Category: Book Reviews

A haunting curse, a sweet romance, and a bewitching magic system enchantingly meld together in this gorgeously written fantasy. Lily Bellamy and Andresh Zatavier are each haunted by the loss of a parent in their childhoods. For Lily, the haunting is literal—visions of her mother’s corpse follow her reflection. For Andresh, the haunting is emotional—a […]

A thoughtful middle-grade baseball novel with more on its mind than winning Suzanne Kamata’s Pop Flies, Robo-Pets, and Other Disasters opens with a setup that might sound familiar. Satoshi Matsumoto has returned to Japan after three years in Atlanta, where he was the star of his middle-school baseball team. He comes back with a good […]

A sweetly relatable family vacation story where the middle child strives to make a name for herself Emma, the second of three siblings, is tired of being in the middle all the time. Squished between her two brothers on a long ride to the beach, she brainstorms how she can stop being second pick and […]

A tightly paced supernatural thriller involved in the seedy handlings of tech secrets In C.J. Finch’s ambitious page-turner Pull, a man with the psychic ability to gain people’s memories through mere touch is targeted for high-value unencrypted files by an unknown and equally gifted assailant.  In New York City, Alex Hemsley is the chief technology […]

Every once in a while a debut novel arrives that feels less like a polished marketing object and more like someone finally saying the thing nobody else in the genre wanted to say out loud. Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It by Brooke Averick is that kind of book. Brooke Averick, the comedian and podcaster behind […]

Two lovers are tested in this dramatic romance spanning time and continents.  When a college student, Nick, decides to take part in an archaeological dig in Israel, he has no idea it will change the trajectory of his life. Once there, he meets a fellow student, Hannah, and together, they experience a brutal attack on […]

Little storytellers, big history In the third installment of her Bella’s Tales of History series, Deb Evans asks children and adults alike to reflect on the crucial roles that women played in the American Revolution; in doing so she encourages us all to “remember the ladies,” and their work, so often forgotten by society. Through […]

Picture your life flashing before your eyes, but slowly, on a steam engine, with a brisk Edwardian ghost in a cloche hat for company. That is roughly the conceit of The Midnight Train by Matt Haig, the second instalment in his Midnight World and the sort-of-but-not-really sequel to The Midnight Library. If the first novel […]