In this book, Austin Channing Brown explores what it is like to be a Black Christian in America. She writes beautifully. Her ideas leap from the page and elicit every kind of emotion: anger, sadness, joy, exhaustion and determination.

Her stories range from personal ones to her experiences with events that captured national attention like Ferguson and the 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. There are interludes, in which she offers advice or personal notes like a letter to her unborn son.

I enjoyed this book, and it’s an urgent read. I hope you read this too, and if you’ve become complacent in your anti racist work, I encourage you especially to pay attention to the chapter titled “Ain’t No Friends Here” and find yourself on that bus with Austin and her college classmates. For me, I aspire to be like the white classmate she described saying:

“Doing nothing is no longer an option for me.”

I have now read 2,594 pages of high fantasy romance this year, but who’s counting?

After I finished Crown of Gilded Bones, I was devastated that the next book in this series was going to be about gods from the main story.

“I want more Poppy and Cas and I want it NOW. No one wants to read the Silmarillion of From Blood and Ash. Give me Poppy riding a dragon or GTFO,” I said.

That feeling did not stop me from preordering A Shadow in the Ember on ebook, so when it showed up on my Kindle I was like, (deep sigh) “Fine, I’ll read it. But I REFUSE to enjoy this.”

Um. I was wrong. A Shadow in the Ember totally delivered, with a few major improvements from the original series:

1. The female MC is a badass, morally grey, fully realized ADULT.
2. Consent! Consent is a main theme in this book and it’s explicit and discussed many times over. Thank the gods.
3. Explicitly fat main character. Sera, our badass MC, lives life in a big body and she talks about it very descriptively. Unlike Poppy, who didn’t always come across as plus size (to me), Sera is unquestionably fat. And super hot and desirable. And a kickass warrior. Right on. May the fan art please reflect the text.

When it comes to funny books, I consider myself somewhat of a tough audience. It’s very hard to make me actually laugh out loud at a book. Will I breathe harder through my nose? Maybe. Will I smile? Potentially. An actual laugh? If the book is hilarious, I might laugh once, *maybe twice*

This book had me giggling almost once per chapter. A couple of times I laughed so hard I had to put it down. I laughed so many times and so much at this book I lost count.

A rabbi and a porn star walk into a teaching conference…yes, that is how The Intimacy Experiment begins. And it is no joke. (Ba-dum-cha, I’m here all week folks!)

I *really* liked this book! It’s sweet and steamy and the plot is detailed and compelling.

Ethan is a rabbi who is trying to reinvigorate and grow his synagogue’s membership. Naomi is a former porn star who is chasing her dreams of being taken seriously for her ideas, and teaching in a classroom setting. He’s almost too sweet to be real and she is assertive and very spiky. Naomi navigates her relationship with her past and her own identity as a Jew as Ethan’s navigating the politics within the synagogue and his own family dynamics.

I enjoyed Danan’s immersive descriptions of Jewish religious life and the way she brought philosophy through Ethan’s dialogue. It could have been so dry or boring, or overly religious ans stuffy, but I felt like he was so excited about his ideas and explained his thoughts and feelings so beautifully to Naomi (and us).

Both The Roommate and The Intimacy Experiment make excellent arguments about politics, religion, sexism, discrimination and sex workers and I am here for it. I can’t wait for Rosie Danan’s next book. I adore how she takes serious topics and weaves them into a sweet love story with plenty of spice to boot.

I feel almost as sad finishing With You Forever as I did finishing Get a Life, Eve Brown. The only thing keeping me going right now is knowing that we are getting more Bergmans from Chloe Liese, one more at a minimum, since she’s currently working on Oliver’s story, so there’s that.

With You Forever is the story of a serious, loner artist, Axel (the oldest Bergman brother), and his ball of sunshine, overachieving crush, Rooney.

Axel is autistic and loves intensely in his own way. It’s hard for him to understand his feelings and even harder to interpret those of others. Rooney is effusive and ebullient, although she is dealing with IBD and a complicated relationship with her parents. Somehow, these two work it out and when they do it is so worth it.

Liese is the master of the slow burn that actually pays off. THE TENSION in this book…I mean.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was Jemisin’s first novel and in it, a young woman (Yeine) is named potential heir to the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and must go to a floating magical city overrun with horrifying humans and enslaved gods to compete for the throne.

This story has a lot of intense and complex world building - religion, politics, physics, magic - and some very human characters. In some ways, this book felt more like YA than some of Jemisin’s other work in that it’s not quite as graphic as some of her later work and there is a coming of age story arc, yet it is decidedly not YA in its themes and content.

Some of the ideas in this book show back up in The Broken Earth Trilogy - like killing people by turning them into jewels - which, weird flex, but ok.

Overall, I enjoyed this but I had trouble paying full attention to it while I was reading. I wasn’t as immersed in the world and ideas as I was with her other books, although I will read the next two books in the series, of course.

It’s been a minute since I read a young adult novel! I’m glad Tokyo Ever After was my re-entry, this book was a real treat.

The main character is an 18-year-old Japanese American girl named Izumi, who has been raised by her mother. Suddenly, she and her friends discover a clue to her father’s identity and it turns out he’s the Crown Prince of Japan.

She Who Became the Sun is a fantasy novel set in 14th century Asia (what is now China and Mongolia). This book is a sweeping epic that grapples with many big themes like identity, sense of self, fate, power, gender and politics. I had really high hopes for this when I picked it up. It delivered in some areas and let me down in others.

Things in this book that were awesome:
- a deep look at gender and sexuality,
- intricate political intrigue,
- an extremely immersive time and place with a cool yet subtle magical system,
- an engrossing examination of destiny and desire, and what people will do for power
- beautiful writing that brought characters to life in very specific detail
- great multi-faceted characters - everyone is morally gray in this story!
- excellent examples of character foils in the eunuch general, Ouyang, and the main character, Zhu Chongba (shoutout to all my English lit majors!)
- LGBTQIA+ rep, specifically trans, gay and lesbian main characters

Things in the book that were not awesome:
- pacing, oh god the pacing. The first 100 pages were amazing - chock full of plot points and excitement. The middle 200 pages were…a snooze? I kept losing track of characters and places and having to go back and reread paragraphs. The last 100 pages were back to that super gripping, dramatic plot that sucked me right in and left me wanting more.
- action descriptions. The author made some choices to “yada yada over the best part” on a few separate occasions. Sometimes I appreciated this, and others I needed a better understanding of what had just happened.
- too many characters? There were a lot of familial pairs so the names got confusing for me at times. I would have appreciated a character list somewhere in this book or a family tree or something

All that said, I enjoyed this book and will be reading the sequel(s)!

Meh.

I think I must have started with the wrong Jasmine Guillory book, because this one was NOT IT. The setting had so much potential! It fell flat. The characters could have been so interesting! They were not. The steam could have been so steamy! It was not. The banter could have existed! It was absent.