A short, sweet, autumn-flavored romance. The whole story takes place over one night, the last night Deja and Josiah are working at Omaha, Nebraska's best pumpkin patch. Instead of sticking to their shift, they decide to have an adventure: taste every treat, see every sight, and just maybe set up a moment for Josiah to talk to the mystery girl he's had a crush on for four years.

This is my new favorite manga series! Coco is the daughter of a tailor but she has a passion for magic. She was given a book of spells and a wand as a child, but she knows she'll never be able to use them because witches are born, not made. Or so she believes until she spies on a witch casting a spell and realizes that magic is cast by drawing. She tries her hand at some of the spells in the book, and is amazed to find she can summon light. But her next experiment has a darker outcome: she turns her other and her home to stone. She is taken in by witch who runs a rural atelier, or school, with three apprentices. Her new mentor encourages her passion for magic, but is also protecting her, as he suspects the rogue sorcerer who contacted her as a child will contact her again. As Coco grows, she has to use her new skills to solve a series of increasingly difficult problems. Watching her learn is both joyful and satisfying, and I was extremely impressed by the beauty of the art. Traditional manga aesthetics are mixed with influences of Maxfield Parrish and Little Nemo in Slumberland. I devoured this book and jumped directly into the sequel!

This is just as good as book one. I'm excited to see Coco working together with her fellow apprentices on more complex problems. I love how she uses the limited tools at her disposal creatively and successfully. The art is hitting every note perfect for me, and of course the book had to end on a cliff-hanger, arg!

This book was published in 2012, so a few of the facts in it are now out of date. There's been a massive change in China's policy of importing American trash and recycling, and I think the numbers for waste and pollution production overall are now even higher than they were 7 years ago. However, this is a still very readable and informative book. Humes has won multiple Pulitzers for his writing- he's very good at focusing each chapter on a specific person and their relationship with/battle against trash. This includes a worker at Puente Hills, the largest landfill in the US, serving the LA area; the CEO of Waste Management, Inc; two different scientists studying ocean plastic; a Seattle resident helping out with an MIT based study tracking how far trash travels before it reaches a landfill (often hundreds or even thousands of miles); an archaeologist excavating trash to study it; several artists participating in the artist residency program at San Francisco's main trash hub; the founder of ChicoBag, an early reusable bag company; the founder of TerraCycle and more. It is hopeful to read about so many smart people who have been working on and studying trash, recycling and plastics for decades; but discouraging to learn how deeply messed up and unsustainable our systems for waste are. It's a problem beyond the scope of any one person- one that we must ALL begin to take personally before we are all buried under mountains of our own waste.

This gorgeously drawn comic perfectly captures a kind of aimless Los Angeles young adult summer experience. Three friends argue, skate, spend too much time on instagram, flirt with their exs and eat a lot of burritos. Megan is in a band, and also in love with her straight bandmate, Kate. Jimmy really shouldn't met with her ex, Katie, again but she does. Clark is texting a lot with a girl in Chicago that he met online, but he also goes to some trouble to borrow a car to go on a date with a girl who's still in high school. The story doesn't have a lot of action, or resolution, but sometimes neither does life.

What a delight this comic is! Debian Perl is a technomancer living in Megalopolis, a rapidly gentrifying city on the west coast of North America. In this future sentient robots have full civil rights, intelligent beings live all across the solar system, and humans come in every color of the rainbow. Debian is just walking home from her favorite bubble tea spot when she hears some loud crashes coming from an arcade. Inside she finds a confused antique robot, a furious shop owner, and a curious teenager who immediately starts filming the unfolding drama on her egg (a levitating smart device). Debian manages to talk the robot out of its panic and determines that its CPU is dangerously overheated. Debian and the teen, Digits, take the robot back to Debian's workshop home. When they look at the robot's motherboard they realize that its memory drive has been stolen, and its hard wear illegally tampered with. Digits is amazed by how Debian can communicate with this ancient tech and asks to learn this secret, magical language. Debian explains that this language is code, and that anyone can become a coder with practice. Together, they follow the clues to solve the mystery of the missing memory- discovering an exciting potential new partnership along the way! Katie Longua's art and Brittany Currie's vivid colors perfectly capture this vibrant, exciting, heartwarming story. Lauren Davis and Mel Hilario have crafted a satisfying middle grade mystery with educational elements woven in so well that readers may leave the story surprised by how much they have learned. I'm very excited for the next installments in this series!

I've been looking forward to this book's release since I heard a podcast interview with the author all the way back in 2015! The author examines the roles of black female characters in several of the biggest fantasy franchises of the past decade: Rue from The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC show Merlin, Bonnie Bennett from The Vampire Diaries and Angelina Johnson from Harry Potter. The author is incredible well researched and draws on a wide variety of sources and quotes, both in the academic realm and the fandom realm. In each chapter she also recounts her personal experiences with these stories, and how her view on them has changed over time. The final chapter also dives into the popular fan reading of Hermione as a black character, and the author's perspective of one of the first outspoken black HP fans in the early days of HP fan groups online. I rarely count nonfiction books as guilty pleasure reading, but this was such a delight. I loved all of Thomas' insights into these characters and the ways black characters in the hands of white writers can fall into a predictable cycle of tropes: seen as spectacles, meet with hesitation, faced with violence and leaving a presence which haunts the rest of the text. I can't recommend this highly enough, especially if you enjoy thoughtful critique of literature and pop culture!

I was lucky enough to get a black and white advanced reader copy of this at BookExpo. The series continues to be extremely charming, with the characters facing challenges in the magical world which are often very easy metaphors for queer experiences. As the main character friend group has grown larger, each character's story arc is a bit shorter because the author must balance out more character's time on the page. But I am still very captivated by this series and glad that this book ended in a way which leaves room for more!

This is a short, friendly, accessible guide to sex ed topics. The language is very inclusive of queer, trans and nonbinary people, and aims to entertain and destigmatize as well as educate. I love the playful artwork by Isabella Rotman and the bright colors by Luke Howard. Appropriate for middle schoolers up to young high schoolers.

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson has won many awards and it deserves them. Originally serialized as a webcomic, this is an astonishingly moving story of a super villain and his side-kick, the shape-shifting title character, who must save a city from a villainy much worse than their own.