Tina has known since she was a kid that her destiny lies beyond Earth. From the outside, she looks like a regular high schooler, someone who loves her friends, has a passionate sense of right and wrong, and never passes by an opportunity to stand up to a bully or a corrupt local business owner. But in her chest is a star beacon which will someday activate and call an alien spaceship to pick her up and return the memories of her previous life. Tina is the clone of a famous and beloved space general from the Royal Fleet and she can't WAIT to get to the business of saving people for real. But when Tina's ship and future come for her, she learns that battles are messy and fighting comes with causalities. This is the first book of a trilogy, which asks the questions: what are acceptable losses when fighting for a greater good? How far will you go to save your friends? How about a girl you just met, but are already half in love with? This series is fairly light in the realism and sci-fi world building departments, and cares about its characters maybe more than its plot, but its delightfully queer, trans, and full of heart. 

The stories that center on Jack, Jill, and the Moors continue to be some of the strongest installments in this series. In this one, Jack reappears at the school for Wayward Children- in her twin sister's body. She needs help, and she needs it fast, and despite the sign outside the school which reads "No Quests", a group of Eleanor West's students once again step through a magical door to save a world not their own. 

Zoe and Dani, high school best friends now in their first year of college at two distant and different schools, reunite for a spring break in New York City in 2009. They have five days to cram in as much sight seeing and bonding as they can. But Dani brought one of her classmates, Fiona, and this third person injects an intense new energy into the dynamic. Dani wants to visit all of the biggest tourist attractions. Zoe wants to have some adult experiences she's never had before. And Fiona? Initially she wanted to ditch the other two, but then she decides Zoe is more interesting that the people she was going to meet up with, especially after Fiona manages to buy some weed from the desk manager at their hostel and Zoe turns out to have a fake ID. This is a smart, beautifully drawn story about the painful period between being a teen and becoming an adult, the growing pains of an old friendship, the addictive pull of a new crush, the struggle to figure out who you are and want to be against the backdrop of a foreign city. Fans of previous Tamaki collaborations will love this one as well. I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advanced reader copy; preorder it now or look for it in stores in September 2023. 

I've read 30+ of Terry Pratchett's 50+ books, but I didn't know very much about his life before reading this biography. I never had the pleasure of hearing him speak at a convention, or of seeing him at a signing, despite the extensive amount of touring he did from the mid-90s to the 2010s. This extensive biography was written by his long time assistant, friend, and collaborator Rob Wilkins, a huge Pratchett fan who went from working on organizing the UK Discworld conventions to working for Pratchett's agent to working for the author himself. It's funny and conversational, full of footnotes and silly asides, not unlike a Pratchett book in that regard. It takes nearly 90 pages to get through Pratchett's high school years; though to be fair, Pratchett published his first two short stories, bought his first typewriter, and attended his first few sci-fi conventions before he was out of high school. He was a tremendously dedicated worker, often writing two or more books a year once he quit his journalism and PR jobs to begin writing full time. This book is primarily about his creative work and extensive hobbies (gardening, beekeeping, raising goats and ducks, astronomy, silver-casting, brewing mead, building home electronics, playing computer games, forging his own sword) but skates lightly over his interpersonal relationships outside of professional collaborations. I did not leave it with a good sense of how his only daughter might have felt about having such a workaholic as a father, but I did leave it with a better sense of what fed and nourished his astonishing imagination, and the successes and stumbling blocks he met along the way. 

I started listening to the podcast of The Anthropocene Reviewed years ago- maybe late 2019 or early 2020? For me these essays are colored with the bittersweet poignancy of the early covid period, and indeed the book references covid, collective health, and vaccines regularly in essays on small pox and more. I had planned to re-listen to the whole book, but I ended up missing the lovely sound editing of the podcast version so I only ended up listening to the last 25% to hear all of the essays which were exclusive to the book ("Winter Mix" to the end). This book is my favorite of John Green's work to date, and I'd recommend it even if you've bounced off his novels. 

Najwa's world centered around her charismatic, beautiful, popular best friend Trina and their shared passion for competitive Scrabble. Then Trina collapsed and died during a tournament, and Najwa was thrown into the confusion of depression and grief. Finally, a year later, Najwa feels able to return to her first Scrabble tournament since the death of her friend. She wants to win in Trina's memory and earn her old title, Queen of the Tiles. But then someone starts posting on the dead girl's instagram account, taunting messages that hint that the death was a murder, and that the players might even now be in danger. Najwa does her best to unravel the events of a year before, navigating gaps in her own memory, and a tangle of the envy, hatred, admiration and love the Scrabble community had for Trina. This is an engaging, diverse, complex mystery that kept me guessing until the very end. Full of wordplay and etymology trivia. 

A whimsical, witty debut middle grade murder mystery full of word play and puns. The Swifts are an ancient English family with many quirky rituals- one of them is the tradition of naming every new child by opening the dictionary and pointing out a word thought to determine their character; another is the massive family reunion they host every ten years when Swifts from around the world gather at the family manor, a decaying three story mansion, to try and find a massive treasure hoard hidden by an ancestor. Shenanigan Swift, youngest of three sisters who still actively live in the house, is determined that during this upcoming reunion she will be the one to find the treasure once and for all. But almost immediately, fights behind to erupt between the contentious Swifts, and a scream in the hallway leads to the discovery of a body at the bottom of the stairs, and then a deadly Scrabble duel, and then a bloody accident in the library... before she knows it, Shenanigan is searching not for a treasure hoard but for a murderer. This book includes nonbinary, trans, and queer characters and an overall message of being true to one's self despite societal and familiar pressures and expectations. An excellent read for anyone who enjoys a good all-ages tale. 

Now that the HarperCollins strike is over, I can post my review of this book!

The beginning of this book is a solid, but conventional, slow burn romance between two teens on a long term space mission responding to a distress call from a space station on one of the moons of Titan. The main character is Ambrose Cusk, the smart, handsome, privileged son of the Cusk corporation, which invented much of the technology on the spacecraft, including the AI operating system. The distress call is from his sister, Minerva, who like Ambrose graduated from the top of her class in the astronaut academy. But Ambrose wakes up aboard the Coordinated Endeavor with no memory of takeoff. Also, he learns he is not alone on the ship. A second young man, from a rival country, inhabits the second half of the ship, sealed away behind one central connecting door. Initially suspicious of each other, the two must begin working together as they discover more and more strange incongruencies on their craft. If this isn’t enough to whet your interest, the book throws out a huge twist at around the 40% mark, one that absolutely surprised and hooked me in for the rest of this wild journey. Queer, original, and a page turner. 

This is my sixth NK Jemisin read, and while I enjoyed it a lot, it has a pretty different feel than her others, and didn't knock me over in quite the same way. Set in present day New York City, this book chronicles the first few days of the city awakening as a conscious entity and fighting the latest battle against an ancient and alien enemy that wants to prevent the birth of Earth city-beings. The story is fast paced and very easy to consume, and I had a good time reading it, even though I liked some of the six different POV characters more than others, and still don't feel like I fully understand the multi-verse conflict at the heart of the narrative. This book felt more cinematic and less literary than what I tend to expect from Jemisin, so if you've wanted to try one of hers but been intimidated by the dense world building of her fantasy, this might be a good one to start with. I will be very surprised if we don't see a film adaption of this series soon, as it feels almost written for the screen. 

This is an ambitious sci-fi comic set in the near future, 50 years after a change in the sun's radiation killed all mammals on earth who lingered in the sun's rays. Small groups of humans managed to survive by hiding in basements, subways, tunnels, and caves and only venturing out at night. Now, 10 year old Elvie and her adopted guardian Flora travel the Pacific Coast trying to invent a cure. Flora has developed a medicine from the scales of monarch butterfly wings that keeps people temporarily safe, but it's not a final solution. They encounter various windfalls and dangers on the road- earthquakes, shipwrecks, a lost child, butterflies, enemies and allies. The art is dynamic and beautifully watercolored, but I got bogged down by the occasional dense text-heavy page, and overall the book took me a lot longer to read than comics usually do. But I still enjoyed it, especially recognizing the ravaged remains of classic west coast landmarks and Elvie's inventiveness and bravery.