The Neurospicy Bean

  While this book isn’t doing anything particularly new or unique, I thought that what it is doing, it does well. In particular, it’s an effective, if not particularly subtle, critique of the true crime genre obsession. It’s set at a true crime podcast’s competition to find the remains of a serial killer (this doesn’t seem like it can possibly be legal for a recent case, but whatever), and over the course of the novel we watch the competitors slowly unravel. Whether it’s a desire for power or romanticizing the killer, the distance between the competitors and the subject of their obsession slowly narrows, and although there’s a supernatural element at play, the reader is left to wonder how much of that unraveling is because of the supernatural and how much is simply the consequence of a culture that idolizes murderers. Balancing this out somewhat, though, is Caroline, who uses true crime as a processing mechanism for her very real trauma. This book does a nice job of walking the lin...

  There was so much hype around this book and it just…did not meet my expectations at all. I don’t have a ton to say specifically, but there were a couple reasons it annoyed me. First, there really wasn’t anything to make it unique. It felt as formulaic as a queer period romance can get – two upper-class white leads fall in love, they scheme to find a way to be together, they have sex, they break up at the end of the second act, they get back together. Whatever. There was just nothing to make it unique, nothing that gave it any grab or grit. The second issue is that Beth and Gwen were completely indistinguishable from one another. Aside from which parent they spent time with, there was really nothing about them that made it possible to keep track of who was narrating at a given point. Pro tip: if you can’t write distinctive characters, don’t have multiple POVs. They’re like the characters in a love triangle where the only difference is that one has brown hair (gasp). On another not...

  Man, there was so much hype surrounding this book (not to mention the gorgeous cover), and it just didn’t live up. Given the whole context and aesthetic it sets up, I was looking for something with a sort of Moulin Rouge vibe – overwrought and angsty and dramatic. But I guess there was just way too much going on to really establish a coherent vibe. Basically our main characters Esme and Sybil, roommates and best friends who are also in love with each other, get roped into a scheme to steal Queen Mab’s jewels for the owner of popular club The Absinthe Underground.  There’s a lot of jumping around, from the streets of Severon to the Absinthe Underground to the main character’s brother’s house to Fae and back again. And there are so many different dynamics going on – Esme and Sybil’s relationship, Sybil’s family history, all the dynamics of Severon, the worldbuilding of Fae, the characters in Fae, and there just isn’t  room for them to all get fleshed out properly. There’s...

  For whatever reason, nothing about this one clicked for me. The premise – girl from a family of brujas doesn’t want to be a bruja, casts a spell that accidentally banishes her family, and has to save them from dark forces – is perfectly compelling, and I genuinely did quite like the wide variety of mythological creatures that were incorporated into the story. There were beings and creatures that rarely come up because, frankly, Latine mythology just isn’t that written about (though this is changing!).  But I found Alex really frustrating as a main character, and Nova was flat-out unlikeable – I know we were supposed to get a flirty banter, rivals to lovers kind of vibe from his dynamic with Alex, but I just didn’t get it. But then the other love interest, who may have had more potential, wasn’t there for half the book! So we didn’t even really get to see her dynamic with Alex much at all, which was disappointing. Beyond that, something about the pacing just felt awkward. I c...

  I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by this one! It’s a fairly traditional enemies-to-lovers setup, and there’s not anything super out of the box, but I was shocked by how invested I got in Rune and Gideon’s relationship (I know – JAY getting invested in STRAIGHT PEOPLE?). There were also a few elements that I particularly enjoyed.  First, despite this being a YA romantasy, there’s actually a shocking amount of complexity and nuance that gets conveyed. We’re introduced to a world in which witches are brutally hunted and executed, which of course sets the reader up to side with Rune, the witch in hiding. But as the book goes on, it becomes very clear that the revolution that overthrew the witches was very much justified. The story does a really good job of showing the ways that privilege can change rapidly and how people can be talking about two entirely different things without even realizing it when it comes to power dynamics. Spoilers on this one! Another thing I tho...

  This was…not good. Let me first say: how on earth does a town as small as Cameron describes this one as being support not just this mall but apparently enough people to make a random elf competition go viral?? I mean, I guess it happens, but it felt really weird. But that’s not the most annoying thing about this book, by far. Cameron as a character was just so irritating. He was mean to everyone, especially Marco, for no reason. There was literally zero chemistry between Cameron and Marco. Cameron spent way more time thinking about his ex than he spent thinking about Marco, and they just seemed annoyed at each other the entire book until suddenly Cameron decided he liked this guy enough to question all his life plans for him.  Also. THE BOOK MISGENDERS THE NON-BINARY CHARACTER. How does this happen. How does it not get caught in all the many phases of editing a book must go through. Were there not sensitivity readers. Did none of the early readers notice. I mean, I had to go...

  Oh my God this book had no business being this heartbreaking. This poor kid just keeps trying so hard to make things better and help people, and every single time he just gets absolutely screwed over by everyone around him. Honestly it got frustrating after a while, especially because the plot did begin to feel a bit unnecessarily convoluted, but as far as the actual emotional core of the story goes, I thought it was quite good.  From a more world-building/history perspective, it was much weaker. A lot of the dialogue read like modern dialogue with generically old-fashioned words sprinkled in, and it was really jarring in places. Similarly, there were elements that didn’t seem like they’d been fully researched. Now, I’m willing to forgive some of this in a cutesy historical romance, but this book wanted to be doing more than that, and I think it could have been better researched. That being said, like I mentioned above, the emotional core of this story was devastating and sw...

  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 ...

  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 H...

       So once in a while there will be a detail at the beginning of a book that sort of sets me against it and I can just never get over it, and that happened here. Basically the entire premise of the book is that the main character, Jade, has to go stay with her dad in Vietnam in the French colonial house he’s renovating so that he’ll pay for her tuition at UPenn. She explains that she’s lied to her mom that tuition is fully covered when in fact it’s actually still around $30,000 for her freshman year, but she doesn’t want her mom to have to take out loans, and that she has no money for her own tuition because it all went to school application fees.      So, I happen to have some quasi-personal experience with this, because my girlfriend actually goes to UPenn and most of her tuition is covered by financial aid. I actually directly asked her how much financial aid a student coming from a family with three children raised by a single mother who works ...