In a dynasty where poetry can reshape reality and women are forbidden to read, one desperate village girl must master the most dangerous spell of all. The Poet Empress by Shen Tao opens with Wei Yin burying her fifth sibling—a casualty of the famine ravaging the Azalea Dynasty—and closes with her rewriting the rules of […]
Welcome to Week 5 of the She Reads Everything 2026 Reading Challenge. This week is all about banned and challenged… The post Banned Books appeared first on She Reads Everything.
The Future Saints by Ashley Winstead arrives as a visceral exploration of how loss reshapes not just our interior lives but the art we create from the wreckage. This latest offering from the author of In My Dreams I Hold a Knife and The Last Housewife ventures into new territory—the chaotic, glittering world of rock […]
A heartfelt chapter book about friendships and relationships Kloe’s New Friendship, written by K.M. Selvidge and illustrated by Kateryna Meleshchuk explores growing pains and everyday social challenges in a charming anthropomorphic animal world. The story follows Kloe, a kind and thoughtful middle schooler who has to navigate friendship issues, the arrival of a new student, […]
The Swan Princess gets an empowered twist in this modern take on the beloved fairy tale. On one side of this dual point-of-view fantasy, Ren is a secluded sorcerer who has lost his entire family to a malicious curse. Living only with talking animal companions, he is fueled by a vow to seek revenge against […]
Succession meets The Magicians in this gorgeously gruesome, murderous battle for the throne. Quinn Hogshead’s Witch in the Wall is drenched in the shared emotional experiences that make sibling rivalries so searingly painful. From savage start to shocking, star-crossed ending, this bloodstained battle for succession has a bodycount so dizzyingly high that you’ll get whiplash […]
Jennette McCurdy follows her searingly honest memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died with a debut novel that refuses to look away from uncomfortable truths. Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy plunges readers into the interior world of Waldo, a seventeen-year-old navigating the treacherous waters of desire, class consciousness, and the desperate need to be seen. […]
Synopsis: Julie Wade’s grandmother is not your ordinary grandmother. The locals tell wild tales about her supposed witchcraft and the myriad of secrets hidden on her vast estate in the central Florida swamps. During a summer visit, Julie discovers the stories may be more than just fiction, and her grandmother may be dabbling in more […]
A gruesomely compelling, well-paced portrayal of a family hounded by a traumatizing intergenerational debt At the start of Kentucky Dragon, Mark Morris is a an eleven-year-old boy—the youngest child in a loving family with a terrible, secret debt. By the end of the novel, he’s an adult and his family’s relatably flawed protector. Mark witnesses […]
An in-depth and provocative exploration into the depths of human nature The War Brain examines the incessant call to arms that is programmed into the hardwiring of the human brain. Author Leif Occultus posits a fascinating theory for why human nature resorts to war and then cites many examples throughout history, which, while bloody and […]