Summary Crystal’s House of Queers is a contemporary young adult novel about a group of friends who create a safe-haven for outcasts and gay teenagers within the home of Crystal, a high school senior with a crush on her classmate Haley. Crystal lives with her grandparents, but her grandfather comes down Covid-19 and Crystal is left to take care of the house and herself when her grandfather and her grandmother are both checked into the hospital. Payton, a new girl in school who is out and proud as a lesbian, meets Crystal in her art class they hit it off, bonding over their love of drawing and p ..read more

This week’s Top 5 Wednesday theme is Family Dynamics. I love family dynamics in books, and something I’ve been particularly focused on lately is siblings. Sibling relationships are fascinating to me because there is so much shared history and so many experiences that siblings go through together. You don’t get to pick your siblings, and you don’t always approve of everything they do, but they’re still family and you gotta stick together. There are lots of great examples of sibling relationships in fiction. Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater I love devoted siblings who will do anything fo ..read more

Summary (Spoiler-Free) Wild Sky is an epic fantasy adventure set in a world where wild dragons roam the skies. The story begins with Tauran Darrica, a wounded veteran of dragon combat (we know something awful happened to him in the battle, we just don’t know exactly what), who is just barely scraping by after leaving the Sky Guard. Tauran returns to the city of Valreus, a place full of bittersweet memories of his time as a dragon rider in the Sky Guard. There he meets Kalai, an idealistic young foreigner who came to Valreus looking for adventure. Kalai happens to be in the right place at the r ..read more

Did I mention that I like Dark themes and angst? Well if I haven’t proven that yet, we’re going there today! Also note, this post will contain spoilers for some of the books mentioned (particularly The Song of Achilles). How We Got Here Half Bad by Sally Green This trope is one of my favorites. You start at the end of the story and give a weird, tantalizing setup. Then the rest of the book is explaining how you got to that point. It’s popular in movies (Deadpool) and television (the first episode of Breaking Bad), but I also love when it’s used in books. It’s basically a way of working in ext ..read more

* This post contains spoilers for all the books of the Wode Series, including Summerwode and Wyldingwode. Wyldingwode is what happens when fate rips the Ceugant apart again, but this time our characters are a little bit older and a lot more mature. At the end of Summerwode we saw our three main characters separated by fate: Robyn pulled into Barrow Mere, Gamelyn under the yoke of the Templars, and Marion left to manage hearth and home at Tickhill with new baby Aderyn. At the outset of this tale, we’ve moved forward a few years in time, but not much else has changed. Robyn is still missing ..read more

Here’s a perfect example of a pretty cover hiding a book that absolutely did not deserve it. There were some good things about Autonomous. Let’s see… The bisexual representation was nice to see. The futuristic world was fun and dystopian at the same time: they have fuzzy foam furniture and plants can grow out of people’s’ heads. But also… slaves. I enjoyed the dichotomy. Not everything is perfect or amazing. The friendship between Med and Threezed. They were, beyond a doubt, my favorite characters in the book. I loved the way their upbringings flipped the societal expectations for robot and h ..read more

Awww, kid-me would have absolutely LOVED Proxy! Kid-me would have been so into this. She would have fallen for Syd and identified too much with Marie and totally shipped Syd/Knox. She would never have asked questions like “why the hell are proxies even a thing, that makes no sense” or wondered about the likelihood of that many young children putting themselves into crippling debt to voluntarily go to school. She definitely wouldn’t have cussed out that old man for sending a bunch of kids into the desert alone and then somehow beating them to their destination totally unscathed like Glinda in O ..read more

I have feelings. So many feelings. Summerwode is the fourth book (out of an anticipated five) in the Wode series by J. Tullos Hennig. This story is (I believe) loosely based on The Tale of Gamelyn, which is a Canterbury Tale as well as actual English history from this time period, including a recorded siege of Nottingham Castle in 1194. Richard the Lionheart had been ransomed from Henry VI and is returning to English shores. Our band of outlaws had made some progress toward legitimacy in Winterwode, and now a royal pardon is within their grasp. Meanwhile, old enemies are plotting revenge and t ..read more

On Andross Station felt like reading sci-fi light. It was essentially a standard race-against-the-clock mystery with the set decorations of a sci-fi story. If it weren’t for the swearing and some violence, I would say that it would probably make a nice, palatable entry into the genre for a younger reader. As it was, there was strong language, violence, and enough sexual content to put it pretty firmly into the range of adult or new adult and to leave me wondering exactly who this novella would work for. The plot itself was tepid and fairly predictable. Given that it was a novella, it might be ..read more

What do you get when you take a pretty, but otherwise average, easy-going, modern American woman and suddenly embroil her in a world of vampires, demons, and other secret supernatural threats that lurk in the shadows of our everyday world, introducing her along the way to a brooding, menacing, snarky, but ultimately good vampire who happens to be the hottest man she’s ever seen? Well, if you’re lucky you get Buffy! If you’re not so lucky, you might end up with Night Pleasures. Let me sum up Night Pleasures real quick. It is a story about a woman named Amanda Devereaux, who is excessively norma ..read more