A BUNCH of people raved about this book but I was afraid it would be TOO SCARY for me so I conducted some extensive pre-read interviews with friends before deciding to give it a try. I made it!! It really isn't too scary although if I tried too hard to imagine any of this it got real scary so I just like, didn't imagine it.

Anyway, it's really funny and sharp and weird. And definitely spooky but not like...aggressively upsetting. I had to re-read the last few chapters because I was like, wait, what? But also I'd been reading really fast to find out what happens. Aaaa!

This was fun and I think it will probably appeal to a lot of teens who are more into video games and Twitch streaming etc than I am. It's a great exploration of how toxic "online" stuff spills out into the offline world, and the ways intersectional identities can affect your online experience. The romance is cute, and I also appreciated the side friendships and the main characters' relationships with their parents as the parents struggle to understand the world of online video gaming.

OOOF. If there had been a book with this summary/content from almost any other author, I probably wouldn't have picked it up--I don't tend to go for books about super dark topics, especially not in 2020 because, jeez. BUT I loved Kimberly Brubaker Bradley's previous books so much that I knew I had to read this one, and it is SO GOOD. Like, yes, emotionally devastating and I sobbed for like the last half of if. But at the same time there is a hopefulness and a strength here that keeps it from being just totally crushing, as well as a sense of humor to Della's narration that keeps it moving. This book is so, so powerful and so important to read for I think not only its middle grade target audience but also for adults who work with kids, and just for most everyone? It's so sharp at pointing out the specific ways that the smallest adult actions can change a kid's life for the worse or for the better. UGH. SO GOOD. This book will stay with me for a long, long time.

That said--and this should be pretty clear just from reading the plot summary--this book definitely has a content warning for child sexual abuse, so keep that in mind if that's a trigger for you.

The author's afterword about her own experience as a survivor is also really powerful and something that will probably mean a lot to kids who have also survived abuse.

This is a really compelling and powerful book about a really fucked-up place. It's wild to have it laid out like this, how blatantly awful it is to be holding all these people who have never been, and at this point likely never will be, charged with a crime?? The interviews--with US soldiers who've worked at the prison (who aren't allowed to call it a prison because their inmates haven't been charged with a crime or sentenced to prison time), the inmates, the lawyers and others desperately working to get people out... oof. But at the same time the lovely artwork (from a variety of artists) and the conversational tone (literally, since the dialogue is adapted from transcribed interviews) make this an engaging read (rather than just a long slog of cruelty which like...it easily could have been).

This is the kind of book where I got actively furious when I had to put it down. SUCH a page turner. I feel like all of Tiffany Jackson's books have that hugely compelling page turner quality and yet also at least one extra plot twist where if you did put the book down and stop to think about it for a second you'd be like, wait, what, that doesn't make sense? But you don't actually need to think about it because you just have to keep reading baby!!!!!!

Anyway, the "ripped from the headlines" R. Kelly-ish vibe here is obviously upsetting, and there's some really interesting explicit textual criticism here where the main character, Enchanted, loves Disney movies and Twilight and justifies a lot of Korey's bad behavior by thinking it's romantic like Edward Cullen or that it's okay that she's only 17 because Ariel the Little Mermaid was only 16 when she got married. It's interesting commentary but also having Enchanted explicitly think lines like that makes her sound extremely young. Which I guess is the point, she is!

This is a great one for fans of thrillers/mysteries.

This would be a great book for a middle school-ish class/club/youth group to work through together. It's very engaging and informative but broken up into bite-sized chunks, and it has a lot of built in reflective activities. (It could also be good for a teacher to read and repurpose some of the activities.)

The premise is cool and of course I'm here for queer WOC getting their fairy tale romances. For me, the execution was a bit clunky and the dialogue was a bit heavy-handed? It will probably resonate more with younger teens who maybe haven't read as many feminist takes on fairy tales before. This book will definitely have its audience that it's important for, but I wouldn't highly recommend it to adults. (Which: is fine, it's a YA book and it's FOR teens.)

LOL this popped up as a Kindle Daily Deal or something and I read: "Echo Brown is a wizard from the East Side, where apartments are small and parents suffer addictions to the white rocks. Yet there is magic . . . everywhere." and I was like, cool, I'm into urban fantasy, let me check out this teen wizard.

But it's uhhhh magical realism where she learns that trauma can distort her perception of time and space and that in turn she can help others unlock their potential.......which is totally a valid kind of book, it's just that I stopped reading after the first half of the blurb and was like, "where's Hogwarts." There is no Hogwarts.

This is semi-autobiographical and the author is also a playwright, and knowing that helped me cope with the dialect. To me, a white reader, the way that she wrote out the dialect for the crack-addicted adults in this book....I mean, if a white author had written these lines I would have been like "this is racist". Like, "This ain't no place for a girl chile. Lawd, I prays fo da day when someone heps da lil girl chiles of dis worl', 'sepcially da black ones." (That's on page 3, the first time Echo's mother speaks...but there are a LOT of lines like that. On page 11, her mom says Echo's father "is a lyin'-ass, conniving-ass, no-good-ass mothafucka wit' thirteen kids by different womens, and he don't take care a' none of 'em.") Which, if Echo Brown also writes plays I could see her being more used to writing out dialect that way? And since it's semi-autobiographical I guess her mom talks like that?

Once I sort of got over the dialect, I mean, the writing is beautiful, and her story is inspiring. This has gotten like, across the board rave reviews and I think it will mean a lot to other teens who have gone through similar traumas? It's just...a lot to take in.

Oh also one super weird nitpick and maybe this was intentional? Like this is definitely magical realism and the narrative moves around mid-paragraph but it's set in the late 90s and rooted in pop culture (like they go see Titanic and Rush Hour at the theater) but then there are references to like RuPaul's Drag Race (and not JUST RuPaul who I know was a pop culture figure in the 90s but like specifically Drag Race which was later...) and the movie Get Out?

I attended summer camp for like 8 years as a kid and 4 summers as a counselor, and I really did love camp and think it was a really defining life experience for me in a lot of ways. And I'm very nostalgic about camp and very susceptible to camp stories, and so when I saw this I picked it up. I'm not familiar with any of Iris Krasnow's other books. Anyway, I didn't go to the kind of all summer 8-week long camp that Iris did, and there's a different vibe there, but...I like reading about camp.

I might have wished for any effort at all to make a modern reckoning of the way a lot of American camps primarily aimed at white campers appropriate/fake American Indian culture/traditions in a way that's...not great, not to mention her praising the virtues of single-sex activities without accounting for a full gender spectrum? (Which: no, wouldn't have been mainstream concerns when she was a camper back in the 60s/70s but she still works for a summer camp now?) Anyway--I understand that this is a nostalgia project and not her PhD dissertation of critical research on camp but it would have been nice to even slightly acknowledge anything along those lines.

But this is really just fully positive about how great summer camp was and is. So if you would like to indulge in some aggressive camp nostalgia, go for it. If you never went to camp, this is extremely not for you. It's also, I would say, not particularly for people in my age bracket. I think its target audience is basically women who, like Iris, came of age at summer camps in the 1960s/70s.

This is kind of...half-baked. There's a really likeable core here, and I think this could have been about 3 different good books but instead it's all mashed together. Like the actual, real-world plot of Josie coming to terms with peaking in high school and confronting the damaged relationships she's come out of high school with...good. The idea of a book about someone getting sucked into books...maybe also good? (Maybe also already done by [b:Between the Lines|12283261|Between the Lines (Between the Lines, #1)|Jodi Picoult|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1326314890l/12283261._SY75_.jpg|17259372], which I admittedly haven't read?)

I thought the most interesting part was her friendship with Nina, who transitioned in high school and had Josie as basically her only friend and protector, and then Josie realizing that in college Nina is really shining and coming into her own and doesn't need Josie anymore, and that their friendship had kind of a fucked-up dynamic bc of Josie's heroine complex or whatever? That was very good and interesting and to me, more compelling than the boyfriend trouble. But the Nina stuff is a relatively small part of it.

I also liked all the Broadway/theater references, obviously, and so would a lot of teens. So this also could have just been a book about a talented girl who doesn't make it on Broadway but instead learns that community theater isn't terrible. But again...a relatively small part of the book.

Spoiler

But then the like...evil Greek Muses scheme about her getting actually literally trapped inside books for...imagination power? IDK, dumb.

The execution of the "hook" of getting pulled into books was just like...silly, and I think the older teens who will be drawn to this older teen, high school dropout story will think it's too silly. Younger teens might go for it but then the rest of Josie's story is pitched a little old for them.