I really loved this contemporary YA romance with a Native (Muscogee) heroine! I love the complicated intersections at play here--and I love that as a reader, we 100% get why Louise is a little bit self-righteous, and I love that we get to see her learn to see where other people are coming from a little bit; but never to give up her own pride in her culture or her desire for justice.

It's also a great read for fans of teen journalists & teen theater kids.

I'M SO HERE FOR DOCTOR STRANGE, UNLICENSED MAGICAL VETERINARIAN WITH A TALKING DOG SIDEKICK

I'm ambivalent about Loki making moves on Zelma but whatever

This was a really fun, satisfying read! I love Nik as a protagonist and found her v relatable. Plus, love to see Drew & Alexa's cameo!

This was a quick, charming read! I loved Twinkle's passion for filmmaking, and I loved that all the friendship drama was on an equal importance to the relationship drama.

There were some minor issues that bugged me--little things like Twinkle completely loving and revering Roger Ebert but also thinking that Roger Ebert got his start on a blog? Is that a joke? Like yes sure it's hard for Kids These Days to imagine life before Online but...really? (Of course then there are points where she knows she doesn't know as much as she'd like to know and she's just faking it, eg never having seen the original Dracula, but she seems more self aware about those things than she did about the Ebert thing? Which was like literally just a throwaway line that bugged me.) Just little details like that, not make-or-break if you're just reading it for the characters or romance but enough to bug a grumpy adult such as meee. Or like a FAIRLY LARGE part of the book involves Twinkle's despair about not having a cell phone but at one point she "orders a Lyft"?? How Twinkle. How did you do that.

Also as a grown person reading this I was a little frustrated by the obvious ~secret admirer~ email thing but listen...it's cute and I'm definitely all in on Twinkle and Sahil. I appreciated Sahil as a long-time crush-haver who managed to not be a big creepy weirdo.

I also appreciated the diversity in characters, including LGBTQ pals having their own relationship drama and Twinkle's callout of her school as being only interested in diversity on MLK Day. Go off, Twinkle.

I can't believe I read these when I was like 8, dang

http://www.frowl.org/worstbestsellers/episode-105-sunset-island/

As a fan of personal essays, especially ones about our relationships with popular culture, I LOVED this. It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea but it's for sure mine.

The title is a little misleading, and Bolin addresses that on the first page: "This is a book about books. To try that again, it is a book about my fatal flaw: that I insist on learning everything from books. I find myself wanting to apologize for my book's title, which, in addition to embarrassingly taking part in an ubiquitous publishing trend by including the word girls, seems to evince a lurid and cutesy complicity in the very brutality it critiques."

So if you're picking this up in search of a true crime-focused narrative, you'll be disappointed. I'm ambivalent about true crime so I was actually glad that it wasn't entirely focused on that. It's more about Joan Didion and Los Angeles but mostly about coming of age as a woman in a society that maybe prefers the titular dead girls. I love Bolin's writing style and found a lot to relate to here.

This is super sweet, fun, and funny. A great middle-grade GN for all kinds of kids, with bright, fun art. Definitely one to hand to your fans of Smile and the like.

I got an ARC of this with some skepticism, mostly because like...is a YA novelization of a musical really necessary? I totally get the behind the scenes/making of type of book for musicals--I definitely remember poring over my copy of the Rent book before I was able to see the show live.

ANYWAY. I haven't seen Dear Evan Hansen but I have listened to the cast recording and generally like it, and I read the Wikipedia summary because just from listening to the recording I was like "oh wait what's happening?!"

So I started reading this and felt a little cringey, but in a way that seems fairly authentic to its social anxiety-ridden narrator, Evan.

Spoiler

And then things started happening from the POV of Ghost Connor and I was like WTF??? Is...is Ghost Connor in the musical??? I started asking a friend who has actually seen the show and she was like.......no. I described what all was happening in the book and she said it sounded like the book was trying to address criticism of the musical, namely that nobody actually knows anything about Connor. Except that it's kind of the point that nobody knows anything about Connor, so to set him up as this sympathetic queer ghost who killed himself because his kinda-boyfriend didn't text him back, which it turns out his kinda-boyfriend was just DOING YARDWORK AND DIDN'T HAVE HIS PHONE..........anyway it's a lot?????

I think it's also trying really hard to expand on Evan's POV about why he does the objectively shitty things he does, which...again I feel like the information we get from the musical itself is probably enough? You get the sense of how he's swept along with what's happening...I don't think we need a whole bunch more inner turmoil TBH.

IDK, this is fine. Teen fans of DEH are going to be hype for it. I'm not sure it stands on its own as a novel for readers who don't care about the musical?

First of all my Parker Posey fan status is: moderate, and I think you might need to be fan status: super and/or actually related to her to really click with this. Her schtick is that she's sitting next to you on an airplane and just chatting about her life, which facilitates a really casual tone...perhaps too casual, and too prone to assuming I want to know all the details about her home renovations and various yoga studios (this book is seriously like full-on, Yelp reviews for every yoga studio/pottery studio/vegetarian restaurant/co-op/etc she's ever belonged to??).

It's also interesting to me that this book came out in 2018 and she talks about working with Louis CK and Woody Allen in ONLY the most GLOWING terms?? Like including, uncomfortably, mentioning that Woody and Soon-yi seemed to be made for each other??? like girl ok I'm glad you had a good experience working with those men I guess but also uhhhhh



The book is also full of like...weird...collage-style photos of herself?

IDK it was a quick read and had some good celeb gossip but overall.........?

Let's see. Now that I'm looking on GR, I see reviews pointing out that this is more New Adult than Young Adult, and I think that's fair--heads up to YA librarians like me, who had seen heard this been described as a fluffy romance and then been a little surprised that the first few pages are actually pretty explicit about sex?? (Which is fine, obv books can/should exist at all levels of sexual content-having, but given how I'd seen this book marketed I was surprised by it!)

Anyway, ups to this book for its great intersectional content, and having an awesome black cover model! It's a book that will mean a lot to readers who might feel themselves represented for the first time, or for readers who might learn from it.

My issue with it as an adult librarian reading it with some distance is it did end up feeling pretty Lessony, with Alice and Takumi dispensing a lot of information about asexuality and microaggressions. Obviously these are great issues to be informed about, and for some readers this information will seem much fresher and/or more validating than it did for me.

Unfortch I felt like a lot of the informational dialogue got in the way of character development?

And I also don't understand whaat was supposed to be the relationship between Alice and her 2 best friends, like to me as a reader it seemed like a really toxic situation but nobody in text ever called it that?? Nor did Alice's supervisor seem appropriately concerned about the frankly kind of creepy flirtation that was happening at work between her and Takumi?? (Which, not that books shouldn't be about creepy things happening to people or whatever! But since the text itself is very interested in calling out some problematic things that happen it makes it more noticeable when other things are left un-commented upon.)

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