Transitive Verve

  *edited to add* I apologize for errors and typos and I typed most of this with one hand while holding a fussy baby. I have been SO excited for this! I'm a big Leigh Bardugo fan, and I've been following the progress of this adaptation since they first announced it and started announcing the cast members. (PS--to see my reviews of the books, click the "Leigh Bardugo" tag! I still have not read the newest Grisha series though--I am going to reread the originals first.) I'm not going to summarize the plot here because that's easily google-able, but I will sum up the major "difference," which is that the series combines the main plot of the original Shadow and Bone  trilogy, and then melds in the Six of Crows  characters by incorporating some new original content plus some character backstories, since SaB takes place a bit before SoC does. So we meet the Crows before the events of the actual books take place. So it really is a full Grishaverse that we g...

A biromantic ace protagonist who is also a black woman, with a Japanese-American male opposite. This book was soooo good, and actually, took on a whole lot of education and emotional labor. If you've never understood what being asexual means, I feel like this had a lot of good explanations. (I say this as someone who doesn't quite feel like I am ace, but I'm at the lowest of the low end of the spectrum of asexuality. In fact, this book really helped me figure out a lot of things.) I started reading it because I wasn't sure how it would go, a romance novel where the main character is primarily uninterested in sex (because isn't that a big part of the allure of romance novels?), but what I got was so much more than that. It wasn't just about romance, but about communication---there are a whole lot of communication issues in this book, mainly because Alice is trying to figure herself out (and how can you communicate your needs and wants when you're not quite su...

Note: This review may contain spoilers for all the previous books in the ACOTAR series, but will not contain spoilers for this particular installment. The wait for this book was already extra long--all the ACOTAR books had come out a year apart, but this one came out two  years after the last one--and it  felt  even longer, because 1) ACOFAS contained a preview of this book that was FIRE, and 2) on the whole, I was less than satisfied by the SJM release that we got last year, the first novel of her new Crescent City series . (I can't ever seem to remember its actual title, even right after I've just read it.) I liked it, I mostly just wished we could have this next ACOTAR book instead. And now we have it. For starters, I want to point out that the covers have been redone for the entire series, because I think they're trying to rebrand it as adult, which I fully support because OH MAN, this book was raunchy. I mean, I'm pretty sure we were all expecting it--Cassian and N...

  ABFE is the sequel to An Absolutely Remarkable Thing , which explores ideas like being human, being social, social media, etc. If you have not read that book and do not want to read spoilers for that book, then you might want to stop reading now. * * * ** ** ** *** *** *** Book 1 left us on a cliffhanger several months after April May was left crushed (literally) in a burning warehouse and presumed dead. We know, of course, that she didn't die because AART was narrated by her a few years removed from the events of the novel, but what we don't know is what happened in between... HOW did she survive? What happened to all the Carls? What about everyone else who was part of this adventure? ABFE is told in alternating perspectives by ALL our favorite friends, explaining what they were up to in the months that followed the disappearance of April and the Carls: Maya appears to be the only one in the group to truly believe that April is alive somewhere, and when the Som (the online ...

"When the rhetoric is so inflammatory, so enraged, it is not surprising that some people would work together to take matters into their own misguided hands." An Absolutely Remarkable Thing came out in 2018, but DAMN if it isn't the most current, relevant thing I have ever read.  April May notices a giant statue or sculpture of some sort of robot while on the way home at 3am from her soul-sucking start-up job. It seemingly showed up out of nowhere, and it's kind of cool, so she orders her friend Andy to show up with his camera, and they make a YouTube video about it. In it, she "interviews" the robot, naming it Carl. When she wakes up the next morning, she discovers that their video of Carl has gone completely viral... because apparently, over 60 other Carls had shown up out of nowhere all around the world. Suddenly, April is thrust into the limelight as the Carl representative, and as the situation gets more bizarre, April finds herself at the center of, we...

  Clap When You Land  is Elizabeth Acevedo's third-ever novel, but her second one written in verse. It is the story of two sisters separated by life, borders, and secrets, who are finally brought together when their father dies in a tragic plane crash. The inspiration for this novel was American Airlines flight 587, which crashed after departing New York for the Dominican Republican in November 2001. About 90% of its passengers were Dominican or of Dominican descent, Acevedo shares in her Author's Note. News coverage died down as soon as suspicions of terrorism were disproven, but Acevedo didn't stop researching about the passengers and their stories. Yahaira Rios lives in New York with her mother who manages a spa, and her father who disappears to the DR for a few months out of the year. She is a chess champion--or rather, was , until she one day learned something she wasn't supposed to know, and then stopped speaking to him. Camino Rios lives in the Dominican Republic...

Hey friends (if anyone is still reading this blog!) Obviously, I haven't updated in a really long time--the truth is, ever since quarantine/shelter-in-place began in earnest back in March, I've had a really difficult time focusing enough to read even my favorites, let alone anything new. (And, I mean, I also had a baby in June, so... new parenthood and the requisite sleep deprivation have played a role in that too.) For the first time in YEARS, I have not completed my Goodreads Challenge, even though I lowered my goal to the lowest number I've ever chosen. Reading was just not really in the cards for me this year, let alone writing any formal reviews for my blog.  So what DID I read? I had a sharp drop-off in reading romance because I think I'm just tired of reading the same tropes, character types, storylines, etc. over and over. To be blunt, I'm tired of reading about beautiful white het couples' drama. Give me people of color. Give me LGBT. Give me differentl...