Picture Books
Ten-Word Tiny Tales: To Inspire and Unsettle
Joseph Coelho and many illustrators
RFLBG
I like the 10-word tiny tales themselves, but I thought many of the illustrations pushed the tale in darker directions than I was thinking. Includes instructions for writing and illustrating your own tiny tales, so perhaps I need to re-illustrate some of the tales.
Ah! I see the subtitle now. The unsettling was planned.
Young Adult
Gather
Kenneth M Cadow
RFLBG
Like a snowball tumbling down a slope, this book accumulated more of my interest and compassion as it went on.
Reign
Katharine McGee
For most of the book, I wasn’t sure if this was the final chapter of the American Royals series or not. It was. McGee sewed up everything nicely, provided some surprises, and managed to find the perfect conclusion for the sometimes hard-to-like Daphne.
Everyone Wants to Know
Kelly Loy Gilbert
I really got sucked into Honors’s story. As the youngest in family of seven former reality TV stars, things aren’t easy. File this under tough lives of a privileged kid who never asked to be famous.
Every Time you Go Away
Abagail Johnson
Yeesh, these two. Both are tremendously scarred and unable to communicate. But with an intertwined childhood that had me rooting for them.
Courage to Dream: Tales of Hope in the Holocaust
Neal Shusterman and Andrés Vera Martínez
Read for Librarian Book Group
As Shusterman says, the Holocaust needs to be examined from all angles. This angle imagines the Holocaust through folk tales and then connects the stories to real-life situations.
Grownup Fiction
Mad Honey
Pichoult and Boylan
An eminently readable mystery with good New England vibes. I thought it was a good portrayal of how domestic violence reverberates through the years, even after the abuse has ended.
Grownup Nonfiction
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
Priya Parker
Chapter by chapter, Parker walks us through evaluating why one would plan a gathering, planning the gathering, important things during the gathering, and how to end a gathering. This is a handy book for those of us who are trying to remember how the heck we used to gather.