I highlighted about 30 brilliant/devastating passages from Victoria Law's brilliant/devastating Prisons Make Us Safer. In a quick read for a work dense with scrupulously sourced myth-busting statements about mass incarceration, Law fires vicious truth bombs at the unjust criminal "justice" system.

The term "criminal justice system" refers to the legal system in which people are arrested, prosecuted, and threatened with imprisonment. Advocates, particularly abolitionists, are increasingly rejecting the use of that term, noting that the system does not provide justice, it metes out punishment.

The heart of Law's book is that prison doesn't do anything for anyone, and she anticipates any "Yeah, but..." a person might come up with. In particular, Law has no time for prison as a preventative measure. Incarceration takes place after harm is done, and she shows that incarceration is not a deterrent.

I could go on, and if you want me to export all of my highlights, I will! In the meantime, thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC. I should also disclose that I'm friends with Vikki--and dazzled by her!

I believed the hype, blurbs, or NetGalley promotion and read The Nature of Witches sooner than I might have otherwise. The central character, Clara, is a witch with once-in-a-century powers, but with that power comes pain--not to Clara, but to those she loves: her parents, her best friend, and anyone else she lets in. Therefore, she's guarded--emotionally and with her magic. She's under pressure to get the latter in order because the effects of global climate change are becoming catastrophic. Other witches are unable to fight the storms without depleting themselves.

Clara's love interests: an old flame (Paige) and a new one (Sang) help Clara try to get past her paralysis. It's a fast enough read that I didn't mind so much that I didn't love the book, but like most of the people in Clara's community, I was a little bored with her internal struggle.

Deception is the second (to [b:Reckless|1535768|Reckless|Selena Montgomery|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348442258l/1535768._SY75_.jpg|1527893]) in an unfinished trilogy about three orphans returning to their former hometown when their mother figure needs them. Findley Borders, Fin, a professional gambler, is the center this time. She was an intriguing voice on the phone in Reckless, which calls for her to risk her life to save her chosen family--with the help of the DA she immediately read as a fed and a sexy mofo.

Montgomery likes to tell us about hot people who are hot for each other. That's tricky when the magic happens in a similar way two books in a row, but I still missed the characters when I finished Deception. My other complaint is that the omniscient voice switched around too quickly and too much. Still I'm very upset that Montgomery hasn't given us the third orphan, Julia's story, and probably Montgomery is too busy saving America now to ever get to it.

tbh, despite the beautiful language and topical import, I found this book to be a slog. Could be Covid.

Gifty, a neuroscience PhD student at Stanford, is working with mice to understand addiction. Her research interest has nothing to do with the devastating heroine overdose of the person she loved most, or that's what she seems to tell herself. The emotional distance makes sense because the overdose is not discussed in her family. Not by her depressed mother or by her absent father back in Ghana. Gifty is a loner who doesn't have much of an outlet at all, and won't even go to the supermarket where she has a crush on a cashier.

Somehow, things ease up. Gifty grudgingly lets people in, and one of her mice escapes its addition.

I loved this book most of the way through. It's about a young woman, Opal, who loves cooking and cleaning, even for a white family in 1930s Georgia. She works with her grandmother, who has raised her since Opal's parents were out of the picture for reasons that are not made clear. Opal has a warm and loving extended family--through blood and church in Colored Town--their section of Parsons. She even mostly loves her white employer's family, including Jimmy Earl, a boy five hears older than her 18, who is back from pharmacy school for the summer and looking at her in a new way. Competing for Opal's affection is Cedric, the preacher's son and up-and-coming pitcher hoping for a shot in the Negro Leagues.

Speaking of the Negro Leagues, Satchel Paige is a character in When Stars Rain Down. And so is the Klan, unfortunately. Despite being about a girl who is happy with her life as it is, a novel about a Black woman in the 1930s south wouldn't be realistic without bad white people doing bad things. It finally gets to be bad enough that Opal loses her patience with white folks' bullshit. She gets made at God, too, but eventually God gets girl back, which is where my love waned because I'm a monster. I had enjoyed Opal's voice and story throughout, but the end came too quickly for me and with too much acceptance and also an unexpected kindness that probably wouldn't really have amounted to much.