I received an ARC through my job as a librarian

Okay, so I'm floored. This is a slow paced contemporary where nothing much happens plot wise. That sentence sounds like my own personal hell if I'm being honest. But the author came with some solid ass writing, strong characters, a bit of family mystery and lots of family drama. The star, strength and focus of this book is the characters. In addition, there is some wonderful queer rep. Our main character (Violet) identifies as bisexual. One of the other female characters identifies as straight originally but enters into a F/F romance and struggles to identify what she is. Violet also has panic attacks while her brother (Samm) recently attempted suicide and is at a treatment facility. It is never verbalized what her brother has been diagnosed with but is specified that he struggles with food control.

The family drama tends to continuously rear its head. Deaths, views, home life and conflicts left open and unattended to have caused a lot of problems with Liv and Violet especially. While I've never experienced most of their issues, it seemed real. It wasn't over dramatized nor was it ridiculously wishy washy about problems.

I loved the romance in this and especially reading a book where someone doesn't know what they identify as. I feel like people assuming they are straight until they meet someone who makes them realize they may not be is something that is a pretty common thing. Not everyone realized they are gay or bi or whatever until they're confused and kissing someone they never thought they would.

The issues I had were just how little of the shipwreck plot is actually acted on! I would've loved an epilogue where Liv finds the wreck or something but it was just abandoned. That sort of fit with the book but it also just felt like a weirdly abandoned ending for the device that takes Liv and Violet through this WHOLE book. Also, the end about Violet's genealogy was kinda stupid. Those kids do all that research and yet none of them did a basic search on Ancestry? Really?

I can definitely see people picking this up and then DNFing it because "nothing happens" so please just realize this book is about the characters and their struggles. Not about finding a sunken shipwreck.

Rep: the main character is bisexual and one of her friends originally identifies as straight but enters into a F/F romance

Okay I'm so excited that I get to whip out this card already (context: I'm so excited to be old)

back in my day, I went to the library with my mom and wanted a book! I went to this magical land called the Reference Desk and waited 20 minutes in line to talk to a witch known as the Reference Librarian. I asked her for a book that was like Coraline and that damn witch refused to suggest anything but the damn Babysitters Club and the Dear Canada series. This damn book should have existed back then! I just kept rereading Coraline to spite that witch!

Okay yeah so as an adult reading middle grade, this is quite predictable. It reminds me of a very specific other book but I can't put my freaking finger on what book it is! For the target audience of this book though, this would be a good read with good morals, lovable characters. Also, as someone who wanted to bash my head through a wall when I was recommended stupid fluffy Babysitters Club over and over and over again as a child, this was the darker toned I wanted as a child! There's nothing graphically violent but it's darker and has an eerie feeling for most of the book and has a kidnapping.

This honestly seemed like a combination of Neil Gaiman's Coraline & Stardust but leaning more into steampunk and with space pirates. Also! Why do we as readers and writers under use space pirates?! I want more of that shit!

A second also: praise be to the cover gods. They are blessing middle grade titles like it's going out of style glares at YA titles with faceless girls in cloaks or badly photo shop stock image with ombre clearly done by an unpaid intern just doing their absolute best

This was a very Swoon Reads publication. By that I mean, very British, super quick read, with a predictable cast, plot and morals.

I really liked Lucinda. She was more modern for the time period but didn't stick out like a sore thumb the way some do when putting a forward thinking woman in this era. The romance was very predictable but cute and sweet. I love that she found someone who is also a feminist. I think that's the only way I would have liked her ending up in a romance (and who are we kidding? It's YA. We can't have women in books being single!)

This book was suggested to me on Instagram by a follower and I am so happy they did.

Okay this book hooked me right from the start which is surprising. I'm not normally one for contemporary set fantasies most of the time but this really worked for me! I think between having Horace's magical box and Chloe's dragonfly, I'd want to go with a dragonfly so I can walk through stuff but both of their abilities were used really well throughout the whole plot.

We of course have an underground evil cult trying to kidnap children but pretending they aren't evil. Good times in middle grade!

I will absolutely be reading the sequel after how things ended between Horace and his mother. I loved his family dynamic but my mind got blown at the end.

This was a wonderful own voices title from Indigenous Australian authors. I honestly couldn't think of a single author I knew that fell under both of those categories before. I really REALLY hope we'll get more Indigenous authors published by mainstream publishers in the coming years. Indigenous rep seems to have completely fallen to the wayaide despite the "We Need Diverse Books" campaign and readers asking for diversity.

Despite being less than 200 pages, it covered a lot of things about how Indigenous people were treated under colonization. Now I apologise but I'm going to use the Canadian terms for them. I am just not well versed in Indigenous Australian history beyond the fact that I KNOW we did similar things in Canada.
-Missing & murdered Indigenous women
-Modern day death rates of Indigenous people's
-The 60s Scoop
-Residential Schools

This book deals a lot with death. I can honestly say that as a cis straight white person--even from a lower class upbringing--I know one person who has died and it was health problems. I'm quite lucky. The consistency of deaths in Indigenous communities is still to this day STAGGERING in Canada. There were serious parallels between the murder mystery of this book "how are this many people dying in such a small town" and "this was ignored or swept under the rug." Yet, despite this book involving and revolving around a lot of death, it wasn't particularly depressing nor did it ignore the impact of deaths. It was sort of cathartic for me as a reader. The main character's father grieves through the whole book. Though it is such a short book, this wasn't hastened. It was done with care and gradually built up.

I loved how the authors wove in all of the issues Indigenous people are and have faced along with their cultural beliefs of the cycle of lives and souls and how we are interwoven with animals and nature.

God, I'm a hot ugly cry mess right now. This book hurts my heart.

Trigger warning: self harm, rape and domestic abuse

I still like the characters in Kelsea's timeline but the plot for it just seemed...off and scattered a bit. The magic wasn't quite explained and I'm a little lost on that end. I really struggle that the past timeline with William Tearling is far more interesting to me than Kelsea's. I wanted more of that timeline and not so much of Kelsea's

So this wasn't totally what I was expecting but I honestly had NO idea about the role of the Ritz during the Nazi occupation of Paris! I love it when authors go find overlooked and almost forgotten members of history and just mess with them when we have holes in our knowledge of who they were/what they did/what happened to them.

I honestly almost walked away from the book a bit before the midway mark. I know it's set in a different time and place but the institution of marriage and how women were expected to act once married...just sent me on an angry feminist millennial rage. BUT...Melanie Benjamin won me over by the end. I don't know how or when exactly but I was so glad that Blanche and Claude finally got to have a marriage

The ending is what really sucked and by sucked! I! DO! NOT! MEAN! IT! WAS! BADLY! WRITTEN! The ending was real. It's from records and the idea that Blanche went through ALL of that in the war and with Claude, only for her to come to that end was honestly heartbreaking. It infuriates me more now that we just don't know the details of that situation because my brain is trying to romanticize Claude and Blanche together.

Rep:

one of the main characters is Jewish

Okay I want to slap whoever told me this was just "you know, a fantasy folklore retelling of something that kinda felt Russian." I would have read this SO MUCH sooner if I had known it was about pogroms and antisemitism pre-World War II! I feel so betrayed and now I can't even remember who told me so I can't cut them out of my life.

How have I just been randomly stumbling into books that talk about racism and bigotry without knowing it recently? Like I JUST read [b:The Downstairs Girl|33224061|The Downstairs Girl|Stacey Lee|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1542719671l/33224061._SY75_.jpg|53929589] thinking it was about a newspaper opinion column and then got slapped with 300+ pages of America being racist as hell to Chinese immigrants.

I honestly really think more books like this are needed. I did a degree in European history that covered a variety of centuries and geography (with a specific focus on Russia and WWII). People seriously do not comprehend how longstanding antisemitism is. It wasn't just the Nazis in World War II that suddenly were like "hey! why don't we blame the Jews?!" There's just so much geopolitical and cultural conflicts that are still going on today that started over a thousand years ago. The infusion of the bear and swan were really interesting and did help break up a pretty difficult topic but it also fit in with the tone and geography of the book.

I also was not aware that a bunch of this presented in a format like most books written in verse (i.e. I thought it would take me like triple the time to read)
Rep: Eastern European Jewish folklore and characters

One of my favourite stand alones and contemporaries I've read. The main character is so funny and sarcastic! The group of friends has such a wonderful mixture of views and backgrounds. The school and some hypocrisies within it reminded me a lot of my Catholic high school and as an atheist who had to go to catholic school, it was just really cool to see that in a book--especially where the atheist character is just an atheist...they weren't betrayed or their family wasn't murdered to make them lose faith...they were just an atheist. PS Katie's Twitter feed should be published cause it's so damn funny.