Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review

This is the second book of the Lillac Town series. It is set in the same bookstore as the last book and also features a lot of characters from the last book but with a different focus this time.

Lily is a Brazilian girl, who has to deal with her past trying to reach out to her, as well as that casual fling with Mayte. She is still dealing with her families homophobia before she left and cut all ties with them and reading her story really broke my heart for her. Her sexuality is unlabeled, but she definitely likes girls. It's really nice to read about unlabeled characters!

Mayte is a bisexual, black, Cuban woman and I am so glad that she got more screen time in this book. She already appeared in the first book and I adored her, but getting to see more of her this time was lovely.

The writing is also incredibly good, not overly flowery but still beautiful. You can see that it's not Hollis first book and to be honest I think I enjoyed it even a bit more than I did The Melody of You and Me.

And one of my favorite things is that during a sex scene there was actual talk about what a character liked and what not and it was so beautiful to read about a character being allowed to set boundaries and having them respected and just... talking about what they want to they can both have a good time. I need more of that kind of stuff, it was beautiful!

The ending is a bit cheesy, but it kind of fits the character's well. But I do feel sorry for the other characters in the series who will be surrounded by sappy couples.

All in all, if you are looking for a cute story with loveable characters, loads of awesome side characters or enjoyed The Melody of You and Me, you should definitely read this book.

(And while this has nothing to do with this book, I have to mention how excited I am for the next book in the series, as it will focus on Karen, a Brazilian-Japanese girl who really loves cats and is also super cute, I'm so excited!)

Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book was sadly a total miss for me. A plot that keeps jumping back and forth in time without any real pauses in between, flashbacks where we are told what happened in the time jumps, quite a lot of unremarkable characters, who I kept confusing. I also didn't enjoy the writing style. I didn't really enjoy most of the humor.

This book has a very interesting idea (because let's be real, a student for 30 years? That's really cool) and I absolutely adore the cover, but for me, this was a big miss sadly. I like my Sci-Fi a bit more straightforward and with a plot that makes sense and explains a bit.

We also only get one instance where we are shown that Fred has been a university student for 13+ years when he spouts some facts about wasps and mating rituals with flowers. In the place where it was, it disrupted the flow. And other than that, we have a drunk college student, who is in his 30, but acts like he's much younger and who apparently has gained absolutely no knowledge in his 13 years of University.

There's also a lot of plot twists, that could have been very interesting, but due to the plot changing all the time not even the big reveals felt like something special. Because of course, everything you believed would turn out to be wrong in the end. Just accept the weirdness and go with it. Ugh.

I didn't enjoy this book at all.

Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

As someone who grew up with video games available easily and a Gameboy pretty much glued to my hand (until Nintendo came along), I was intrigued when I saw this book. I know that video games haven't existed for that long and so knowing more about the history behind it seemed interesting. So for me, one of the most interesting parts was certainly the fact how hard it was to get access video games back in the day.

One thing you need to know when you go into this book is that there's a lot of focus on the technical innovations that made video games possible in the first place. While that is certainly important, it wasn't really what I signed up for when I picked up the book. I also feel that I learned more about the creators behind video games than I actually did about video games, which was a bit of a disappointment. Personally, I feel like there could have been a bit more focus on video games themselves than just on their development and developers.

The illustrations were really good though and making a comic book about video games was an interesting approach and one that worked very well. There were a lot of easter eggs pointing to popular video games, which was nice to see. This definitely enhanced my enjoyment of the story and so I still had a really good time reading this book.

All in all, I enjoyed this book and I learned quite a bit and I enjoyed reading it despite the things that bothered me a bit. It definitely gives a broad overview of video games starting with those that had no sound and barely any graphics and developing into the more advanced ones we have today. At the end, there's even a glance into the future and into what video games might develop. If you enjoy the technical side of video games, you will probably like this book even more.

Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This beautifully done graphic novel depicts the struggle of Isaac, a student who lives with epilepsy. Besides the stress of epileptic attacks, which are preceded by an aura, represented by knifes ready to strike, he has to deal with his classmates', family's and doctors' ableism. He finally made his first friend in a long time, who tells him that it will get better, but Isaac is slowly losing hope.

This is a heartfelt and absolutely stunning graphic novel. The art is amazing and truly beautiful. I especially liked the jarring change from softer colors to black/red during seizures, because it emphasized their suddenness.

And while I think the story does a very good job of portraying how Isaac's epilepsy takes over his life, shortening the time he can spend with other people and sometimes feeling like they take ages, shown in page after page, I would have liked some more plot and knowledge about Isaac's relationships with other people. 

There is also a lot of internal monologuing going on in this book and barely any dialogue, which I found a bit weird at first, but it actually shows how isolated Isaac has become quite well and I grew to enjoy it a lot.

The end is not very satisfying as it happens pretty quickly and wraps up too fast for my taste, but I adored the rest of the comic quite a lot.

This story also deals with depression as result of chronic illness and also with the darker things in life, so please be warned for suicidal ideation and mentions of self-harm in this book. Some of the drawings are pretty gore-y and bloody too.

Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I want to start my review by linking to Aimal's, who talks about the racial representation in this book. While diversity in books is important, it's just really weird that the most specicist characters in this book where the non-white ones.

Now this book is probably one of the most diverse books I've ever read. 3 out of 5 main characters are non-white, not a single one of them is cishet, there's a hearing impaired main character, that lives with her deaf grandmother and uses sign language to communicate with her and her friends. 

While I really liked the LGBT+ rep that we got in this book and that each of these identities are important to the characters, the racial rep was mostly just there without ever playing a role. The story is set in the future and apparently in a post-race world. We don't discriminate based on skin color anymore. We just hate monsters now. While of course neither someone's race nor someone's sexuality nor anything else should ever be the be-all of a character, portraying a diverse cast, but having the racial aspects of said cast disappear in the background because "race no longer matters, there's only one culture now, the human culture (aka western, mostly america-centric)" is not the best of racial representation. Barely any of the characters have ties to their culture, this all just disappeared. Now, of course, that is a common sci-fi trope, but I just really expected better from a book that was hyped as a super diverse sci-fi story. Colorblindness is not the same as actual acceptance. (especially with the colonization-allegory tied into all of this and the absolutely terrible part where the Nigerian/Indian character is the one that hates the chimera the most and then has to be educated by the white characters that maybe colonization is bad, you know?)

Another thing that bothered me about this story is that fact that we just have 72 hours for all the plot. While this is an interesting concept it just messes up the pacing a lot. We have to get to know way too many characters for this limited amount of time. Hell, one couple falls in love and tries to have sex all in the middle of fighting a war. In 72 hours. Yeah... not really the most believable of love stories. 

Other than that, this was certainly an enjoyable fast-paced read and I definitely adored all the representation we got, but especially the racial rep could have been done better.

Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is an open and honest memoir about growing up and living as a gay person in the '60s. Having been raised in a religious household in a church that told her that being gay was wrong and a society where there was no other option presented but to be in a heterosexual marriage, Carol struggles with the attraction she feels for women and the lack of attraction she feels for men.

Her journey is a long and hard one, hiding her feelings from friends, her family, her fiance, her employer, and co-workers. She experiences first love and heartbreak in college and after she starts teaching at a small school, she also finds the feminist movement that helps her grow bolder in her personal choices. 

Despite this, she still lives a Double Life, engaged to a man she doesn't love, even though he is the best man she's ever known and lying to her parents. When her father dies unexpectedly, she realizes that she would have loved to tell him. Now, she will never get to experience him supporting her. 

This book is a quite long memoir and we follow Carol from her teenage years to her late adult life. It was fascinating for me to see how in some aspects the feminist movement of that time emboldened women to go out and live their life to the fullest, even if they still had to fear societal rejection for that. 

I personally can't imagine how hard it would be to grow up in a society where you have no role models and your feelings are not even talked about in any way. I imagine it must be very hard to figure that out then and you can see Carol's struggles with that.

I think this was a very beautiful memoir, I enjoyed the writing style and it was a great read.

Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

4.5 Stars

This book is a true masterpiece of writing. A slow-paced very character-based masterpiece. All the characters in this book felt incredibly real, even if they were not people I could easily relate too. All of them had their struggles and problems, their background stories that related to them, their quirks and weird habits, which made all of them feel so incredibly alive. At times I felt as if I was standing right next to the characters, watching them up close and personal. 

The book starts with the Richardson house. Several small fires have been lit in it and their youngest child Izzy, the rebel, is gone. Temporarily, her siblings think. She realized that she went to far this time, setting the house ablaze and decided to take some time out. 

From that moment, the story jumps back in time and we are told the story of artist Mia and her daughter Pearl moving in and how their lives start to intertwine with the Richardson household. Both families influence each other. And the story goes even further back in time, telling the story of everybody and explaining their motivations and reasons for doing what they do.

Despite all of these different relationships, at the core of this book is only one. The relationship between a mother and her child. We are told stories about all kinds of mothers. And one of the main strands of the book is the question what one needs to be a mother in the custody case that divides Shaker. A young, poor Chinese-American mother left her child on the doorstep of a fire station after her boyfriend left her in the town she moved for him, where she is unable to find work and feed the child. A local white, rich family that had been looking to adopt a child for ages are overjoyed. But after the birth mother gets back to her feet and finds a job she just wants her child back. And now the question is what makes someone a mother. Is it the possibility to give a child everything they could want in material riches and a loving family with two parents, or is it the love of a birth mother that would do everything for her child?

Another fascinating relationship was the one between Izzy and her mother. Mrs. Richardson had nearly lost her when she was a baby and thus always was a bit more attentive to her than to her other children. When Izzy pushed for her freedom Mrs. Richardson feared that, until her worry for her child turned into disdain for the unruly daughter she raised. Their interactions were fascinating to watch, a tug-of-war that just kept going where neither of them could ever be the true winner.

This book is a wonderful example of how small details can help to create incredibly vivid characters. The writing style is beautiful and like I said, the characters were incredibly real and 3-dimensional. None of them felt flat. None of them were purely good or purely evil. You could despise a character for their actions, only to feel sorry for them five pages later, when their motivations were explained.

Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I requested this book because the idea of a girl being able to talk to animals and transform in water sounded really great to me. And of course, there are many of these plot points in the story, but there's also a lot of other stuff going on.

Jet is a princess and until now she has only lived in her underwater kingdom only meeting a few people and barely anyone her own age. All that changes when her father sends her off to school, so she can learn with the common people and grow as a person. Next to the hardship of having to live up to all the royal expectations that are placed on her, plus figuring out how to deal with other teenagers, Jet also wants to figure out what happens to all the animals that have gone missing recently.

There is friendship and romance and drama and a really interesting mythology, but sadly this book didn't fully work for me. The writing style is often quite juvenile and many characters act quite childish at times, which was quite annoying. It was also pretty predictable at times, so I wasn't at all shocked at the big reveal in the end. There are also some really annoying rivalries between a couple of girls going on that I couldn't understand at all? (Jet refused to go dinner with two girls on her first evening there because she was tired and after that they? just? hated her?)

On the other hand, I absolutely loved the idea of enComm and how they talked with animals, as well as the animals. I think Peppercorn was one of my favorite characters and it was certainly good that Jet has someone she knew at that school

All in all, this book sadly didn't fully work for me, but there were still some really interesting parts in it as well.