This was really cute! I picked it up because of my affection for Bens Acker & Blacker. It's a quick, fun middle-grade novel, great for tweens who loved Force Awakens. Annie Wu's illustrations are adorable.

My main quibble is that the protagonist, Mattis, is pretty much the least interesting character? He's not uninteresting--I do appreciate his inner turmoil re: wanting be be heroic vs actually being heroic, and I think that struggle is something relatable for tweens... but just, give me more about Dec, the kid who was raised with a droid for a brother? Give me more about Lorica, the Paris Hilton rebel? It's clearly setting up for a series and I hope future books are narrated by other members of the squadron.

Loved this!! It's the least-confused I've felt by a Saga volume in a while ;) I noticed the back of the book called this a "standalone" which...it's not, you definitely could not pick up vol 7 and start there and follow it, but the story's arc was pretty self-contained within the Saga...saga. Very beautiful, touching, and funny... and goddamn those meerkat creatures were so cute!

I especially loved seeing older Sophie with Lying Cat :'''')

I love books about reality television so I was excited to get an e-ARC of this, but had to abandon the ARC pretty quickly because this book has a lot of footnotes and the formatting got screwed up in the ARC, so I just waited for the finished copy to be out. Sidenote: I don't think the footnotes added a lot to this overall. Also: I think it's weird that this family and their show are basically positioned as an equivalent of the Kardashians, but the Kardashians also exist in this world. I feel like they shouldn't! That's just, like, my opinion.

I really liked the basic premise of this and the ~insidery~ feel it had for reality television production, and I really liked Bentley as a character.

That said, the full plot is simultaneously very convoluted and very neatly resolved, and yet also I didn't really buy the romance.

I'd rec it to fans of reality television; it's a quick, fun read.

This very sweet and Rainbow Rowelly.

This is a quick, fluffy, cute read. Great to see multiple queer, interracial relationships in YA fiction and the main ~issue~ is just they're awkward nerds. As an adult reader, for me it veered a little bit into "oh my god just suck it up and talk about your feelings already" frustration, but for many a teen reader I think it will be extremely relatable.

This was so stunning and beautiful, my god. There's such beautiful language in this.

“Pain is our most intimate encounter. It lives on the very inside of us, touching everything that makes us. It claims your bones, it masters your muscles, it reels in your strength, and you never see it again. The artistry of pain is its content. The horror of it is the same.”

I don't want to say too much about it because I didn't know too much going into it and I just loved watching it unfold.

I still really love the concept and characters of Bombshells! I struggled a tiiiny bit with this just for "lazy DC reader" reasons, ie I refused to look up "tenebrae" even though they kept talking about tenebrae.... (Here: I just googled it for you, GoodReads. "Tenebrae is a being from another universe that is part of the Mergence, a group mind. She is sent to Earth prior to the Mergence's arrival to get everything in order for the absorption." Is that even this same thing? IDK IDK I don't care)

Also I don't know anything about Atlantean politics so I struggled a little bit to understand Mera's whole arc here...but still! Bombshells! Fun! The final scene was very moving I thought! I love Harley and Ivy! I love muckraker Cuban-American Lois Lane! The artwork is beautiful!

http://www.frowl.org/worstbestsellers/episode-73-diary-of-an-oxygen-thief/

I just hated this book so much.

I couldn't put this down. Jade's voice is so compelling. This is a great character-driven story about the difficulties of being poor and black at a rich white school, and how sometimes Jade's poor white friend can't understand her life, and sometimes Jade's wealthy (ish) black mentor can't understand her life. (Intersectionality in action y'all, and so deftly handled).

A great book to hand to fans of contemporary realistic books--especially for readers looking for books without romance. Jade's art is also a big part of the story, so that's another big appeal factor here. A really beautiful book!

LOVED this! Super relatable for a lot of teens (eg Teen Renata) and yet not a character dynamic I've seen before in YA much before? (Fat and insecure but doesn't need to lose weight to overcome it?? Not shy exactly but wary of romantic rejection??) Super funny and sweet and very diverse. Molly's voice is hilarious and realistic. And it's a very sweet romance. Multiple romances, even! <3!