5 Star

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender

December 2, 2020 4 Comments

354 pages | Balzer + Bray | Contemporary | Release Date: 5/5/2020

Felix’s last name is Love but he’s never been in it. And he desperately wants to be. Even though society makes him feel unworthy of love because he is queer, trans and Black.

When a transphobic art gallery targeting Felix goes up at his prestigious NYC art school he thinks he knows exactly who did it—his best friend’s ex, Declan Keane. Taking revenge into his own hands, Felix initiates a catfishing scheme and…nothing goes as planned.

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Muse of Nightmares by Laini Taylor

October 24, 2020 Leave a Comment

15 Hours 54 Minutes | Hachette Audio | YA Fantasy | 10/02/2018

Laini Taylor is one of those authors who reminds me why I love books and reading. She weaves these sweepingly romantic epic fantasies that I can’t imagine working in any other medium. I have officially reached book hangover territory.

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Audiobook Review: Memorial Drive by Natasha Tretheway

September 21, 2020 Leave a Comment

5 hours 9 min. | Harper Audio | Non-Fiction | Release Date: 7/28/2020

I’ve finally been in the mood for nonfiction again and picked this one up while browsing the new release shelf with no context whatsoever. I skim read it was about a murder and thought it was maybe true crime (it’s not). I didn’t even look at the cover long enough to realize Tretheway is a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate.

Memorial Drive is a literary eulogy to Tretheway’s mother, who was shot and killed by her abusive ex-husband in 1985 while Tretheway was away at college. The book begins with Tretheway’s experiences growing up as a biracial girl in 1960s South and she takes us along through triumphs and heartbreaks as she and her mother make their way to Atlanta for a new life together.

Tretheway has a Pulitzer Prize in poetry so it’s no surprise that the writing is amazing. There is a large section where the narrative voice switches to the second person and it is done flawlessly. I was listening to this on audio and it took me a minute to even realized she’d switched.

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All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

September 13, 2020 Leave a Comment

6 hrs. 42 min. | Memoir | Catapult | Release Date: 10/2/2018

Nicole Chung is probably most well known around the internet as the managing editor of the now-defunct The Toast and her If John Cho Was Your Boyfriend piece. In her memoir she tells the story of her transracial adoption, her path to finding her birth family and how she inadvertently uncovers a family secret.

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On The Come Up by Angie Thomas

November 2, 2019 Leave a Comment

447 pages | Contemporary | Balzer & Bray | Release Date: 2/5/2019

I don’t know what this says about me but when a book or author has a lot of hype I tend not to read it until it quiets down. Angie Thomas was an author like that. I’d been following her ever since she announced her deal on Twitter and I’m happy to see the success she’s gained. I’ve still yet to read The Hate U Give because I’m not in a place to read Black trauma stories but when I was taking a bus trip I saw this on Overdrive and picked it up.

Now, this book exists in the same place as The Hate U Give and does spoil some of the outcomes of that book so be warned if you haven’t read it.

In On The Come Up 16-year-old Brianna “Bri” Jackson is an aspiring rapper from the hood who lives in the shadow of her deceased father’s rap fame. She’s ready to have her come up but injustice, poverty, and complicated family dynamics stand in her way.

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Audiobook Review : Strange The Dreamer by Laini Taylor

January 9, 2018 Leave a Comment

Hachette Audio | Fantasy | 3/28/17

*Trigger Warning : Infanticide, and Sexual Assault

If you read Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bones series and said “I want more GIVE IT TO ME NOW”—well here you go ! In this duology Taylor pits science against imagination and an impossible future against centuries of pain.

Strange The Dreamer is the unusual tale of young librarian Lazlo Strange and how a mysterious city without a name becomes his great adventure. Strange The Dreamer roots itself in many of the same themes from the Smoke and Bone series; there arevividly imagined characters woven out of tragic histories, blinding hope and dreams… .literally on that last one. In a way it’s a love letter to fiction and the power of stories.

Lazlo Strange’s world appears to have a tenuous connection to the world of Smoke and Bone.

Laini Taylor’s imagination is just plain interesting, seriously what goes on in her head? Is it the pink hair? Her brand of YA fantasy is so immersive and her worlds are complicated and beautiful.

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