Crystallinegirl

Have you ever read a book that is so good you don't know what to say about it? It's taken me almost two weeks to even attempt this review because I just don't know what to write. The Poppy War is your typical story of downtrodden, disadvantaged girl testing into the highest school in the land and gaining the opportunities and privileges that come with that, but then the book takes a sharp twist into war. Rin doesn't exactly get the most typical of educations, even before war breaks out. And when war breaks out, the school is disbanded, the students getting flung all over the land to where the government thinks they will help the most. For Rin, that's joining The Cike. The Bizarre Children. The division of people who can do....things. Things the rest of the military isn't comfortable with. The Cike can call on the powers of gods, and doing so makes them not-quite-untouchables. Rin, who was never short on resentment before this, grows ever more resentful.

Rin is an interesting character; she's been hard done by, yes, but she makes decisions that only make things harder on herself. So I feel for her a little, but at the same time, girl. Check yourself. What's been done to you doesn't justify what you plan to do to others. I am hoping she comes to see that in the next book, because her rage and need for vengeance definitely gets the best of her in this one.

The Poppy War is an excellently written blend of military fantasy, epic fantasy, and coming-of-age novel. Unlike some books, where the military aspect far overshadows the characters, leaving them flat, Poppy War doesn't ignore the characters to focus on the bigger picture. It's a very good mix of both close-up focus on characters, fights, battles, and zoomed-out strategy and war. It's probably the best military fantasy I've read, and the Asian aspect of it makes it even better. So much military fantasy is western European, or Steampunk, or both. I've been finding more and more Asian and African fantasy, and I am SO HERE FOR IT. I need to try to find more South American fantasy. I know it's out there.

I will definitely be watching for the next book in this series, because it's awesome.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

Another spooky story for October! On first glance, this one is very similar to Rin Chupeco's The Girl From The Well, but the plot is actually quite different. It's still human boy, murderous ghost girl, but here the girl is bound to her house and forced to murder whoever comes inside. Unraveling the WHY is a major part of the plot.

I'd say this one is actually less creepy than The Girl From The Well, though one of the evil things Cas encounters is VERY creepy. Both of these were just about the right amount of spooky for me. I'm actually REALLY disappointed that the sequel is proving very difficult to get my hands on! I had to request it through Marina, my statewide lending program, so I'm not sure when it will arrive. But I NEEEEEEED to know what happens to Cas and Anna after this book ends!

I think I liked the relationship between boy and ghost better in Girl From The Well; you could clearly see the draw for the ghost, and the connection between them. Not so much here; Cas is trying to kill Anna, but then they become fascinated with each other for...some reason? Anna isn't compelled to kill Cas, and that's never explained, and seems to be her main source of fascination with the boy.

Another major difference is that while Tark in Girl From The Well is rather isolationist and creeps out his peers, Cas seems to attract his peers, and quickly finds friends wherever he goes. He's typically used them as contacts in the past, not really valuing them as friends, but that changes with the events of this book, as he actually comes to know a couple of the kids at his new school and value their friendship. He even puts up with their jokes about being Ghostbusters and who would be which character, which is kind of hilarious.

Both stories are great; I'd say this one is slightly more light-hearted than Girl From The Well, but only slightly. There's still lots of creepy ghosts, life-or-death situations, gory deaths of side characters, and curses. It's another great spooky October book for scaredy-cats like me!

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

Dark Lycan is the twenty-first (!!!) book in the Dark series, Christine Feehan's epic world of Carpathians and vampires. And yes, they're different. I don't think that number counts her “Wild” books, on leopard shifters, even though they exist in the same world. Dark Lycan introduces (I think, it's possible they were mentioned in an earlier book, but I don't recall them) a new species, the Lycans. Lycans are to werewolves as Carpathians are to vampires.

I suppose I should explain that.

Vampires are Carpathians that have given up their souls. They are almost invariably men, because male Carpathians eventually lose the ability to feel emotions and see colors (the better to be hunters of vampires, often their former friends and family) unless they find their lifemate. This is where the paranormal romance comes in. Each book is a story of a Carpathian finding his lifemate and “claiming” her. It's an ancient ritual that binds their souls together, giving them a telepathic and empathic connection and involves a lot of sex and exchanging blood and yadda yadda yadda basic vampire erotica.

The Dark series is a bit formulaic - dominant powerful hero, sassy heroine that doesn't know what he's capable of, outside danger to them both, instant love because she brings color back to his world and he has a primal need to bind her and have sex with her and yeah. I'd stopped reading several years back (and I had a TON of these books!) because I was a bit tired of the near-chauvinism and almost-forced sex storylines. But I wanted some mindless guilty pleasure and the Dragonseeker bloodline (a specific family line of Carpathians had always intrigued me. So I picked this up and was pleasantly surprised. Fenris didn't force Tatijana - on the contrary, he didn't want to bind them. (Maybe Feehan's modernizing slightly?)

Feehan's strength, I think, is in introducing characters whose love stories you want to read. In this book we see a bit more of Fenris' brother and his lifemate, who is also not yet bound, and they've been a slow-burn through several books because I remember them from when I stopped reading, a couple books before this one! This book also introduces Tatijana's sister, and the man who will be her lifemate - but he's a Lycan, so that's...strange. The normal formula is that the man is always a Carpathian, but the woman isn't always. She can be converted (because they do work off standard vampire mythos) so I assume that's what they'll do to her lifemate? Anyway, I've learned those two couples are the next two books, so I've put holds on those at the library because now I'm hooked again!

Side note: I thought this was going to be a quick paragraph or two fired off, but then I started talking about the background and - well I used to really love these books. Apparently.

So. In Dark Lycan we introduce the Lycans, have a new, real partnership between equals, and actually have a bit LESS explicit sex than I'm used to seeing in the Dark books. Cool. The pacing was a little weird, but the combat with vampires is never really the point of the books, it's the romance and the feelings and the sex, so whatever. These aren't great literature. They're hot fluff when you need to turn your brain off for a while (and maybe turn other things on).

If you like Paranormal Romance, and don't mind your heroes very dominant and rather forceful, you'd probably enjoy this series. I'd recommend starting at the beginning, though, because all the characters and background history would be VERY confusing to someone that hasn't learned it through the books. Goodreads has them listed in order.

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

This book has one of the best forewords I've ever seen. Bornstein explains that since 1994, when the book was first published, language has changed a lot, and terms that were used regularly then, like transsexual, are highly offensive now. So she has heavily rewritten the book to change the language, but she goes on to say that language is an always-changing thing, and in five or six years this edition, too, might be offensive in the language used. Then she apologizes for that. My favorite lines are one of the last paragraphs of the foreword:

Now, if anything you read in this book makes you feel bad or wrong or small and weak, then please know that I said something wrong. This book was written many years ago, and the culture I wrote it in is not the culture in which you're reading it. So, if you find anything to be personally insulting, please accept my apology and keep reading with the knowledge that your identity and how you express your gender are correct only when you feel they are correct.

It was a wonderful note to start the book on. I just loved “if you are offended, if this invalidates your identity, then I AM WRONG.” Bornstein transitioned in the 80s, and has been an outspoken advocate of queer and trans people most of her life. She is definitely a figure in queer history that more people should read about.

The rest of the book is every bit as good as the foreword. Bornstein absolutely destroys the concept of gender in this book, dissecting it and looking at all the parts and pieces to attempt to figure out why society is so set on the binary system. She more than makes her case that gender is a spectrum, not an either/or. And not just a spectrum between “more male” and “more female” but a colorful kaleidoscope of gender expression and identity. She does not shy away from sensitive topics like surgeries and anatomy. She talks to the reader like she's your favorite outrageous aunt, sitting in the family room gossiping over heavily-spiked tea.

The formatting was occasionally confusing; she has the usual justified text, but then she has left-aligned passages (usually quotes from other people) and right-aligned passages (side-bar like content; I'm unclear if these are notes she made on the original text or what, but it generally clarifies or alters what the main text is talking about.)

I would HIGHLY recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn more about gender issues. Bornstein has an incredibly entertaining way of writing, and she loves to challenge what we think of as gender.

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

If you've been following my blog,  you know we recently bought a house. We haven't finished unpacking yet; mostly the upstairs is what's left, the spaces we don't use multiple times a day. I've spoken about wanting to “Pinterest the hell out of this house” and absolutely wanting to reduce clutter. When we moved yearly in the military, we were pretty good at not having excess clutter. After living in the last house for four years, we'd definitely acquired a good bit. So the move actually helped a lot; we got rid of a lot of unnecessary items. But we won't be moving again for a good long time, and I want to prevent that build up. So. Everything should have a place. I was hoping this book could help with some of my more problematic spaces. (I have a laundry closet with no room for ANY storage - the detergent and bleach live next door in the bathroom!) While the book did actually give me a possible solution for that SPECIFIC problem, I don't feel that there was much in this book I couldn't have gotten from Pinterest or watching more episodes of Marie Kondo on Netflix. (I love that show!)

The first chapter is spent on their philosophy; like Marie, they recommend you pull everything out of a space and look at it and keep only what you really like/need/use. Getting rid of excess stuff is always the first step. They stress getting containers to fit the space; they talk a lot about The Container Store. At the moment, that advice is a little useless, as I don't have the surplus funds to just go buy a ton of containers!

After that chapter, the book is split up by rooms/spaces, with several photographs and explanations of different examples. So they start with the entryway, and have a few different entryways with tips for each. An entry that is really a mudroom, with benches and individual hooks/cubbies, then an entry that is just a table by the front door for mail and keys, then a coat closet. Same with laundry; a small laundry room, a laundry closet with a little bit of shelving, a large laundry room, and tips for each. I was disappointed they didn't have my laundry setup; a closet with room for the stacked machines and NOTHING else. I feel like that's common enough they should have included it! The solution I did find, somewhere in the book, was an over the door shelving unit. I -think- I can push the machines far enough back in the closet space that I'll have the clearance for shallow shelves/cubbies on the back of the door for things like detergent, spot cleaner, bleach, tub cleaner, dryer balls, etc. I'll have to stop buying my detergent at Costco, or decant it into a smaller bottle, but now that it's just my husband and I, and no roommates, I don't think I need the giant container of detergent anyway!

They don't cover all the spaces in a house; it's Entry, Laundry, Bathroom, Home Office, Play Spaces, Closets, Kitchens, and Pantries. No bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms, or guest rooms. Just the problem areas, really, which makes sense.

It's an alright book. It's very pretty, and has some fantastically organized spaces, but I can find the same things on Pinterest, with the same how-tos and tips from Marie Kondo. So I'd give it a pass, really.

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

With this book, Elizabeth Acevedo has solidified her position as one of my must-read authors. The Poet X was EXCELLENT, and this one is every bit as good, which is awesome, considering the wildly different formats of the two books. The Poet X was a novel in poem form, being the collected poems of a teenage girl. This book is a more traditional novel, written in prose. It loses none of the lyrical, enchanting quality of Acevedo's writing, however.

With The Fire On High centers on Emoni Santiago, a teenage mother struggling to graduate from high school on time. When a culinary arts elective is offered during her senior year of school, she takes it despite feeling like she should be spending her energy on her daughter's future instead of realizing her own dreams. The elective opens up an entire world for her, however, taking her from whipping up magic alone in her own kitchen to being recognized by talented chefs as having something special. The added hours spent on cooking begin to affect her other responsibilities, however, and Emoni struggles to balance everything in her life, a fight that is very nearly upended by the new, very cute boy who just transferred to her school.

Emoni deals admirably with the vast responsibilities of being a parent, the complications of her own somewhat unusual home life (she's been raised by her grandmother after her mother's death and her father's absence), and the pressures of high school. Especially a school where she spent freshman year pregnant. Rather luckily, her daughter's father goes to a different school, so at least she doesn't have to deal with him every day.

Similar to The Poet X, the book deals with the intersection of black American culture and Puerto Rican culture, a combination I've been seeing more and more in Young Adult. (Well, The Poet X was Dominican, but they have very similar worries, mostly revolving around feeling “not black enough.”)

I loved Emoni, I loved Malachi (the cute transfer student), I loved Abuela and Baby Girl/Emma. I even didn't mind Tyrone too much. For being a player, he was trying to do right by his daughter. Acevedo has such a talent for characters. Angelica (Emoni's best friend) and her girlfriend were a delight, too.

If you see a book by Elizabeth Acevedo, pick it up. You won't be disappointed. I can't wait to pick up her next book, which appears to be another novel in verse called Clap When You Land, due out next year!

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

Ohhhhhh my. This is a short book, and a quick read, but MAN is it great. It tackles racism, microaggressions, white feminism, coming out, “it's just a phase!”, polyamory, breaking up, trans-exclusive language...and so much more.

The plot revolves around Juliet's summer internship with an author in Portland, Harlowe Brisbane. Many of the chapters begin with an excerpt from Brisbane's fictional treatise on feminism, Raging Flower: Empowering Your Pussy by Empowering Your Mind. One of these excerpts in particular took my breath away:

Read everything you can push into your skull. Read your mother's diary. Read Assata. Read everything Gloria Steinem and bell hooks write. Read all of the poems your friends leave in your locker. Read books about your body written by people who have bodies like yours. Read everything that supports your growth as a vibrant, rebel girl human. Read because you're tired of secrets.

Juliet reminds me a lot of me when I was detaching myself from Christianity and the conservatism I grew up with. Devouring books, learning about historical figures that I should have known about and was stunned that I'd never heard of. So I totally understand her wonder and shock at an entirely new world opening up before her.

Through Harlowe and her primary partner, Maxine, Juliet learns about polyamory. It's a remarkably good example; even though Harlowe and Maxine have their issues, their arguments are reasonably healthy, and despite disagreeing on some topics, they still love each other and say as much.

In Harlowe, we have an example of a white feminist who tries to be intersectional, at least a little, but can still be blind to a lot of her own microaggressions. Maxine, her partner, is a woman of color, as are most of the other characters in the book, so Juliet has lots of opportunities to see how white feminism can be ignorant of issues and blind to its own faults.

As a white feminist myself, I took this portrayal for the warning it is. I do my best to lift up voices of color by reviewing books by and about minorities on this blog as often as I can. I try to be as intersectional as possible, but I know I will make missteps, and I can always be better. But this book, though it's meant for the other side of the equation, is a reminder to feminists like me to keep trying to be better, and the costs to other people when we screw up.

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

This biography is titled for Tommy Nutter, the tailor, but it's really a dual biography of Tommy and his older brother, David. Both gay, both influential in their own celebrity circles, both intimately affected by the AIDS crisis.

Lance Richardson is himself gay, and I think his personal connection brings a depth to the biography that a straight author wouldn't have. He writes about the persecution of gay men in Britain in the 70s, and the underground gay clubs, with a kind of underlying passion that illustrates the pressure these men were under to hide the very cores of themselves while still finding a sense of community and revelry with each other. (And later, when he talks about the AIDS crisis in the 90s, you can feel the emotions and grief behind the fairly objective words.)

The story itself is gripping; Tommy the tailor and David the photographer, and the high-profile celebrities they orbited around - The Beatles, Yoko Ono, Elton John, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson. Tommy made clothes for them all, including the suits three of the Beatles wore on the cover of Abbey Road, and the outfits worn by Jack Nicholson's Joker in Tim Burton's Batman. David took photographs of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's wedding, and was Elton John's personal photographer, publishing a book of photos of the star in 1977.

The biography is part social history, giving an incredible view of the underground gay club scene in the 70s and 80s in London and New York, which the two brothers bounced between.

One thing I was struck by is how casually everyone used drugs at the time! Tailor's assistants mention doing speed to get work done; everyone drunk themselves into a stupor as often as they could; David unexpectedly blacks out after combining alcohol and some kind of drug while partying one night. David ferries cocaine for a friend/employer at one point - and not a little bit of cocaine, either. A lot. It was definitely a different era for drug use!

The book is also an amazing example of how much people can influence culture and still be forgotten. I'd never heard of David or Tommy Nutter, but the celebrities they clothed and photographed almost everyone has heard of! They didn't just clothe and photograph them, but influence them. David was a close friend of Elton John's, cheering him up when he fell into the depths of depression. Tommy was a major pillar of support for the manager of The Beatles, and created a lot of Elton John's off-stage wear. These two were huge in the cultural change of the 70s and 80s. How do we not know their names?

I really enjoyed this book, and it's a great piece of gay history for Pride Month. I highly recommend it.

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

I loved this book. The wit is dry, the action easy to follow, the confusion of the main character absolutely warranted (Mermaids? in Lake Michigan?!), and it's just wonderful. And it stars a bisexual teenage BOY. Male bisexuality could use more visibility, so this made me really happy. I picked this book for the M/M for Pride; I was really excited to find the main character is bisexual! It was a great surprise.

Bridger (an unusual name, but it fits him) is a senior in high school with a crush on his next door neighbor. He plans to go to school far away - Florida - where he can just BE himself instead of having to come out. But for that he needs money; so he answers an ad for an assistant doing....well he's not sure exactly what. When he finally demands answers, he learns the truth about the world of myth and magic, and things snowball from there.

He wrestles with keeping it secret from his friends - because really, who would believe he saw mermaids in Lake Michigan? At the same time, he's trying to wrap his head around his attraction to Leo, star football player, who just might like him back, and how to tell his mom he's bisexual.

I loved Bridger, and his best friend, Astrid, who will kick the butt of anyone who looks wrong at Bridger, and Leo was an absolute dreamboat. I also want to know more about Pavel and his companions! I really really hope the author writes more books in this world, because I want to read them!

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

So the biggest reason for my recent hiatus was that I was having trouble reading. If I can't read, I can't review! And every time I tried to read a book, I fell asleep. I just couldn't pay attention to pages of text. I knew, however, that this book had a demisexual protagonist, and I thought that might be enough to keep my attention. I opened the book, and found that the entire thing was written in text message format with speech bubbles, instead of giant blocks of text. Which was EXACTLY what I needed to hold my interest!

This is a precious book, told entirely via text messages between Haley, a demisexual girl, and Martin, a bisexual boy. Which, hi, that's my life? Most of the bisexual men I've been reading lately have been in M/M relationships, so it's nice to see a bisexual boy in a relationship with a girl. AND that they address the viewpoint of many people towards bi boys - that they'll cheat. (That's a biphobic attitude that is aimed at bi people of all genders, but it seems especially prevalent from women towards bi men.)

I love both of these characters; I love that they bring up that things can be so much easier to say via text than face-to-face. I love the far-reaching, random conversations the two have, and the in-jokes they create.

You'd think a romance would be hard to tell without description - only text is similar to only dialogue. But Johnson manages, and does it superbly.

This was the perfect book to break my reading slump, and I love it so much.

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

Bingo Love tells the story of Hazel and Mari, two girls who met at a bingo game in the 60s, fell in love, and were forced apart by their families. I don't tend to review graphic novels on this blog; but for this one, and for Pride Month, I'll make an exception.

I SOBBED at the end of this beautiful little book. Mari and Hazel love each other SO. MUCH. And what they go through is heartbreaking. When they meet in the 60s, loving the same gender is not very accepted, so when they're caught kissing, they're separated and forced to marry men. Hazel's marriage, at least, is an amiable one. The book doesn't get into details on Mari's marriage, only that she divorced him.

The book is also very intersectional! Both black women, one bisexual, both girls at the beginning and grandmothers at the end, with large families. Hazel is gorgeously curvy with naturally kinky hair, Mari willowy and tall.

I think the problem with reviewing graphic novels is that they're so short it's hard to say much without giving away plot! But if you're looking for a very easy read for Pride, this graphic novel is definitely a good place to start. Bring tissues.

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

This book won at least two awards; the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and France's Grand Prize for Fantasy, and the author had previously been named one of the 39 best Arab authors under the age of 39. I picked it up to read for the Year of the Asian Reading Challenge, since the Middle East is all-too-often neglected in regional groupings like that. People don't think of it as Europe or Asia. I also try to read translated books on occasion, in an effort to diversify my reading. So this hit a number of my interests - I  wish I had actually liked the book more!

It's an interesting retelling of Frankenstein - which I haven't actually read, and now feel like I really should. But it bounces around between several viewpoints. It's not too many to keep straight, but it's definitely too many to truly care about. And it suffers from an unreliable narrator - it's written as several stories told to an author from multiple people that he's woven together into a single narrative, and while he does that well, it suffers from contradictions between how different characters recall things, scenes that don't play a part in furthering the plot but the characters thought they were important, and no authoritative “this is what REALLY happened” to draw it all together.

And I very much dislike unreliable narrators, so that alone is enough to make me dislike the book. If you like ambiguous narratives and vigilante stories, however, you might enjoy this, and the writing style itself was quite engrossing.

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

Sana is a California transplant from Wisconsin; both her parents are immigrants from Japan, so despite feeling like she's a midwesterner, none of her friends think of her as one. There's a cringe-y scene early in the book where she cheers with her friends about being “midwestern farmer's daughters” and they tell her she's cute for thinking that, but she's Japanese, obv. I felt really bad for her. When her family moves to California, suddenly she's not the only Asian girl in a sea of whiteness. It's an interesting mix of having a place with your own people but also fighting the stereotypes of sticking with your own ethnicity. It's assumed she'll be friends with the other Asian kids, which annoys her, but she also finds to be true; having not had the opportunity to have friends like her before, she finds she really likes it. But she also tries to break that mold and be friends with people she's not assumed to like - like Jamie Ramirez and her Hispanic friends, and Caleb and his white goth friends.

The book also explores the way racism hits races differently; the Hispanic kids get hassled by cops while the Asian kids don't - though they also have things expected of them that the Hispanic kids don't. The book gets into cultural expectations as well - PDAs are not really a thing in Sana's world, so she's reluctant to be public about her affections at school, which drives misunderstandings.

It's only in the last few chapters that all the secrets come out, and Sana struggles to put things right.

One thing I really liked about the book is the narrative structure. At the beginning of the school year, Sana's English teacher gives them a project, which is to keep a journal to transcribe poems into and talk about what they mean to you. Chapters from Sana's poetry journal are interspersed with chapters of the narrative, and give some nice insight to how she's feeling. Her love interest, Jamie, also loves poetry, and it plays a large part in their relationship.

I quite enjoyed this book.

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

I wish I had the first two books in front of me to refer back to while reading this one. Specifically, the last few chapters of book two. Like the first two books, this one alternates chapters between the bard's point of view, and the story told to the bard by Tea. The difference is that they have separated paths at this point; so instead of the bard's chapters being very short, getting clarification on the story she's telling, he's now telling what's happening to him in present day, interspersed with Tea's letters that he's carrying, with the rest of her story. This gets VERY confusing. It's confusing even trying to explain the timeline! Okay, if we split up all three books between Tea's story and the Bard's viewpoint, chronologically they'd look like this:

The Bone Witch - Tea's Story
The Heartforger - Tea's Story
The Shadowglass - Tea's Story
The Bone Witch - Bard's Viewpoint
The Heartforger - Bard's Viewpoint
The Shadowglass - Bard's Viewpoint

See why I'd like to have the other two books to refer back to? This book is giving me part 3 and part 6. And while it was pretty easy to keep them straight in books one and two, because the Bard wasn't doing much besides having a conversation with Tea, in this book, he's off seeing OTHER important events that are happening while Tea is doing other things - and occasionally flitting in and out of his orbit too!

It is a good conclusion - the end, especially, had me crying into my book - but most of the book was very, VERY confusing. Like another conclusion I've read recently, if you moved straight through the trilogy with no waiting time, it might not be too bad.

What ESPECIALLY annoys me, is in the Bard's viewpoint in the first two books, she does something that is supposed to be impossible. So in her story in The Shadowglass, this thing is impossible. But in the Bard's viewpoint, she's ALREADY DONE IT. And there's no explanation of HOW. That's really what I'd like to refer back to the other two books about. Having that particular task be in the time gap between the two parts of the book was poorly done. Like, really? I read Book 2 almost a YEAR AGO. I don't remember how that part happened.

So that's particularly frustrating. I wish Book 3 had condensed to one timeline. I don't really see why it couldn't have. It would have been much less confusing!

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

Another book in my permaculture research, this in-depth guide is definitely going on my To-Buy list. (I always check these out from the library before spending money on personal copies.)

There is SO MUCH information in this book. Unlike some of the other books, there's no big spreads of full-color, glossy photos (which can be useful, I'm not digging on those); The Food Forest Handbook is mostly text with a few black-and-white photos tucked in. There are spreadsheets and diagrams and lists, sidebars of useful information, how-to walkthroughs and case studies of specific plants. I'm not sure how they packed so much into a little over 200 pages, but this book is a treasure trove of permaculture strategies.

The book starts with a chapter on why permaculture is important; they explore past examples of permaculture, some present food forests, and why it could be useful to us going forward. The second chapter gets into designing a food forest to fit your needs - scoping out your site, determining what resources you have, all of the planning aspects. Then we have a short chapter on putting all that knowledge together and going “from concept sketch to detailed designs” - how to refine your research and plans into something you can work off of. Chapter 4 is about selecting the specific plants; going from “okay here I want a fruit tree and a nitrogen fixer” to “a peach and comfrey.” Plant varietals are discussed here, as well as the different needs of tree guilds.

The rest of the book gets into maintenance, harvesting, and propagating the food forest, and the last chapter is on a tour of established food forests in various climates, to see what's possible.

This is definitely a book I want on my resource shelf; it can get a little dry at points, but there is so much knowledge here. One thing I really liked was the diagram of tree shapes - if one tree says it has a conical shape when full grown, and one has a pyramid shape, there's a diagram that shows what exactly the difference is.

Overall an excellent, information-packed book, if a little difficult to read straight through.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

This is an amazing reference book. It begins with some general chapters on why you should save seeds, the anatomy of seeds, and some basic techniques for harvesting seeds, hand-pollinating, basic general principles of seed storage and the like. Then it dives into the real meat of the book, the chapters on the specific plants. They're divided into the six broad categories listed in the subtitle: vegetables, herbs, flowers, fruits, trees, and shrubs. Within those chapters, each species is listed separately, with notes on the scientific name, the species family, the plant type (annual, biennial, perennial), seed viability, how many plants to save seed from, spacing for seed saving, and then a few paragraphs on flowering and pollination, any isolation requirements, and specifics on how to harvest, clean, and store the seeds for that species. It also has germination and transplanting notes for each species.

This would be an invaluable reference manual if you intend to save seeds from your plants and become self-sufficient, but it's still useful if not, for its notes on the pollination of each species. The isolation requirements are especially interesting; there are some plants that will cross-pollinate with plants 10 miles away! The sidebar on pumpkins and squash was also fascinating - I didn't know so many squash were technically the same species as pumpkins, just different cultivars. And that means they'll cross-breed if you're not careful! Even more fascinating, giant pumpkins aren't the same species as jack o'lantern pumpkins, so they won't cross breed.

I will absolutely be adding this book to my collection as a reference manual.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

This is another much-hyped book - and oh man, did it stand up to the hype. Told entirely through poetry, this novel was extraordinarily powerful, and had me sobbing near the end. Xiomara is an amazing character, and her poetry shows us her emotions more than prose ever could.

I've always loved poetry for that reason; especially poetry that plays with formatting - spacing and line breaks and size of stanzas. It's so much more evocative than simple paragraphs of prose. (My favorite poet is probably e.e. cummings, who is rather infamous for unusual formatting.)

Acavedo does similar things, making Xiomara's poetry explode across the page when necessary, and ordering it into simpler stanzas in calmer moments. It's not rhyming, even poetry; this is written slam poetry. And I love it.

Xiomara is Dominican, living in Harlem, with a very strict, religious mother. Her twin brother is gay but not out to their parents; Xiomara is fine with this but knows their mother won't be. Her poems cover her need to protect her brother and herself, both from their parents and from the outside world. She writes about street harassment and questioning God and falling in love with a boy, which is also against her mother's rules. Her poems are at turns heartbreaking and joyous, but always beautiful.

This is an amazing book, and is the second book on my Best of the Year list. I am blown away.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

This felt like an older anthology, but I recognized a lot of the authors in it, and I was excited to see a sci-fi anthology centered on war but starring women. The book is divided into five sections; Swords (& Spears & Arrows & Axes) and Sorcery focuses on the more standard fantasy warriors - knights, and mages, and the like in fantasy worlds. The next section, Just Yesterday & Perhaps Just Beyond Tomorrow, is closer to contemporary fiction, with a story set during WWII, and a drone pilot, and then an alien invasion of Earth. Somewhere Between Myth & Possibility is like a combination of sci-fi and fantasy; there are space ships and alternate dimensions and witches. The fourth section is Space Aria, and it is what it sounds like - space opera. Pretty straight sci-fi. It's the fifth section that has the most thought-provoking pieces. Will No War End All War? centers stories about the cost of war. And it's a little depressing, to be honest. It's a heavy topic, so that's unsurprising, but it left me in a low emotional place when I shut the book.

Warrior Women is a really interesting book, with twenty-four different stories examining different aspects of war. Some stories are told by soldiers, some by scientists, some by commanders, some by the sisters and daughters of soldiers. The book does a really good job of examining the subject from all angles. I am eager to see what my husband, as a former Marine, thinks of the book. I can't say that I enjoyed the book, exactly, but it gave me a LOT to think about. And books that do that are just as important as escapist fantasy.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

This is a sweet, southern f/f romance. Set in Georgia, it deals with a lot of things young lesbians might have to deal with in the south - religion, bigotry, the stress of coming out or not coming out (or being forced back in the closet by a move to a small town)! It doesn't deal with any outright violence against our lesbian protagonists, and it just barely touches on drug use, eating disorders, and abusive relationships. Joanna has a mostly supportive family, even if they do ask her to hide her sexuality for her senior year in the new town. Jo reluctantly agrees to do so, but doesn't count on falling in love with a girl at her new school.

The book deals a LOT with religion and sexuality; Jo's father is a radio preacher, and she attends a baptist church in town with her stepmother and new grandparents. At one point - one of my favorite scenes in the book - she snaps, and calls out her classmates for thinking homosexuality is a sin, while they eat shellfish and have premarital sex.

I liked the book, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it. I grew up Christian; I'm familiar with all the concepts in the book, but rather than progress to a kinder, more loving version of Christianity, I left it behind altogether. I'm glad that some people can reconcile religion with progressive values, but I can't. So it might be a good book for some, but not for me.

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

I call this a graphic novel because that's really what it is - it's not a comic, though. Each spread of pages is a mixture of text and oil painting - sometimes just a painting.

If it was just the text, it would be a very lackluster book. There are aspects of the story that are unexplained, and aspects that are explained only by the accompanying paintings. It's really the paintings that make this book unique. It's almost like - an adult picture book, I suppose. It actually reads more like someone found the series of paintings and constructed a story to support what they imagined was happening in the pictures.

Regardless, it's a unique experience. Manchess is a remarkable artist. The paintings are gorgeous, and the book does that thing where the text and art play around each other on the page, creating unique formatting that helps tell the story on its own, like when a full two-page spread of a painting has two lines of text to emphasize them.

Fascinating, beautiful book.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I have very mixed feelings about this one. I've read several retellings of Pride & Prejudice, but I think this is the first one that aged the characters down to teenagers. And I don't think it works as well. In both The Lizzie Bennett Diaries and Unmarriageable, the main character and her older sister were in their twenties. They were still living at home, but they were graduating college, starting careers - a completely different stage of their lives from the characters in Pride. In Pride, Zuri is a senior in high school and Janae, her older sister, is home after her first year of college. Which makes their younger sister, Layla, thirteen. And if you know the plot of Pride & Prejudice, you know why that squicks me a little bit. (Zoboi did change that plot point slightly so it's not quite as bad as it could be, but still. Ew.) This is a good example of what should be a New Adult story feeling forced into a Young Adult mold.

Age issues aside, I really liked the other changes made in this retelling; class differences are alive and well in the modern day, and I especially liked how it addressed neighborhood gentrification. Because yes, improving neighborhoods is a worthy goal; but when it raises rent without raising the income of the people living there, it forces people out who have lived in the neighborhood their entire lives. Gentrification is classist and, because our class system is racist, racist.

I enjoyed the Afro-Latino racial change; just like Unmarriageable's Pakistani setting, it brings a new cultural wrapping to the plot, and adds racial tension to the lessons on class that the story usually tells.

The book skims over a lot of the normal Pride & Prejudice plot, which I rather expected for a Young Adult book. Unmarriageable was much better in that regard, but Pride is still very enjoyable. It's definitely a worthy addition to the Pride & Prejudice....pantheon? Shelf? Canon? I do think it would have been much better as a New Adult story, though. I'm still stuck on that.

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

I've been making a habit of checking out gardening books from the library before buying them, so I know what I actually want to have around as a permanent resource. This book has definitely made that list. Other books talk about some of these same principles - swales, herb spirals, rain gardens, tree guilds - but this book actually goes into detail with step-by-step instructions and pictures on how to MAKE many of those things. I also appreciate that the author lives in Maryland, about an hour west of me. So our climate is the same.

I really enjoyed his chapter on uncommon fruits - I'd been reading that pawpaws are one of the fruits that do well with black walnuts, and his description of pawpaw fruit REALLY makes me want to grow one! They're an uncommon fruit largely because they're too delicate to ship, but they apparently taste delicious! And they're native, which is always a plus. I'd love to stick with native plants as much as possible.

His chapter on mushroom growing was also interesting and VERY detailed. (I quite enjoyed that he included “a good beer” in his list of supplies at one point.)

It's a short book, and it only covers a few topics, but it is EXCELLENT for those few topics he touches on. Definitely want a copy of this in my personal library!

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I don't remember why this book was recommended to me, but it's been languishing in my library stack for at least a couple of months now. I finally got around to reading it - and it's delightful! There are three more books and a novella in this series, and the author has apparently started another fantasy series.

Jackaby is told from the viewpoint of Abigail Rook, an English miss who ran away from home in search of adventure. The book opens on her arrival in America, by way of the Ukraine and Germany. The only work she can find in this new town is as an assistant to Jackaby, a distinctly odd character who claims to see things no one else can. Abigail, however, begins to believe him, and accompanies him to a murder scene, where she spots mundane details that he had overlooked. With Jackaby spotting supernatural things that no one else can, and Abigail taking note of more mundane details that Jackaby misses, the two make a formidable team.

Jackaby, of course, has that infuriating habit of not telling Abigail all the things he knows, which leads to her not mentioning useful details because she didn't know they were useful. I'm hopeful, now that she's earned his trust, that in future books they will communicate better and work together more seamlessly.

The worldbuilding here seems to take “America as a melting pot” into the supernatural world as well, with creatures from various cultures migrating with their humans to America. Jackaby has a rather improbable knowledge of this huge variety of creatures, as well as a library to look up more obscure facts that aren't already in his labyrinth of a mind.

I liked that Abigail wasn't portrayed as stupid; she's a bit ignorant of the supernatural world, but she didn't know it existed until Jackaby, and she's learning quickly. She also can't see it like he can, so she of course misses some things that he thinks are obvious. He could be a little better about remembering that not everyone can see the supernatural, though.

The cover mentions that it's Dr. Who meets Sherlock, and that's a very apt description. Jackaby is VERY Dr. Who like, with the bustling energy and quick mind that comes off as arrogant but is more...oblivious, really. Abigail fills the companion role, along with a certain policeman that I'm hoping shows up in the following books as well. I will have to track those down and find out!

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I try to be very mindful when reviewing books on autism, or other #ownvoices books that I'm not part of the demographic. They're very important books for people who are not of that demographic to read - that's how we learn about each other - but we get into iffy territory when reviewing them. It can be problematic to be critical when you're not the target audience. For Autism in Heels I don't have that problem, because this is a really good book! I'm sure autistic people will still get more out of it that I did, and female autistics even more. But there were paragraphs that definitely reminded me of my husband, and we had several good conversations inspired by this book. (“What makes a good friend?” being one of the more interesting ones.)

Jenny tells an engrossing story of her life; interwoven with facts and anecdotes about female autistics in general were specific examples from her life, and both problems she'd faced because she was autistic, and problems everyone faces that were particularly problematic for her as an autistic. Much like my husband, she comes at stories sideways, giving several details and tangents before getting to the point that ties them all together. That's much easier to deal with in print; I often have to stop my husband, specifically ask him where he's going with his story, and then let him get back to all the surrounding details. Knowing that he DOES THAT lets us deal with it in a manner that is less frustrating for both of us. (I get frustrated because I can't hold all the loose ends in my head without knowing how they connect, so once he gets to his point, I often have to make him repeat some of the earlier parts, and he gets frustrated because I can't follow his train of thought.) In text form, I can skim forward when I need to and come back to the earlier tangents. I suspect she also had an excellent editor, because that only gets confusing a few times. (Or she did it herself in revisions. Either way, it's far less confusing than a lot of conversations I've had with my husband!)

She does talk about some pretty intense domestic abuse from her college boyfriend near the end of the book, and then segues into eating disorders, so be aware of that. Those are both things that autistic women are particularly vulnerable to, and they definitely deserve a place in the book, but they can be difficult to read about, and my heart broke for college-Jennifer.

This is a great memoir of an amazing woman. I might need to look up her other books, even if they are targeted towards teens.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I've seen this book absolutely raved about online, as an amazing, diverse book with an #ownvoices author, and I knew I wanted to read it, I just kept having other things come up with higher priorities. I finally settled down to read it, and....it's exactly what everyone has said. Absolutely fantastic.

Melati, our main character, is struggling with OCD, but as this is set in 1969, it's never diagnosed. She thinks a djinn has taken up residence in her brain, and is giving her horrifying visions unless she does his will. And then riots break out and she and her mother are separated. This book covers an event we were never really taught about here in the US; in 1969 politics in Malaysia reached a boiling point and massive riots broke out between the Chinese and Malaysian populations. It's an event that rips Melati's world apart, and that she fights to survive in this book, while still fighting the djinn in her own head.

The Weight Of Our Sky is a young adult book, but it covers some very weighty topics. Between Melati's mental illness, the death and violence that surrounds her, and the prejudice and bigotry driving it, it's a book to read mindfully. The author includes a content warning at the beginning of the book, as well she should. The detail with which she describes Melati's experience (both in her head and outside of it) is stunning.

Melati is Malaysian, but she somehow finds herself with a Chinese family, and together they confront the tensions between the two groups of people, both their own prejudices and the violence from the roving mobs outside the little house they've holed up in. All the while, she's trying to hide the counting and tapping that keeps the djinn quiet in her head. The book is an extraordinary look at untreated mental illness, and the toll it takes to act normal when your brain is lying to you.

Fantastic book.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.