A Reviews / A- Reviews / B Reviews Category / B+ Reviews / Book Reviews / C Reviews Category#ownvoices / amateur sleuths / book clubs / Brooklyn / childhood friends / children / civil rights / families / female friendship / Historical / India / Japanese-American history / Kentucky / librarians / Los Angeles / Memoir / mystery / POC / POC author / Reading lists / South Carolina / Womens-Fiction / YA10 Comments
I run a virtual book club for seniors, volunteering for a non-profit (check it out and see if you’d like to help, or consider participating in the national village movement closer to your home), and we take turns picking out the books we read. One of the advantages this has ... more >
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More Than Just a Pretty Face by Syed M. Masood Jayne’s review of this #ownvoices YA novel got me to pick it up and I was glad I did. Danyal Jilani is a good-looking and sweet nineteen-year-old in his senior year of high school (he was held back a year ... more >
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I spent much of 2020 grateful to books and authors for giving me a way to visit other times and places while stuck at home because of Covid. Below, listed in alphabetical order by author, are my top eight favorite books of 2020. Some grades have been adjusted since my ... more >
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Dear Brandy Colbert, I’ve been meaning to read one of your books for a long time and when The Voting Booth was published I was struck by the cleverness of the concept. This romantic YA novel takes place over the course of one day—Election Day—with Marva Sheridan, an activist eighteen-year-old ... more >
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Jennie, Sirius and I (along with Jayne), reviewed Naomi Novik’s last book, Spinning Silver, together. Our roundtable discussion was a lot of fun and the three of us decided to reunite for Novik’s recent release, the first book in her Scholomance series, A Deadly Education. –Janine. Janine: A Deadly Education ... more >
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Trigger warnings: Dear Tiffany D. Jackson, A couple of months ago I read and reviewed your YA novel, Monday’s Not Coming, and was impressed. The book had a powerful mystery at its center, a disappearance of a teenager noticed only by her best friend. Even before I read it, I ... more >