what I’ve been reading lately:
-
The True Queen by Zen Cho
I really liked Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown when I read it in 2015, and I think I felt similarly about The True Queen: I felt that the plot took a while to get moving, but once things picked up I was totally there for it. The True Queen starts with two girls, Sakti…
-
Fireboat by Maira Kalman
Maira Kalman is one of my favorite artists, so when I found a copy of Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey on the street, I clearly had to bring it home. I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to actually reading it: I like Kalman, I like…
-
Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone
I generally like Max Gladstone’s writing, and I like this book’s message of community/collaboration, but space opera as a genre is not particularly my thing. The way the characters escape from one dangerous situation straight into another one sometimes leaves me feeling bored; I don’t particularly care about enormous spaceships and epic battles and deadly…
-
Honor Girl by Maggie Thrash
It’s summertime, and fifteen-year-old Maggie Thrash is at the same Appalachian all-girls camp she’s been attending for years, which her mom and grandmother also attended when they were young. She thinks it’ll be a summer like any other, full of practice at the rifle range and rainy-day talent-show performances and hanging out with friends. And…
-
We Are Okay by Nina LaCour
In her foreword, Nicola Yoon says this book is “a small, glittering world of beauty and emotion and truth,” which I think sums it up pretty nicely. I read this book over the course of two days and loved being immersed in Marin’s world, raw as it felt. (I cried near the end of the…
-
The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Riddle of Ages by Trenton Lee Stewart
I read and liked the first three books in this kids’ series in 2007, 2008, and 2009, and also read and liked the prequel in 2012, so I was delighted to learn, this year, that there was now another Mysterious Benedict Society novel. Like the others, it’s about super-smart kids (well, they’re a bit older…
-
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
I read a few sentences of This Is How You Lose the Time War aloud to my boyfriend because I was liking it so much, and he just looked at me and asked if this book was written for me. It really is full of things I’m into: tea and cities and literary allusions and…
-
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Having never read Dracula before, I didn’t know what kind of reading experience I was in for when I picked it up, in ways good, bad, and funny. The good: I didn’t realize that it was presented as the journal/diary entries and letters of various characters, plus things like newspaper clippings and telegrams, rather than…
-
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
As I was reading The Wind in the Willows (which I somehow never read as a kid), I found myself wondering whether I should picture the anthropomorphized animals as human-sized, animal-sized, or somewhere in between. Like, if a toad has a horse, and his friend who is a mole can walk down the road having…