*Book Group Selection | Bolded Means Favorite
Middle Grade
*Kareem Between by Shifa Saltagi Safadi
How did the Muslim ban affect individual U.S. Citizens? This book answers the question in an interesting and enlightening way. Alas, though, the poetry depended often on words
f
a
l
l
i
n
g
down the page, and the use of dramatic spacing.
Both of which felt cliched to this reader. None of the poems stood out, and I was left wondering why this novel in verse didn’t abandon the verse and write the interesting story it was telling in prose.
Young Adult
Dead Things Are Closer than They Appear by Robin Wasley
*Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay
*Not Like Other Girls by Meredith Adamo
*Twenty-Four Seconds from Now… by Jason Reynolds
*How the Boogeyman Became a Poet by Tony Keith
*The Unboxing of a Black Girl by Angela Shanté
Pick the Lock by A.S. King
One of my peccadillos is that I cringe when story-created song lyrics are present. And this is stuffed with story-created song lyrics. It was a rough go for me, but the book had an interesting way into how domestic violence affects families.
Red in Tooth and Claw by Lish McBride
Lish McBride does her thing (fantasy that doesn’t bug me, found family), but it’s a Western! What can she not do?
Grownup Fiction
The House on Tradd Street by Karen White
I picked a book by Karen White off the shelf at my library, and by page 25, I realized that the book I was reading was one from later on in a series. I put it down and put a hold on this book, the first in the series.
There were a few things I didn’t love like the cliche of the main character subsisting on sugar and remaining slim and the love interest grabbing the main character’s arm to get her to stay and listen to him. (Not okay! Not only that, but later in the book, he hit another character in the jaw for doing the exact same thing.).
But this managed to hit the sweet spot of having ghosts but not being too scary. As someone who loves ghost stories but doesn’t want them to haunt her dreams, I will be checking out the second in the series.
p.s. The book I initially started reading was the seventh in the series! Seventh!
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
The book that has forever changed my use of the phrase “verbal communication.”
