While the main character is 13, I’d say this book is most appropriate maturity-wise for fourth or fifth graders. It’s still a middle grade book, not what I would consider in the young adult category.

Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus is about a girl named Aven who was born without arms. Still, no one is going to tell her what she can or can’t do. She still plays sports (soccer) and the guitar and goes to normal public school like other kids. Because she’s gone to the same school since kindergarten, no one really thinks that much of her differences. But now, Aven isn’t in Kansas anymore.

Her family uproots to Arizona to run a deteriorating theme park called Stagecoach Pass. This means Aven will have to start a new school, somehow manage to find new friends, and gather up the courage to deal with “the looks” from classmates and teachers.

This book is precious. It shows the humanity of children with differences, be they glaringly physical (like Aven’s lack of arms) or neurological (like Tourette’s).

Although it’s a middle grade book, Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus doesn’t shy away from tough issues, mainly themes of disabilities and adoption. There’s mystery and friendship and perseverance in spades. I think most middle school students could enjoy this book.

This is a book I think I'll revisit and I'd recommend it to anyone feeling a bit down or overly nostalgic or anyone who wonders what life might have been like if they had only done this or that differently.

The Midnight Library is the story of all the choices Nora might have taken in her life. In her life she was truly afraid of living. At 35 she had lost her father to a heart attack, lost her mother to illness, lost her brother to resentment, lost her job, lost her piano student, lost her love of swimming, lost her chance to have a successful career in a band, and even lost her cat.

Nora felt she had lost everything, and so Nora lost the last thing she had to lose, her will to live.

That might sound depressing, but this book isn't depressing at all.

Instead of dying, Nora ends up in the in-between-world of The Midnight Library, where she has the opportunity to explore books of her possible selves. Her friendly elementary school librarian helps her find various lives she might like to try out and if she finds one she likes and truly wishes to keep as her own, she'll merge into that life. Sounds perfect, right?

But there's a danger. She can't stay in limbo forever and further thoughts of helplessness could cause the library to collapse around her if she looses that last vestige of her will to live.

This story will remind you of the simple joys of living and inspire you to find your own world of infinite possibility. All you need is hope.

If you're an anime fan, this is available on Hulu and I highly recommend it.

The novel is everything I'd hoped it would be. It was so much fun to "see" more in depth into the story. It's also a relief to know the author has a very powerful grasp on how MMORPG games work. I know I have students who will absolutely love this series.

Basically this is what Sword Art Online SHOULD have been. But it stands completely on its own right as a story where a game world becomes reality for those trapped into it. This story is funny, thoughtful, and precious by turns. At times Naotsugu's character is annoying. His actions are sometimes just a bit too anime to translate to a book. That's the only part of the author's writing that felt inauthentic to their own style.

The second novel for Log Horizon still covers the material of the anime, but in a way that feels strong in its own right. After reading two of these, I have to say that the Log Horizon novels are among the strongest of all the anime/manga novelizations currently released in English. They're certainly better written than the Naruto novelizations, which I read a couple of years ago to make AR tests for them. These are strong enough to stand on their own without the parent material.

"I finally realized that the place where I belong can't exist until I make a place for other people to belong."

There's not a ton of action in this particular volume. The tension comes from the characters, especially from the plight of two young twins that Shiro, the main character, mentored before they were all sucked into the game. Now they've been essentially enslaved by a production guild due to their low player levels and Shiro has to decide if this world requires the ethics of his former world. Is it his responsibility to make this game world (their home for who knows how long?) a better place?

This is the first of a two-part volume. So it does suffer a bit from being too stretched. This could have been one piece.

I did enjoy seeing the younger, lower level players learn to build their own confidence and fail along the way. I feel like this series does suffer from some of the same "plot armor" issues that most YA stories suffer from, but these characters aren't entirely free from consequences.

I was sometimes tempted to skip parts of the "kid" scenes to get back to what Shiroe was up to. That was far more interesting to me. I realize this character development is pivotal and I did enjoy it. I just wanted some more worldbuilding by this point. It'll come in the second part of this volume, I'm sure.

Great idea and I'll definitely keep reading.

Oh man.

So, this world is amazing. I could read a 2000 page book about this world, and I'm thrilled to finally see a book from Nesta's perspective. I was so tired of perfect Feyre and her perfect life and her hypocritical "I don't need no man and don't wanna be a housewife" attitude which ended in her being so wrapped up in a man she can't really be separated from him as a person and fulfilling housewifey duties budgeting for their perfect court.

Don't get me wrong, I love the books. But I'm still bitter about how the author forces readers toward one love interest and assassinated the character of another for no good reason.

Sarah J. Maas treats Nesta the way she should have treated Tamlin, so I'm glad to see that the author is learning that more people matter in this world than just Feyre and Rhysand.

I'm being petty.

I've always liked Nesta, even at her most viscous and most cruel. She really wasn't as bad as her reputation suggested. Her character development in this book is simply masterful.

This book needed more world building and fewer "romance" scenes, but Maas knows what the majority of her readers care most about and it sells the books, I suppose. They just didn't feel earned like in previous books.

I'm hoping the next book will have just as much character development, just as many pages, and a greater insight into this world and its workings.

I'm not so sure how to rate this one.

The book deals with some heavy topics, so here are some trigger warnings with as few spoilers as possible:
suicide, death, grief, fire, infertility

For a book with such heavy topics, it felt much lighter than I was expecting. This meant it was easy to read, but I don't think the lightheartedness of so much of this worked well. Due to the nature of the story, we learn most of what we know about the characters from their conversations, so this book is a whole lot of tell and not a lot of show. The parts that show us the characters are the best parts by far.

I found the idea of this story intriguing. Some required a bit of a suspension of belief at first, like the fact that Tallie brings a strange man to her home when she knows nothing about him. As a therapist, she should know much more about getting someone help in this situation while also keeping boundaries to keep herself safe.

Tallie was a bit of a problematic character for me. She's supposed to be 40. Her character's voice and actions make her feel like she's 20. She's very naïve and although she thinks about deeper aspects of what is happening to her, she doesn't seem to actually process them. I think if she were written to be younger, her actions would make more sense to me. I do like some things about her, of course, but she required me to suspend some of my belief about what an actual person would do in her situation.

Emmett works much better as a character on the page. His story is slowly revealed over the course of the book and I felt much more empathy for him than I did for Tallie. It made the story feel unbalanced for me. I wanted to care about these characters equally.

This was a BOTM book for me and I'm still glad I picked it. It's on the edge of what I'd normally pick for myself. I'll read more by this author because she has a strong writing style.

2.5 Stars

Alright, so I’m not a romance reader. But I enjoyed two other books by this author, [b:The Great Alone|34912895|The Great Alone|Kristin Hannah|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1501852423l/34912895._SY75_.jpg|56275107] and [b:The Nightingale|21853621|The Nightingale|Kristin Hannah|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1598993363l/21853621._SY75_.jpg|41125521]. I wasn’t really sure what this one would be but it came through for 99 cents on my Kindle deals email and I went for it. The cover was pretty enough.
It’s... an okay book. The start of slow. It takes more than 100 pages for anything to happen. The writing is of great quality though, so for those of you who like to read, who like the 90s and like horses, won’t mind the long build up. The resolution is satisfying enough but I did have a couple of problems with this one
One of the main characters is “the fat sister”. The other is “the housewife sister” and the youngest is “the bumbleheaded blonde sister”. It took forever for personality to shine past caricatures. The reader is reminded every other paragraph of Winona’s size and that’s just not necessary. This size makes her jealous and passive aggressive and just plain unlikable.  Her relationship with her father would have been enough to accomplish this. And Vivi Ann is seen for so long as empty headed, even by her sisters. It’s frustrating.
I’m also less than thrilled with the treatment of and characterization of the Native American ranch hand. The elements of racism could have been explored differently, without creating the idea of a man of color about to devilishly steal the beautiful white woman.
Overall, it was okay. I’ll read more by this author because I love her masterpieces I’ve already mentioned, but I probably won’t read everything by her. I’ll be picky with some of her older books.

I really wanted to like this one more than I did. It's a good book. I didn't love it, though.

Sanctuary is a near-future dystopia about a teenage girl named Vali who was born in 2016 in Columbia. Her parents fled a seemingly never-ending civil war when Vali was four. They made the long and dangerous trek from their homeland to California. They became "undocumented" "illegal" residents in the United States.

Eventually the family made their way to Vermont where Vali's younger brother, Ernesto was born. Since he's born in America, he is documented, legal, safe. But the rest of the family is not, a fact that becomes all too real when Vali's Papi was deported back to Columbia. He died there.

Fast forward to 2032 when all US Citizens are given microchip implants to prove their legal status. The United States has a president elected to a third term, a demilitarized zone full of landmines separates Mexico from the United States. Vali and her mother rely on fake ID chips to keep them safe, but that won't work forever...

This book is the story of what happens when Vali's family is torn apart, when California secedes from the United States, and the only hope for survival for thousands upon thousands is to make it to the place now called Sanctuary.

The story starts off strong, full of vibrant detail and characters that will pull at your heart strings. Unfortunately that level of detail doesn't last. Characters become more and more two-dimensional as the story progresses and plot becomes more and more simplistic. This book should have been on par with Hunger Games. The story had that much potential. It could have easily been another 100 pages (or had 50 pages replaced with more straightforward plot with better characterization for supporting characters and planning). I was supposed to feel deeply for the people Vali met on her journey. Instead, because they were so loosely described and often not around for long, I felt next to nothing. That in turn made me struggle to feel as deeply for Vali as I should have.

The book has an open ending, leaving plenty of room for a sequel should the author choose to write one. It's not entirely necessary, but I'd be open to one.

A fascinating look at the ways we lie to others and to ourselves, how we abandon who we are to create who we are and what we sacrifice along the way...

The Vanishing Half is a story of two identical twin sisters, born with light enough skin to "pass" for white in certain situations, if no one around them knows the truth. One sister, Stella, will choose to perform this life as a white woman, but it costs her a relationship with everyone she knew and loved and makes life isolating for her as no one can ever truly know her after crossing over. The other sister, Desiree, will make her life as a black woman.

The book explores how these opposite choices create entirely different life paths for the Vignes twins and how those choices lead to radically different lives for the daughters of the next generation. Stella's daughter, Kennedy, is blonde haired and blue eyed, and whiteness is all she has ever known. Desiree's daughter is so dark that camera's can't quite focus around the color of her skin. Desiree knows her family and trusts her mother. Kennedy can't help but think her mother is hiding something.

This book had potential to be great, but I don't think it entirely lives up to that potential. The pacing of the book makes the middle third drag by so slowly that I could have put the book down and not felt bad about not finishing. I felt like this book only scratched the surface of some of the topics it tried to cover, perhaps because that list of topics is so long.

I love that the author included multiple ideas around the concept of "passing" and realize that no one character can tell every story, so I'm not so hung up on how the character of Reece "passed" so easily as cisgender. I do wish the author gave a little more complexity to queer spaces and identities, but if this book is an entry point for white, cis bookclub moms to understand a bit more about the complexities minority communities face, then I'm all for it.

I wish the emotional depth of the main characters' stories was plumbed all the way to the core. I felt like, in most instances, it was only danced around. I was left wanting a bit more in most aspects.