Read and Enjoyed: Star-Crossed by Barbara Dee Mattie, a star student and passionate reader, is delighted when her English teacher announces the eighth grade will be staging Romeo and Juliet. And she is even more excited when, after a series of events, she finds herself playing Romeo, opposite Gemma Braithwaite’s Juliet. Gemma, the new girl at school, is brilliant, pretty, outgoing—and, if all that wasn’t enough: British. As the cast prepares […]
March (disability – club foot) – Handbook for Dragon Slayers by Merrie Haskell April (mental health – depression) – More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera June (sexuality and gender identity – transboy) When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore Handbook for Dragon Slayers by Merrie Haskell Thirteen-year-old Princess Matilda, whose lame foot brings fear of the evil eye, has never given much thought to dragons, attending instead to her endless duties and wishing herself free of […]
I have read a lot of books. So many excellent, wonderful, marvelous books. But how many of them have had a lasting impact on me? This is the question I began to ponder after reading Lory @ Emerald City Book Review’s post about her personal canon. I have plenty of favourite books that have influenced my reading and writing preferences. Fewer books have made a lasting impression on my personality, […]
I began this post as an ordinary review of A Conjuring of Light, the final book in V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic trilogy. I realized most of my thoughts stemmed from the frustration of reading a trilogy’s conclusion, so I’ve structured this post to reflect that. If you haven’t read the Shades of Magic trilogy, you can avoid spoilers and skip to the section “The Problem of a Trilogy” for some general discussion on multi-volume […]
Middle grade fantasy is supposedly one of my favourite genres, yet it’s one I don’t seem to get around to reading very often! That genre’s the theme of this list, though I’ve decided to add the term ‘speculative fiction’ here so I include a few books that aren’t quite traditional fantasy. (Last summer I wrote a blog on my understanding of the term spec fic.) Links to GoodReads, followed by a brief note […]