What a perfect book that really hits home. I think Ari's experience of struggling to understand himself is common to everyone. I saw myself mirrored in Ari's thoughts and feelings. This should be a must read for everyone.

Well, this is better than the dumpster fire of the first book, but that's not actually saying much.
If the first book had been written better, this one would have actually been decently strong. I probably would have liked the series instead of landing on an opinion more along the lines of "meh".

The Betrayed picks up right where the first book left off, which is good because that first book left off in a confusing mess. The "is he / isn't he" dilemma from the first book carries over into this one and made it kind of hard for me to root for certain characters or to process and move along with the story. I wish the author would have ended that question much sooner or actually addressed that readers were unsure and hadn't quite believed her description of the most important scene in the first book. I think that's what harmed this book the most.

Other than questioning if I had the whole picture for about 90% of the book, this one was pretty okay. The writing flowed along much better. The main characters actually grew and changed and acted in believable ways. There was some witty banter that I actually found enjoyable. Side characters were very flat and forgettable, though.

The Betrayed doesn't completely make up for the sins of The Betrothed, but it at least levels everything out. I'd read more by Cass.

Oh, how much I needed this graphic novel at the start of college! I had such a hard time adjusting from a class of about 170 where I knew everyone in my grade and the grades below me to a college of about 14,000 students. Since my school was bigger than just about any around it I wasn't expecting the adjustment to be so hard. I was an only child who had a room to myself and suddenly I was LIVING with someone I didn't even know in what I desperately wanted to be my own space.

Oh, and I was also an AVID fanfiction author.

So, I could definitely relate to Cath.

I believe this is volume one of what will be a four volume series, so there's not a huge amount of plot to absorb yet, but so far Cath has moved into college and is not sharing a room with her twin sister as she had hoped, but an outgoing young woman named Raegan. Raegan and her boyfriend make Cath their charity case and eventually push her out of her comfort zone to do things like eat in the cafeteria and go bowling. They aren't nearly as wild as Wren, Cath's twin sister.

Cath also makes a friend named Nick from her fiction writing class and they end up writing together at the same time every week.

It's cute.

But I'm hoping that somewhere behind this cutesy novel will be an exploration of why straight women write fictional love stories with gay characters and some of the problems that arise from this. I'm not going so far as to say this is a problem but it can be problematic. I'm hoping we will explore why crafting and detailing an epic relationship for Simon and Baz was so important for Cath that it became her entire life. But considering Rowell then turned around and actually wrote said story about Simon and Baz, I'm not holding my breath. I know I could read the novelized version to see if this ever happens and I will.

I'm also hoping to see more exploration around mental health, especially pertaining to Cath and Wren's father and to Cath herself. We'll see!

The Goblet of Fire is certainly not my favorite Harry Potter book. I think I'm simply not much of an action fan. Still, it's a five star read for me because of how much I enjoy revisiting this series every single year. I think my personal preference of Harry Potter books would have to go as follows from most favorite to least favorite.

1. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
3. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
4. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
5. Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix.
6. Harry Potter the Goblet of Fire
7. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

I did not want to put this one down!

Ash, a senior on his school's football team takes a hit that's a little too hard and before he knows it the world starts to change. He's been hit into a different dimension. At first it's barely any different from the world he knows. He's still himself. His friends are still his friends and still exactly how he knows them to be.

But that doesn't last for long. The changes begin to roll in as he shifts dimensions again and again and before Ash knows it - the world is completely changed and so is he. Unfortunately, it's up to him to set things right again. It turns out that being the "center of the universe" sucks and no one deserves it.

Some reviewers don't like that the one to set the universe "right" is a middle class white kid named after a guy who was named after a slaveholder from Gone with the Wind. But I don't think this quite fits the white savior trope. The book goes to great lengths to show that Ash is no hero and he's not creating change in the world so much as he is just experiencing possible realities. He does learn from the experiences of his friends of color as well as about LGBTQ identities, but only does so when they affect him personally. Still, I don't see this as an inherent problem. That's where most of us white people start. And at the end, Ash is still partially who he was in those alternate universes, which I think alters the way he would identify in the end. He also learns that he will never completely understand other people's experiences. He makes mistakes and is challenged on them and forced to take responsibility and do better. I see this less as "white male saves the world" and more as "white male beings to understand the world" and I think that's really important to show for teenagers who haven't had the diversity of friendships and experiences that this character does. Teenagers tend to have a small locus of experience and that can make them (it certainly made me) a bit self-absorbed.

I do think this book takes on a ton of issues and it doesn't exactly hit a 100% solid point on any of them. But I think that's okay too. The world is very complicated. The book becomes not about making everything perfect, but about being willing to learn more and use hat knowledge to lift others up.

The end really hit me. It explores if capability is culpability and it was really heart wrenching. I won't go into more detail than that here. I think this is definitely a book most everyone should read, especially those whose experience is only a small, small corner of the world.

This was a wonderful novel in verse about a boy finding his own identity in a world where he never felt he was ever quite 100% anything. Michael fits into many different identity categories, some he chooses for himself and others are perceived by others. He's mixed-race, half Greek, half Jamaican, a half brother, gay but maybe not completely, of two different last names. Finding his whole identity is hard with so many halves and so many variables.

But once he finally gets to university, Michael becomes Mike and finds who he has always been. The Black Flamingo is born.

The poetry in this book delivers the raw emotion of one boy's search for identity. It doesn't shy away from homophobia and racism. I don't think I've ever read a drag queen origin story and it's so great for representation that this exists. It's not close to my story, but that doesn't mean I didn't need to read it.

This One Summer is a coming of age graphic novel about two girls on the cusp of growing up. Their families spend every summer in the small town of Awago at two beach condos right next to each other. So although Windy is a year and a half younger than Rose, they're still summer time best friends.

This is a quiet book. One might not think that from the occasional cursing, talk of sex, and exploration of what it will mean to have boobs one day. But the action of this story is mostly second hand. The girls watch the teenagers of Awago deal with the news that one of their teenagers, Jenny, is pregnant. The girls speculate about Jenny's life and about her boyfriend, who they simply refer to as "the dud". Rose also witnesses her mother's depression, not really understanding why her mom has to go around making everything and everyone sad. It's supposed to be a vacation after all.

There is no big climactic moment, which is generally how our lives play out. There is a reveal about both Jenny and Rose's mother, but there's no real resolution. Again, that's generally how our lives play out.

I had to sit with this one for a minute to understand the point. I think this book is about the summer where Windy and Rose realize how the world perceives women and how they themselves fall into the same trap of judging other women for having emotions and for having sex or being "weird" and unconventional. This isn't comfortable to read, but having been a preteen girl, I can remember that it wasn't comfortable to experience, either.

I don't think this is a book that teenagers (seemingly the target audience) will get on their own. I think this is a good book for mother/daughter or parent/child discussion, even as awkward as it could be. Awkward talks and experiences aren't bad. They're often necessary. After all, the darker adult world looms ahead for our teens, just as it does for Rose. The way to navigate it is together.

Displacement is a brilliant debut graphic novel featuring a 16 year old half-Japanese main character who winds up traveling back through time (or something like it). Kiku Hughes can be doing anything, just living her life, and suddenly she can be swooped along in a mist and find herself some other place and some other time. The first time it happens she sees her grandmother playing violin at a concert or recital in the late 1930s.

She doesn't know much about her grandmother. She knows her grandmother wound up in Topaz, an internment (prison) camp for Japanese Americans. She knows her grandmother died of Leukemia when she was still relatively young, long before Kiku was born.

Kiku's displacements, the times where she winds up out of her own time and place, take her to experience internment for herself. She learns first hand truths that she hadn't learned in school or from her own Japanese-American community. She learns later just how the traumas of internment camps continue on, even generations later, causing her to be disconnected from the culture of her grandparents. She discovers how the aftermath of interment led to the creation of anti-black stereotypes of Japanese as the "model minority". Our history effects us all, whether we know it firsthand, secondhand, or not at all. But when we know our history, we can do our best to be better.