All in Books

Recommendation Tuesday: Summer Rain Anthology

Recommendation Tuesday: Summer Rain Anthology

Sarah Moon
Books

Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.

View all of the past recommendations over here. 

When author Ruthie Knox emailed me about a review copy of the Summer Rain anthology, I jumped on it when I saw the lineup of authors contributing to this collection of "novelettes." In addition to Ruthie, favorites like Molly O'Keefe and Mary Anne Rivers also contributed to the anthology which supports the important work of RAINN. 

Each of the nine novelettes is a complete story (unlike so many anthologies which are too often stuffed with teasers for other books *shakes fist*), thematically bound together by the idea of summer rain. The major are contemporary stories, but there are a couple of science fiction/fantasy entries and there's also a "new adult" entry from Audra North. 

I've Been Listening... Quick Thoughts on 7 Audiobooks

I've Been Listening... Quick Thoughts on 7 Audiobooks

Sarah Moon
Books

I've been enjoying the hell out of my Audible subscription (seriously, it's so great) and have been using it, and Multnomah Country Library's rad digital downloads system, to check out books that I've heard mixed things about seem polarizing in some way. It's a fun way to explore books I'd maybe otherwise pass up. 

It's hard for me to write lengthy reviews of audiobooks because I don't retain details quite as well when I'm listening. But I thought I'd share some brief reflections on some books I listened to recently. 

A Girl Called Fearless by Catherine Linka: Uneven, But Relevant & Gripping

A Girl Called Fearless by Catherine Linka: Uneven, But Relevant & Gripping

Sarah Moon
Books

I don't know if I suffered as severe of dystopian burnout as a lot of readers, largely because I'm self-aware enough to know that any faction-based world irritates the crap out of me, so I managed to avoid a lot of the popular dystopian-ish novels that hit the shelves in the wake of The Hunger Games' popularity.

(Seriously, what is with all the factions, dystopian authors? I just don't get it.)

I've picked up a few recently that I've enjoyed at varying degrees. I enthusiastically enjoyed Maureen McGowan's corporate conspiracy-meets-X-Men Dust Chronicles action-adventure series; I was profoundly let down by the promising water-contamination novel The Ward by Jordana Frankel (that book had so much promise!).

Catherine Linka's debut, A Girl Called Fearless, likely sits somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, yet it manages to shine a bit more brightly than many others because it's both thought-provoking and gripping.

Recommendation Tuesday: A Darker Shade of Sweden (Stories)

Recommendation Tuesday: A Darker Shade of Sweden (Stories)

Sandra
Books

Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.

View all of the past recommendations over here. 

This week, Sandra is getting in on the fun and recommending a collection of short stories she really, really enjoyed, A Darker Shade of Sweden. 

Without any sense of shame, I admit to judging a book by its cover. I laser in on a beautifully bound book. But, a book can’t get by on looks alone. Intelligent writing is what truly endears it.

A Darker Shade of Sweden edited by John-Henri Holmberg has it all: beauty and brains. 

 

Recommendation Tuesday: Open Road Summer by Emery Lord

Recommendation Tuesday: Open Road Summer by Emery Lord

Sarah Moon
Books

Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.

View all of the past recommendations over here. 

I want to reach back into my history with a grade-school pink eraser, scrubbing away my decisions like mistakes on a math test. Too bad I drew my mistakes in ink.

This week I'm happy to recommend a debut contemporary YA novel, Open Road Summer by Emery Lord. If you're looking for a a summer-themed read that offers a bit more than you're expected, this is a great choice.

There are oodles of summer road trip stories and I've gotten pretty particular about them, as much as I enjoy road trip narratives as concept. Open Road Summer is a bit different, however. Instead of a quest sort of story, the narrator, Reagan, is tagging along with her best friend, Dee, on a very structured sort of road trip--Dee's first major tour as emerging country artist Lilah Montgomery. 

Reagan is not only grabbing the opportunity to spend time with her close friend who is rocketing to stardom, but to run away from a bad breakup and make changes in her life: No more partying, drinking or boys that are bad for her. She's a bit surly, and definitely not very forgiving of other people--I found Reagan infinitely relatable. 

Inspiring & Hopeful - Finding Me: A Life Reclaimed by Michelle Knight

Inspiring & Hopeful - Finding Me: A Life Reclaimed by Michelle Knight

Sandra
Books
That day I disappeared in 2002, not many people even seemed to notice. I was twenty-one, a young mom who stopped a a Family Dollar store one afternoon to ask for directions. For the next eleven years I was locked away in hell. That’s the part of my story you may already know. There’s a whole lot more that you don’t.

— Michelle Knight, Finding Me

A Life Reclaimed - these three simple words give voice to the heart and soul of Michelle Knight’s memoir, Finding Me: A Decade of Darkness, a Life Reclaimed, written with Michelle Burford. Less than half the book speaks of the horror that she, Amanda Barry and Gina DeJesus faced each day while held in captivity by Ariel Castro, who Knight refers to as "the dude." 

In concise and clear words that never softens the reality of her experience nor overly dwells on it, she communicates the fear and the pain she knew as her constant companion during her years chained and held captive at the whim of the dude. She held tight to her memories of better times when she cradled her beloved son close, laughing and playing games with him.

Recommendation Tuesday: More Like Her by Liza Palmer

Recommendation Tuesday: More Like Her by Liza Palmer

Sarah Moon
Books

There is more good than bad. Life and love win if you let them. If you believe in them.

Y'all know I've gushed quite a bit about Liza Palmer's books, especially last year's marvelous Nowhere But Home. As a result, I was surprised that I haven't written about any of her other novels beyond a vague, "Yo, this is awesome!"

I actually have a hard time picking a favorite of Liza's novels because I like them each for different reasons. More Like Her was actually the last Liza Palmer book I read, despite that I immediately bought her entire backlist after reading Nowhere But Home, and it sicks in my mind because it has one of my favorite final chapters (though, Liza pretty much kicks ass when it comes to last chapters).

That plus the fantastically well-done friendships and stickiness of work relationships makes More Like Her a can't miss novel and tied with Nowhere But Home for my favorite.

Recommendation Tuesday: Biggest Flirts by Jennifer Echols

Recommendation Tuesday: Biggest Flirts by Jennifer Echols

Sarah Moon
Books

Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.

View all of the past recommendations over here. 

Jennifer Echols is another relatively well-known author with a book I'm happy to include in my Recommendation Tuesday series. While Jennifer is well-loved by readers, she's generally under-recognized by gatekeeper types, despite having embraced positive depictions of teen girl sexuality and identity in her novels for many years.

Her latest, Biggest Flirts--the first in a new series of connected novels, is no different. 

Tia, the first person narrator of Biggest Flirts, is a senior at her Florida high school, drummer in the marching band and notorious flirt. She unashamedly prefers casual hookups, eschewing boyfriends, and even has a regular hookup buddy (Sawyer, who's going to be a main character in the third book in the Superlatives series).

Guest Review: Journey to the River-Sea by Eva Ibbotson

Guest Review: Journey to the River-Sea by Eva Ibbotson

Anushree Nande
Books
This kind of fun will never fail to delight.

— Philip Pullman

Eva Ibbotson was an Austrian-born British writer. My first introduction to her was Journey to the River-Sea, and her later books, though still pretty good, could never match up to the magic and charm of the first, a book I still re-read today and enjoy as much.

Orphans form a large part of Ibbotson’s stories, which are usually set in the turn of the century England or Vienna. Journey to the River-Sea however is set in Manaus, in the heart of the Amazonian forest in Brazil. It is a different time and a different world. Electricity and the telegraph have already been discovered, but there are still many discoveries to be made and expeditions to be conducted in far-flung, exotic places, where the locals are still referred to as savages.

Recommendation Tuesday: Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas

Recommendation Tuesday: Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas

Sarah Moon
Books

Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.

View all of the past recommendations over here. 

Wouldn't we all look guilty, if someone searched hard enough?

Have you ever read a book that you wanted everyone you know to read so you can talk about it with them? 

Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas, which Racquel over at The Book Barbies has recommended rather aggressively for some time now, is one of those books.

Dangerous Girls opens with a 911 call on Aruba. A group of privileged teenagers on spring break report that they've found their friend stabbed to death, blood covering her room and the glass door broken. Elise, the dead girl, is the best friend of narrator Anna, a relative newcomer to this ultra-wealthy crowd, with her "new money" contrasting with the old New England wealth of many of her friends, including Elise. Before she knows it, Anna is arrested and awaiting trial for her best friend's murder. 

As Anna's fighting the charges, the non-linear narrative explores the complicated nature of friendship, the very idea of truth, and how easy it is for court of public opinion to depict anyone as a monster.

Going Over by Beth Kephart: Is Beautiful Writing Enough?

Going Over by Beth Kephart: Is Beautiful Writing Enough?

Sarah Moon
Books
‘Be careful, Ada.’ Of course I’m careful. I’m in love. 

What can I tell you, what should you know? There is a line between us, a wall. It is wide as a river; it has teeth. It is barbed and trenched and tripped and lit and piped and meshed and bricked—155 kilometers of wrong.

Despite Beth Kephart being a highly-regarded YA author (and finalist for the National Book Award), I had not picked up one of her books prior to her most recent, Going Over. 

The writing in Going Over is excellent, and I can see why Kephart's novels are so highly regarded. With that said, the beautiful writing at times out-shined the storytelling and in some respects got in the way of Going Over's narrative. 

Because the wall does not belong to West Berlin, and neither does the ground where I stand when I’m painting. I am a public enemy, a property defacer. I am an artist in love with a boy.

As is popular at the moment, Going Over adopts the dual narrator style, with half of the story being told from the first-person perspective of Ada, who lives in 1980s West Berlin. She paints graffiti by night and dreams of her Stefan, son of her grandmother's friend who lives in East Berlin, "going over" the wall so the young couple can be together once and for all. 

The second point-of-view is that of Stefan.

You have to wait. You have to be absolutely sure. Love is the biggest thing, of course. But there are other considerations.

But, rather than first person, it's in a second person style, creating a distance from Stefan's perspective.

Recommendation Roundup: April 2014

Recommendation Roundup: April 2014

Sarah Moon
Recommendation Roundup, Books

Clearly, I had a much better reading month than my CEFS compatriots, with a number of books I quite enjoyed. 

By far, my most surprising read was Zac & Mia, which is one of those review copies that I downloaded on impulse because the folks at Harper Collins have me auto-approved for their books. Little did I know that it had won the Text Prize in Australia a couple of years ago, because that would've been my first clue that it was a good one. It's getting a lot of comparisons to The Fault in Our Stars, but I'm not sure that's an apt one, though the subject matter is similar. If I were to compare it stylistically to a "cancer book," I'd probably say it's more similar to The Probability of Miracles by Wendy Wunder, but that's not that best comparison either. It's actually just unique, with a distinctive voice and style. 

Recommendation Tuesday: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black

Recommendation Tuesday: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black

Sarah Moon
Books
If she was going to die, she might as well die sarcastic.

Do you love vampire books? 

Are you burned out on vampires?

Do you think that you'd never, ever love a vampire book?

Are modern-day vampires too sparkly and innocuous for you?

If you answered "yes" to any of the above, then I have a recommendation for you!

I suppose I should feel a smidgen guilty for recommending a "big" book on Recommendation Tuesday, but I don't because Holly Black's The Coldest Girl in Coldtown is one of the more original, captivating novels I've read in a long time.

Better yet. it's a darn near perfect audiobook, mixing in atmospheric music and Chistine Lakin's understated, but effective narration. 

Using Verse for “Adult” Content, by Gabrielle Prendergast (Guest Post)

Using Verse for “Adult” Content, by Gabrielle Prendergast (Guest Post)

Guest
Books, Verse Week

Anyone who writes in verse gets used to answering this question: “Why do you write in verse?” There are a lot of reasons of course, but one that I often talk about concerns the depiction of edgier material in books aimed at young readers.

Like it or not, our kids take drugs, self-harm, think about suicide, get abused, suffer from mental illness, are victims and perpetrators of violence, and lose friends. All of these dark topics are suitable for young readers, but may need to be presented in subtler ways than in adult literature. Verse is a way of achieving that. Its reliance on metaphor, sparse language, and contained form allow these issues to be explored without overwhelming the readers with heaviness.

Take sex for example. Not a dark theme (it’s fun and healthy!) but one that frequently raises eyebrows in relation to books for young readers. But again, like it or not, young people, teenagers, even pre-teens have sex drives and sex lives. Many YA books have a “fade to black” policy when it comes to sex. Characters might have sex, but rarely are the scenes depicted in any detail.

Verse Novel Throwback Thursday: Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff, by Racquel of The Book Barbies (Guest Post)

Verse Novel Throwback Thursday: Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff, by Racquel of The Book Barbies (Guest Post)

Guest
Books, Verse Week
You ever laughed so hard
nobody in the world could hurt you for a minute,
no matter what they tried to do to you?

Make Lemonade by Virgina Euwer Wolff is an oldie (a 1993 release) but certainly a goodie novel. I read it during the 7th grade when I was learning English and I had zero idea what a verse novel is.  At the time, I figured I either stumbled upon 1) a novel that’s meant for my basic and simple reading level or 2) a poetry book. Seven years and definition of a verse novel later, I’ve now learned what a verse novel and read other verse novels but Make Lemonade remains special.

Viginia Euwer Wolff's groundbreaking novel, written in free verse, tells the story of fourteen-year-old LaVaughn, who is determined to go to college--she just needs the money to get there.

When she answers a babysitting ad, LaVaughn meets Jolly, a seventeen-year-old single mother with two kids by different fathers. As she helps Jolly make lemonade out of the lemons her life has given her, LaVaughn learns some lessons outside the classroom.

Accidental Inspiration (Or What Happened When a Wrench Landed in My Verse Novel), by Sarah Tregay

Accidental Inspiration (Or What Happened When a Wrench Landed in My Verse Novel), by Sarah Tregay

Guest
Books, Verse Week

My next book, Fan Art, will hit shelves on June 17th. Like Love and Leftovers, it is a contemporary young adult romance, and unlike Love and Leftovers, it is written in prose.

Fan Art didn’t start off that way. It began as a short story in verse, and later turned into a proposal for a novel. But the day after my editor said, “Yes, we’d be interested,” I received a second phone call. In order to reach more readers, Fan Art was not to be a novel in verse. I understood. A LGBT love story and a verse novel was narrowing the market too much.

diVERSEity: Verse Novels with People of Color as Main Characters, by Skila Brown (Guest Post)

diVERSEity: Verse Novels with People of Color as Main Characters, by Skila Brown (Guest Post)

Guest
Books, Verse Week

As we celebrate verse novels all this week, let’s take a moment to highlight those stories that feature a person of color as the main character. This is not a complete list, but a list of some of the best.

If you have favorites not listed below, tell us about them in the comments! 

The Good Braider by Terry Farish

Viola leaves war-torn Sudan for a new life in the United States. Such a great story of strength and loss of innocence. Beautiful cover! Beautiful writing!

 

Recommendation Tuesday: Under the Mesquite by Guadalupe Garcia McCall

Recommendation Tuesday: Under the Mesquite by Guadalupe Garcia McCall

Sarah Moon
Books, Verse Week

Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.

This week's Recommendation Tuesday is part of our Verse Novel Week celebration! View all of the past recommendations over here. 

And the pomegranates,
like memories, are bittersweet
as we huddle together,
remembering just how good
life used to be.

— Under the Mesquite by Guadalupe Garcia McCall

When I get ready to put together Verse Novel Week each year, I always try to (rather foolishly) get caught up on verse novels I've missed and check out as many as I can find from the library. This year, my pile reached fairly ridiculous proportions, but at the top was Guadalupe Garcia McCall's Under the Mesquite, which came highly recommended by Nafiza, who has excellent taste. 

Under the Mesquite is one of those books that will just suck you into its words and rhythm, and the verse format adds so much to that feeling as Garcia McCall weaves together Mexican American immigrant Lupita's story of family, loss and hope. 

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