This is a sweet, fun story of giant fighting robots and the teens who pilot them. The art is cute for the humans but I found it a little hard to tell what was actually supposed to be happening in some of the robot combat scenes? Generally I could piece it together from dialogue.

Overall, not my particular cup of tea, but great for tween (and beyond) fans of Pacific Rim and such.

I had a hard time putting this book down! Yvonne's voice is so strong, and I really felt for her senior year struggles. I appreciated that she didn't have a clear path toward figuring out what she wants to do after high school, and I loved her self-awareness of both her privileges (as a relatively well-off teen getting a good private school education) and her disadvantages (as a black teen girl at a mostly white institution). I was just rooting for her so hard the whole time!

Spoiler

It's also sex positive and pro-choice!

Also it made me real hungry! Why isn't MY dad a gourmet chef! (I guess it wouldn't do me much good at this point in my life BUT STILL)

I think this is just the kind of thing where I can appreciate abstractly the quality of writing while acknowledging that it's not really my cup of tea.

This was a really moving, tense read. A great contemporary YA about and for teen activists. I recently read Let's Talk About Love and had the complaint that the characters kind of felt like walking Tumblr primers for their identities, and this book is much more advanced level. It's packed with intersectionality--trans characters of color, LGBTQA characters of color, nonbinary characters of color, disabled characters of color, etc etc etc, but very much in a way that assumes the reader is already familiar with all of these concepts and ready to roll their eyes at clueless microaggressions (um, and macroaggressions) against their identities. So: for some readers this might be a bit confusing, but for a lot of readers I think it will come as a relief that these characters can just be who they are without a ton of explanation given. It's also a real callout @ clueless white allies and it's probably the type of book that's going to make a certain subset of white people real mad, but I think it's a valuable perspective to read and sit with.

It's a sad, infuriating, moving read but with characters to root for and just enough shreds of hope to keep it from being completely bleak.

I JUST WANTED THIS TO BE A FUN, DUMB MYSTERY BUT IT WAS A REAL SLOG.

For a book sold mainly on everyone's effection for Joe & Barack's adorbs friendship, why would you make the baffling choice to have them be mad at each other for nearly the entire book!? MASCULINITY IS A PRISON

This would be 1 star from me but the cover grants it 1 bonus star. TRAGICALLY the content does not match the delightful whimsy implied by the cover.

http://www.frowl.org/worstbestsellers/episode-106-hope-never-dies/

I haven't read the main Secret Empire book (and lbr probably never will) but I really enjoyed this nonsense (I think largely because Hydra Steve was in this for like, 2 panels and seemed extremely tangential to the magical happenings at hand). I'd read another entire volume of just Dr. Strange, Ben Urich, and Jessica Drew making D&D jokes. Please give that to me, Marvel.

Also, let Jess be a werebear!

I didn't really know what to expect from this but I enjoyed it a lot! God knows, I love a group of fictional pretentious youths. Despite being written by a woman it does have some of the irritating hallmarks of ~literary fiction~--there's like, one female character and she's ~mysterious and lovely~, and I do get that part of that is that we're only seeing her through Richard's eyes and he doesn't really understand any of what he's walked into here. (Also: justice for Judy Poovey, I was so pleased with her epilogue.)

but also like wow



I did appreciate the way the tension builds throughout this, and the way the emotional repercussions played out for everyone. Ultimately I found this book very hard to put down.

I enjoyed this a lot! I don't normally read a lot of mystery/thrillers but I saw this on Netgalley and something about the title/cover just grabbed me. It was short and fast-paced but still had a fully-developed relationship between the two sisters, and a really dark sense of humor to it. The details about life in Lagos were interesting to me and set it apart from a lot of other mystery/thriller type books.

Ohhhh I just loved this book so much. I loved Darius. I felt like his struggles here are captured so poignantly, including his awareness that "nothing bad has ever happened to him" and yet he still feels his depression. (Because...that's how it works.) And the sense of not really knowing his family, and the sense that we as a reader get that there's more going on with his parents than Darius can perceive...and yet he's also a funny, observant narrator, and I loved the peek into life in Iran as well.

Spoiler

I also really loved his friendship with Sohrab, and just kind of...the vaguest hint of neither of them being able to fully process their feelings for each other but just the power of finally finding a friend being a good enough place to start.

UGH. BEAUTIFUL.

Looove this! This is the 2nd book I've read this year (after Moxie) that I think really successfully incoporated ZINES. (I have to say that IRL, in my limited experience, I am not seeing a wave of resurgence of teen zine-making, but both of these books make a really persuasive case for why zines are still a relevant and satisfying project.)

This is a great, funny, moving, realistic story about friendship and cultural identity and music and I just loved it <3