it is by no means exempt from a lackluster promise of romance. The book opens with Blue lamenting that her as-yet-unknown true love will die after he kisses her and then shortly after she sees Gansey’s spirit on the corpse road and has the whole true love and death combo reiterated. And I’m sorry, but I don’t care. I mean, sure, it’s kinda sad that Blue can’t kiss her true love, or whatever, but that’s not the end of the world. She could focus on other things. And from the reader’s standpoint, it’s blatantly obvious that Gansey is her true love and he will die and she will kill him. If she doesn’t both fall in love with and kill Gansey before the end of the series, I’ll be shocked. And, to be honest, I don’t really care.

Also, she’s sixteen. Does the concept of “true love” usually come up for sixteen-year-olds this often?

I’m also really hoping that this doesn’t devolve into a love triangle. Blue/Gansey is clearly inevitable, and Adam needs to duck out while he still can with his dignity intact.

It’s clear that I am supposed to like Blue and Gansey, but I just… don’t. I always prefer secondary characters to the leads, but I usually care about the protagonists more than I did here. I low key think that The Raven Boys would be a better book if Gansey and Blue had their roles reduced significantly. Gansey’s drive to find Glendower—despite the explanation that comes in the second half of the novel—feels like a snobby rich boy’s hobby. It’s not a high-pressure plotline, and I didn’t care about the search at all except through Adam’s eyes.

Gansey is very much like Sam from Shiver. There’s simply not that much to him. He’s rich and he’s presumably attractive. I think I was supposed to get the impression that he’s a really good friend, but that didn’t come through for me. He’s portrayed as a martyr for keeping Ronan around even though Ronan is a hothead and a terrible friend… but Adam and Noah don’t get that same halo even though they also put up with Ronan. And, like, Ronan is legit traumatized, a fact everyone seems keen to overlook. Yeah, he can be an asshole a lot of the time, but it would’ve been pretty shitty of his friends if they cut him loose for not being the person he was before suffering psychological damage. And Ronan’s not actually as bad as he’s made out to be.

Ronan, probably

Book Club: Flora & Ulysses

The best children’s books enchant adults without losing the ability to delight children. Kate DiCamillo is a wonderful writer. Without exception I love every one of DiCamillo’s books that I’ve read. Most people cite Because of Winn-Dixie or The Tale of Despereaux as their favorites, and while they’re great, my preferences lie elsewhere. The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulene is underrated and fantastic. Flora & Ulysses is less underrated–it won a Newbery Medal–but no less beloved by me. It’s especially special to me because I attended one of DiCamillo’s readings when she was promoting it. DiCamillo was as charming in person as her books suggest, and she’s one of the biggest authors whose autograph I have. I got to run a book club on Flora & Ulysses a few years ago, and it was so much fun because it is an apparently easy read that has beautiful themes underneath. Flora & Ulysses is creative in its use of media, it’s full of lovable characters and adorable illustrations, and it is genuinely funny and heartfelt.

Please enjoy these discussion questions, and be aware that they do include spoilers.