The Bees by Laline Paull

The Bees is one of the most beautiful and creative books I've read in some time. The premise is straightforward: it's the story of Flora 717, one of thousands of sanitation worker bees tasked with cleaning up all the waste the hive generates. Flora isn't a typical bee, though--she's not quite content to "accept, obey,...

Hurricane Child by Kheryn Callender

I really wanted to love this middle-grade novel about twelve year old Caroline, set on Water Island and St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. And while I thought it was quite good in many ways, and touched on many important themes and subjects, in the end, I couldn't really connect with it. The plot...

The Diviners by Libba Bray

I absolutely loved this glittering, creepy, magical romp through 1920s New York. It centers on Evie O'Neil, who is sent to live with her uncle in Manhattan after causing trouble in her Ohio hometown, thanks to her ability to read people's secrets from objects belonging to them. Evie is a sixteen year old in search...

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

I don't read a lot of mysteries, but I'm trying to change that, because if there's one thing I've learned about myself as a reader in thirty-two years, it's that I like variety. I'm pretty certain at this point that there are going to be books I love (and books I hate) in every genre....

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper

In the past few years, I've been reading a lot of books about race, and something I've noticed is that, for me, it's usually the books that aren't aimed at white audiences that are the most powerful. I enjoyed So You Want to Talk About Race (which isn't necessarily written for white people, but certainly...

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes

The Princess Bride was such an integral part of my childhood that I can't really imagine what being a kid would have been like without it. There aren't many films I feel this way about--Star Wars is the only other one that comes to mind. Given how beloved The Princess Bride is to me, it's...

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

I am a hyper-organized and super neat person, and I definitely went through a phase as a kid where I was obsessed with storage solutions (there was a store near where I grew up called Placewares that I absolutely loved). So this book has been on my radar for a while. I knew the basic...

Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen by Jazz Jennings

This is a tough one to review. Jazz Jennings was fifteen when she wrote it, and I want to say things like "this is a book written by a teenage girl, so take it with a grain of salt", but there's something about that that feels icky and dismissive of teenagers. Teenagers are as complicated...

The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

This novel felt similar to me as the only other book of Kincaid's I've read, A Small Place. The prose is gorgeous, lyrical, haunting. It casts a spell. When I read A Small Place, an essay about Kincaid's home of Antigua, I fell under the spell of the words and was captivated. But The Autobiography...

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

There is so much going on in this novel, and I've been putting off reviewing it because while I loved most of it, the ending drove me crazy, and I've been struggling with how to write about it. Simply put, this is a book about two British Muslim families and the various ways their lives...