I am so upset about this stupid book. The first in Hannah Kaner’s Fallen Gods series, Godkiller is maddening to read. I was reading it for a book club (and none of us are surprised), so when I struggled from the near-beginning with the writing, I kept going to see if I really had to…
Baking and fantasy as written by T. Kingfisher? Of course! YA. Fairy tale-style. Funny. Charming. All that. But it is Kingfisher, so there are also dead bodies strewn along the story’s path, and some scary moments, just more funny, coming-of-age things than the bodies and scares. It gets wacky. It gets introspective. And it’s written…
Here’s the thing: I have an issue with blood. It is a real thing rooted in trauma and it has grown worse with age. Here’s the other thing: Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan very unexpectedly features an awkwardly large number of scenes where the protagonist either bites the inside of her…
I would give this one a 3.5 to 4 stars. I’m going back and forth. The idea behind Mañanaland by Pam Muñoz Ryan piqued my interest and then when I started reading it, I was a bit like “yawn” and then by the end I liked it again. What happened? I think the main thing…
Not a secret: I’m a Harry Potter fan. I read the new stuff as it comes out, including the Fantastic Beasts series, which, if you don’t know, is a five-book series of screen plays set in the Harry Potter world but seventy years before the stories we are familiar with. Which makes Dumbledore really old.…
When I made the Best Books list and started on the adventure of reading to children as they grew, I did not realize that so many of the “classics” of children’s chapter books come from the 50s. Even if they weren’t written in the 50s, many of them take place in or around the 50s.…
A Snicker of Magic, by Natalie Lloyd and published by Scholastic Press in 2014. I loved this book. Going in I had absolutely no expectations, but was very, very pleasantly surprised. I liked it from the first and all the way through the end. Between the combination of magic and word-loving, the prose was light…
the starving artist 