Dear Ebony LaDelle, I don’t t recall how your debut Young Adult novel came to my attention, but I liked the eye-catching cover and the premise sounded interesting. A bit gimmicky (a high school boy tries to get a girl to fall in love with him in three dates) but ... more >
Dear Tashie Bhuiyan, Last year I enjoyed your debut, Counting Down with You, a YA contemporary about a Bangladeshi-American high school student’s struggle with anxiety, demanding and controlling parents, and falling in love with a white boy. I liked it enough to request an ARC of your second book, A ... more >
Dear Kristin Cashore, I consider myself a fan of your YA fantasy even though not all of your books have worked for me. I really liked Graceling, the first book in the Graceling Realm series, did not much care for Fire but loved Bitterblue, and Jane Unlimited, a book separate ... more >
If This Gets Out by Sophie Gonzales and Cale Dietrich After enjoying Sophie Gonzales’s 2021 YA novel, Perfect on Paper, I decided to try this one, also YA, since it had been recommended by Dear Author commenter Susan S. Like Perfect on Paper, If This Gets Out has queer characters, ... more >
Dear Sophie Gonzales, Perfect on Paper was a finalist in the Goodreads Awards YA Fiction category and I thought it sounded interesting and different, so I picked it up. (A warning to readers: the blurb for this book contains spoilers and I recommend avoiding it if you don’t want to ... more >
It’s a cliché to comment on how quickly a year has passed and in the Covid era the months sometimes pass slowly. 2021 wasn’t an easy year so I’m glad I found some great books to make it feel a little lighter. There weren’t an entire ten but I’ve had ... more >