For Rainbow Rowell, I am always & unendingly going back to Omaha. Slow Dance is a careful build of character and emotion over a decade and a half of friendship; a minor chord and a major lift. It's Rowell's writing at its best, deep and emotive and questioning, always questioning, and letting the personalities fill in the blanks and find their own answers. Slow Dance is two messy, chaotic, people learning to love again, figuring out they knew how all along. You'll never want the song to end.

Curveball is a short and sweet middle grade graphic novel that focuses on imaginative exploration vs strict rule following--in this case, under the guise of a star baseball player learning to enjoy live action roleplaying. Elena is a preteen focused on breaking barriers as the first girl to play on the high school varsity baseball team. Baseball is her entire life for better or for worse, until a minor injury gives her a chance to remember what it's like to have fun and play for the sake of playing. The premise for this one hooked me right away, but my initial intrigue hit a wall of stiff dialogue and underdeveloped relationships. While for me, the character development fell flat and the plot was too thin, Miguel Diaz Rivas art was enough to keep me going.

Sarah Sax comes out swinging with this middle grade graphic novel. Tryouts is about baseball on the surface, and underneath explores themes of teamwork, failures, friendship, and lifting up those around you. Sax's artwork is crisp, her characters endearing, the story solid, and the world of Brinkley Middle School will *almost* make you want to go back to middle school yourself.

It is hard to explain the exact mixture of nostalgia, joy, and melancholy this book wrung out of me in it's short but powerful pages.

It is hard to explain the feeling of being an athlete in memory, in learned movements and redirected passion, in stories and instincts and past-tense, but Georgia Cloepfil put into words what bangs around in my heart when I think of soccer. A lyrical and poignant tribute to the beautiful game and the people it turns into players, into teams, into champions, and eventually back into people. Both what that means, and how that feels, is a shared experience among athletes that we are never quite sure how to share; a little death all our own. Thank you, Georgia, for shining a light on this unique grief.

Like the game, the ticking clock of turning pages was leading me to an ending I wasn't sure I wanted to reach yet. Give me one more minute, one more chapter in the environment of the game, in the feeling. But the clock winds down.

Don the rainbow armor and grab your machete: this year, Pride is a little undead. Lindsay King-Miller's fiction debut will have you laughing through your tears, cheering for this group of chaotic queers as they take on the zombie apocalypse, their emotions, and all of corporate America to save their community.

Tillie Walden's art will pull me into any book, no matter the subject. I really enjoyed the coming-of-age story Tegan and Sarah were going for, and mixing the autobiographical with the fictionalized elements worked really well for making it both their story and a more universal one. The personal elements Tegan and Sarah brought to the book were appreciated, especially the honest with which they explored their music, their family, and their changing relationships with each other.

An intriguing interlude story set between season 1 and season 2 of Strange New Worlds. Would be interesting to see the ideas and history of Illyrians and Vulcans play out in the greater Star Trek Universe...does Pike ever tell Number One what he learned about her people's history? Great illustrations, and the writing all felt true to character.

Cute art style, confusing plot.