The Neurospicy Bean

  First off, I absolutely love both the cover and the title of this book. The art is just SO GORGEOUS. Unfortunately, those were probably the most compelling elements of the book to me. The story follows three best friends in Houston and their various senior year challenges, with the sort of core being Dawn’s entry to a film competition, after which the book is named. Each of the three girls has a very distinct story, connected to the others only by virtue of their friendship, and unfortunately I think this made the pacing kind of weird. When one character was having a crucial story moment, it felt like the other storylines were just kind of dragging along for the sake of being there.  One thing I did really appreciate was how this book handled representation. It switched the stereotypical roles that the best friends would have played based on their race – the Black character was the one with strict parents who fixated on her grades, and the Asian character was the one with a fun singl

  I did not expect this to be so good. So often queer YA set in the real (ish) world either wants to pretend that queerness is totally normal and accepted and causes no problems, beats the reader over the head with how traumatic it is, or falls into this weird space of making really unsubtle points about how queerness is hard but also cool and sort of reads like it’s written for someone who wants to feel like they’re super in touch with the queer youth. This book was none of those. It did an absolutely amazing job of weaving queerness into the plot in subtle but crucial ways, and it doesn’t shove aside the challenges of being a queer teenager for the sake of focusing on the plot, but the homophobia wasn’t overwhelming and it never felt preachy. It just felt really refreshingly honest.  And that balancing act applied to the other elements of the story as well: the chaos and drama of teenage relationships melted smoothly into the witchy whodunnit mystery, as the main character Hannah wor

  This was so thoroughly not what I was expecting it to be. We’re introduced right off the bat to Tamsin, who’s just the most irritating girlboss, treats all her coworkers like crap, and also is working to conceal from the public the fact that the city is sinking and no one knows why but it might be related to her research. As I said. Girlboss. But then an apparent clone of her shows up from the door that has mysteriously appeared in her basement and things get REALLY WEIRD. A lot of the book (maybe more than necessary) is spent watching Tamsin’s classic descent into madness. Which she also works to conceal from everyone around her, including her handler, Lachlan. I have to say, Tamsin’s relationship with Lachlan (and Lachlan as a character) was actually the highlight of the book for me, and I really wish there had been more of it. It became shockingly sweet and gentle, and also I really want a tall hot lady with a prosthetic arm to come busting into a basement to rescue me.  Anyway, t

  So I’ve seen a lot of stuff pitching this as lesbian Ted Lasso, and alas, it simply is not. The side characters are charming enough, but they lack the brilliance of the Ted Lasso ensemble and aren’t given much attention throughout the book. Grace and Phoebe are very much the primary focus, and almost every scene revolves around them. And yeah, it is a romance, but those of you who follow my reviews will know that I firmly believe that the best romances have excellent side characters and spend time developing other relationships – not to mention, other aspects of the characters. This book is trying to touch on some of those things, but the proportions weren’t quite right for me.  For instance, one plot element is Phoebe and Grace exploring their potential neurodivergence. I didn’t realize that would be a plot point going in, and I was excited when it was, but it wasn’t explored as much as it could have been. Grace in particular is really reduced to a throwaway line about maybe looking

  I had this book sitting in my room for I kid you not a few years before I finally got around to it earlier this year, and it was absolutely a book that made me think, why on earth did I wait so long to read this? There were so many different stories from so many different creative perspectives, and I loved reading them. It did also make me realize I’m not quite as familiar with King Arthur as I thought I was – there were stories that I struggled to make the connections the author had intended. Still, for the most part thoroughly enjoyable. The Once and Future Qadi ★★★★ This story was a really interesting starting point because it’s essentially just one element of the original King Arthur story (the trial of Lancelot and Guinevere) but from the perspective of a new character coming from a completely different culture. It paints a compelling portrait of Guinevere, and it never misses an opportunity to skewer sexism and xenophobia – often at the same time. A nice little read, though not

  This is such a clever premise for a book. It’s entirely different from any dystopian/apocalypse story I’ve ever seen, and it manages to be surprisingly horrifying in a way that lets it compete with any zombie apocalypse. That being said, the execution was a bit odd. There wasn’t as much tension as it felt like the story warranted? The stakes were clearly high, and a fascinating sort of political intrigue gets laid out across the book, but the actual tension was missing for me for a lot of the book. In the scenes where it worked, it really worked, but so many crucial moments got told in the form of a diary entry that a lot of the tension and drama got lost. Also, the story spanned a really long time. Which is fine because it gave it a very unique structure and, I think, allowed a story of parenthood and what we owe the world to be told that would be really challenging to tell if it didn’t span a lifetime. Unfortunately, it also meant that a lot of relationships sort of got pushed to t