The Real, Honest, Word on Books
By Sarah J. Maas This series is great! It is fantasy, and it is technically YA, but everyone can find something to like in these! I was going to write them up individually, but I sort of consumed the last three in one sitting over two days…so, might as well do them all! What I…
By Sarah Watson This book is very YA, even for me, who loves a good romp in the genre of my youth. That being said, I wish I had read it when I was a senior in high school – it is just what I needed at that time! This is a book about four…
By Kate Elizabeth Russell This book was hard to read, like Lolita – which makes sense, as there are many references throughout the novel to Lolita. This book goes back and forth between fifteen year old Vanessa, and Vanessa in her early thirties. At both points, and the years in between, Vanessa is beholden to…
By Therese Anne Fowler This book is compelling. I was hesitant initially, with its Romeo and Juliet overtones and biracial love scandal, but the story has many more facets than that. At its core is a neighborly dispute over a vast oak tree that has centered the neighborhood for generations. On one side of the…
By Peter Swanson I was ready to love this book. It has the best premise – a bookstore owner creates a list of the top eight perfect murders in literature (as in they could not be proven, the killer “got away with it”). Suddenly, someone starts murdering people according to the books on the list…
By Sarah J. Maas Stop what you are doing and place a “quitter strip” (bookmark) in that other bound travesty you thought you were reading. This is the book to get us through the Apocalypse, people. There are about seventeen plot twists, romance, adventure, and an epic battle. You never knew 800 pages could go…
By Vladimir Nabokov It has been a while since I posted because this book was hard to read. I originally sought it out because My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell just came out, and the author had stated she referenced this work in that one. Lolita is a “classic”, referenced often in pop culture,…
by Kiley Reid This book is great! The inciting incident takes us to a late night in an affluent grocery store, where Emira, a young black woman, has taken, Briar, her two year old white charge, at the request of Briar’s parents. A “Good Samaritan” tells a security guard the situation “doesn’t feel right” after…
By VE Schwab The second in Schwab’s Villains series doesn’t disappoint. This installment has us trying to figure out what is wrong with Victor and more importantly, how to fix it. As in all great comic book adversarial relationships, the infamous Eli makes another appearance as well. There is also a new trio of characters…
By VE Schwab This is the first book in her Villains series. We are presented with two antiheroes and need to decide which side we fall on. Victor and Eli discover how to make ordinary people ExtraOrdinary, or EO, possessing superhuman powers of some sort. It requires death, intention, and a willingness to survive. Both…