Review of What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, by Michiko Aoyama

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library

by Michiko Aoyama
read by Hanako Footman, Susan Momoko Hingley, Kenichiro Thomson, Winson Ting, and Shiro Kawai

HarlequinAudio, 2023. 7 hours, 19 minutes.
Review written September 9, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

First, a great big thank-you to my friend Suzanne LaPierre for recommending this book! I loved it in every way! She recommended it in an answer to my new email newsletter, Book Talking with Sondy, so let me encourage more of my readers to sign up for Book Talking with Sondy and recommend books back to me!

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library is a translation of a Japanese book, set in a neighborhood of Tokyo. We get five interlocking stories – a 21-year-old working in a department store and not happy about it, a 35-year-old salary man who wishes he could open an antique store, a 40-year-old who got demoted while she was on maternity leave, a 30-year-old NEET (not in employment, education or training), and a newly retired 65-year-old.

All of these people are thinking about their lives and their work and what it all means and what they want and what they’re stuck with – or are they actually stuck? All of them find their way to a small community library with a very large librarian, Sayuri Komachi.

I did love that these folks found a path to meaning in a library – my one quibble being that this librarian had time to take up a hobby and make felted objects while she waits behind a screen for customers to show up.

But this particular librarian has mystical powers – and she gives each of our featured characters the books they ask for, plus one seemingly unrelated book that makes all the difference. She also gives each one a bonus gift – a small felted object that ends up having special significance to that person and helps to change their life.

And all of our heroes find paths to new meaning after their encounter with the almost magical librarian. So that might be hard to read for someone struggling with similar issues themselves – except that the author treats all of the characters and their situations with deep respect, showing plainly that their life and their value goes much deeper than their current work situation.

Just a wonderful and uplifting book. And look! Our library has ordered another book by this author – The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park. I have already placed a hold.

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Review of Chickenpox, by Remy Lai

Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary, Graphic Novel, Starred Review 0

Chickenpox

by Remy Lai

Henry Holt and Company, 2025. 235 pages.
Review written July 15, 2025, from a library book.
Starred Review

You’d think stories about chickenpox would lose their popularity now that today’s kids are almost all vaccinated. But this graphic novel is hugely popular at the library – a fictionalized version of the author’s family when all five of them came down with chickenpox.

We’ve got the perspective of Abby, the oldest – who is horrified at the thought of ten days with her siblings when they all come down with chickenpox. When the younger ones squabble, Abby as the big sister is generally the one who’s told she should calm things down.

And while Abby’s out of the action, there’s some friend drama at school – which of course her younger siblings only make worse if they get the slightest whiff of what’s going on.

But most of my fondness for this graphic novel came from nostalgia. Because when I was in second grade, my older sister brought home chickenpox, and the other four of us all caught it and stayed home from school together for two weeks. I was third, not oldest like the protagonist – and my parents went on to have eight more kids. But when we had chickenpox, there were five kids, just like in this book – and yes, the chaos seems accurate.

I still say there’s nothing like a graphic novel for conveying the chaos and intense emotions of middle school. Turns out, it’s also great for showing the chaos of a big family of kids all home with chickenpox.

remylai.com

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Review of Sisters in the Wind, by Angeline Boulley

Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Sisters in the Wind

by Angeline Boulley

Henry Holt, 2025. 367 pages.
Review written September 2, 2025, from an advance reader copy signed by the author that I got at ALA Annual Conference.
Starred Review

I was happy to actually get an advance reader copy read before the publication date – and then I’m writing this review on the publication date, so it was just barely before. However, today I purchased a copy of the eaudiobook for the library, and I put it on hold to listen to, even though I just read it. It’s that good.

Sisters in the Wind takes place in between the author’s two other books, Firekeeper’s Daughter and Warrior Girl Unearthed. There’s no plot overlap between them, so you can read them in any order, but you’ll find out a lot that goes on in Firekeeper’s Daughter, so I think it’s better to read that one before this one. (If you missed that one, absolutely go read it as soon as possible!)

I read this book on a weekend I’d meant to do a 48-Hour Book Challenge that kind of got stymied – but getting this one book read made the whole thing a win. Sisters in the Wind features Lucy, an 18-year-old part-Native girl who’s been in the foster care system for three years, since her father died.

As the book opens, she meets a man who turns out to be Jamie from Firekeeper’s Daughter. He’s now a lawyer trying to help Native kids who have been in the foster care system against the protections of the Indian Child Welfare Act. Lucy asks him why he’s been following her since New Year’s Eve, but that wasn’t him.

Lucy acts like she’s going to follow up, but she knows it’s time to run. She packs her backpack and goes to work one last time – but then a pipe bomb at the deli where she works puts her in the hospital.

Jamie and Daunis show up to take care of Lucy as she recovers. It turns out that she’s the half-sister of Daunis’s best friend Lily, who was killed in Firekeeper’s Daughter. (Not a spoiler, it happens fairly early. But there are other spoilers in the book.) The rest of the book takes two threads – one of her time in a hotel with Jamie and Daunis watching over her as her broken leg heals, and the other thread the story of how she wound up in foster care and why she’s certain that someone’s angry enough with her to plant a bomb.

Along the way, as with Angeline Boulley’s other books, we learn in a natural way about a current issue involving Native Americans. In this book it’s about how the Indian Child Welfare Act was established to try to stop Native kids from being exploited. However, being established is one thing and being enforced is another.

Angeline Boulley always tells a good story. As in the others, we get characters we love and a situation that builds to life-and-death danger.

At first, when I read Firekeeper’s Daughter and learned she’d been working on the story for over a decade, I thought no wonder it’s so good! But now she’s published two follow-ups that are just as wonderful that she didn’t spend even close to a decade writing. Nope, that’s not it – she’s simply a crazy-talented author.

angelineboulley.com

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Review of Not Quite a Ghost, by Anne Ursu

Audiobooks, Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary, Paranormal, Starred Review 0

Not Quite a Ghost

by Anne Ursu
read by Eva Kaminsky

Walden Pond Press, 2024. 6 hours, 45 minutes.
Review written March 18, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
2025 Capitol Choices Selection

This is the second book I’ve read recently where a kid gets a mysterious chronic ailment with intermittent dizziness and weakness, and they try to please the adults around them and not be “lazy” and things get worse and worse – and honestly, it makes me cringe, but in a sympathetic way.

In this case, the kid in question is Violet Hart, who’s just beginning 6th grade and middle school, and whose family has just moved into a big old house where Violet’s sister sticks her with the creepy attic room with the hideous wallpaper.

Fortunately, Violet’s mother and stepfather believe her when she dares to tell them that she’s not feeling well, but they take her to more than one doctor who thinks she’s just got anxiety about middle school. And even her friends start wondering.

On top of that, her two best friends only have one class with her – and it’s gym class, where she doesn’t feel well enough to participate. And they want to expand the friend group to include two more popular girls, and things get awkward.

But while Violet is in the library during gym class, she meets a boy who’s not taking gym class at all, and is doing a project on ghost hunting.

So ghosts are in her head when she’s stuck in her attic room, feeling awful, and she starts seeing movement in the hideous wallpaper. Is all of it just in her head?

This book immersed me in Violet’s world right from the start. Anne Ursu beautifully captures family dynamics and friendship dynamics and a kid who just wants to stay under the radar and find something she can count on when everything’s changing around her, including her own body.

The not-quite-a-ghost doesn’t really come into the story until late in the book, so it’s not necessarily what you want to hand a kid who simply wants a ghost story. But for a great story about the ups and downs of navigating changes of middle school, this book beautifully fills the bill.

anneursu.com

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Review of Kween, by Vichet Chum

Contemporary, Teen Fiction Review 0

Kween

by Vichet Chum

Quill Tree Books, 2023. 343 pages.
Review written November 4, 2023, from a library book.

Kween is about Soma, a Cambodian teen born and brought up in Lowell, Massachusetts, dealing with things and learning to process it all and express herself. A poem she writes and performs online goes viral, but the essay she didn’t write, telling the teacher she was sick of writing about history from the perspective of colonizers got her an F.

Meanwhile, her father got deported back to Cambodia after decades in the U.S. and a green card. And her mother went to Cambodia to be with him, supposedly only for a visit, but she keeps pushing back her return date. They left her in the care of her much-older sister, and Soma resents Dahvy acting like her parent. But Dahvy’s planning her wedding to Ruben, and both of them are teachers at Soma’s school and get in her business. They encourage her to enter a poetry contest in which the finalists will perform their poems.

So Dahvy’s buzzing with things to do for the wedding, and Soma wants to wait until Ma gets back. Though at the same time, there’s this girl she’s had a crush on forever who finally notices her.

The book is narrated by Soma, who’s named after the first queen of Cambodia, and it’s full of teen slang, which put me off at the beginning. But I did get used to it as I went along (and will trust the author to know better than me what’s authentic), and I was pulled in to the many things Soma was juggling – missing her father while dealing with her stressed-out sister and trying to find her voice as a performance poet.

The many different threads are woven together seamlessly and keep you interested and I loved seeing Soma learn to be a Kween. (I can’t use the slang right and shouldn’t even try.)

vichetchum.com
EpicReads.com

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Review of Good Dirt, by Charmaine Wilkerson, read by January LaVoy

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

Good Dirt

by Charmaine Wilkerson
read by January LaVoy

Books on Tape, 2025. 11 hours, 27 minutes.
Review written August 22, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Good Dirt, from the author of Black Cake, is another sweeping saga that shows us a person in extraordinary circumstances in the present and weaves a tapestry of history around that person.

In Good Dirt, Ebony Freeman has fled to France in order to get some time to herself, nine months after the man she was supposed to marry didn’t show up for the wedding.

This wasn’t Ebbie’s first brush with notoriety, and the first time was even worse: When she was ten years old, her fifteen-year-old brother was shot in their Connecticut home when some thieves were trying to steal their family’s historic old jar. Ebbie was with her brother when he died and saw the jar in pieces on the floor.

The family was proud of that jar, and loved to tell stories about its history. It came to New England when Ebbie’s great-great-grandfather brought it along when he stowed away on a ship and made his way to freedom. Moses, the enslaved man who made the jar, carved an inscription on the bottom of the jar, at a time when it was illegal for enslaved people to read or write. That inscription has inspired the family for generations.

But now Ebbie’s managing her friend’s guesthouse in France – and the first people to show up are her ex-fiance and his new girlfriend, Ashley. It’s not as big a coincidence as it seems – Ashley had picked up an ad Ebbie’s friend had placed in a neighborhood cafe when she was in the area for Ebbie’s planned wedding. But the awkward situation forces Ebbie to think through a lot of things she’d been avoiding.

And that’s the situation that fuels the book. Ebbie decides to write the stories of the jar, and we learn its rich history while watching Ebbie deal with her own history and what this all means for the present with the man she’d planned to marry in front of her on the other side of the ocean.

As in Black Cake, Charmaine Wilkerson gives us multiple perspectives on events. I, for one, didn’t care what the ex-fiance thought about things – but she uses even that to help us get to know the whole family – all still dealing with the loss of Ebbie’s brother, and trying to go on with dignity in the present.

This is another powerful story that completely enthralls.

charmspen.com

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Review of Kismat Connection, by Ananya Devarajan, read by Reena Dutt and Vikas Adam

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Teen Fiction Review 0

Kismat Connection

by Ananya Devarajan
read by Reena Dutt and Vikas Adam

Harlequin Audio, 2023. 8 hours, 41 minutes.
Review written October 7, 2023, from a library eaudiobook.

Kismat Connection is a sweet romance about two Indian American seniors in high school who have been best friends since childhood. We get the story told from both their perspectives.

Arjun is a lacrosse star who wants to be an aerospace engineer. His mother has traveled often for work since his dad left, and he’s learned not to count on her. Instead, he spends time with Madhuri’s family, who welcomes him as if he’s their own. He has long been in love with Madhuri, but doesn’t dare tell her because he doesn’t want to mess up their friendship.

But when Madhuri’s mother reads both their astrological charts for the upcoming year and Arjun’s forecasts great success but Madhuri’s outlines trouble – Madhuri thinks of a way to fight against fate. She devises a plan to date Arjun for their senior year – but plan in advance to break up the day after graduation. She thinks of course it will work because neither of them will ever have romantic feelings for their best friend.

Well, it surprises no one but Madhuri when things get more complicated than that.

This book is a delightful rom-com with thoughts about free will and destiny as well as finding who you truly are and following your heart.

ananyadevarajan.com

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Review of Too Small Tola Makes It Count, by Atinuke

Beginning Chapter Books, Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary, Starred Review 0

Too Small Tola Makes It Count

by Atinuke
illustrated by Onyinye Iwu

Candlewick Press, 2024. First published in the United Kingdom in 2023. 90 pages.
Review written March 17, 2025, from a library book.
Starred Review

I love Too Small Tola! Here are more adventures for children ready to read chapter books. You don’t have to have read the earlier ones to enjoy this one, but I do recommend them, and characters return.

I like the way these books give younger children a window into other people’s lives without any need to feel sorry for them and showing lots of love.

Too Small Tola lives in Lagos, unbelievable Lagos.

In Lagos there are children who live in mansions. Mansions so big, their parents have to call their children’s cell phones to find which room they are in!

And in Lagos there are children who sleep on cardboard boxes under bridges where people step over them both day and night.

Tola’s family is lucky. They do not own a mansion or even an apartment. But they do not sleep under bridges either. They are lucky enough to have the roof of one room over their heads.

Tola lives with her Grandmommy and an older brother and older sister. We’re getting to know some of the other people in their building.

In past books, Tola was able to solve some problems using Math. In this book, there are some life problems to solve, which can be trickier. Tola is able to solve problems for her neighbors, but she can’t get her school classmates to believe that she worked for a famous rock star’s family during the lockdown – until they get a nice comeuppance in the last chapter.

Other problems involve helping Mrs. Shaky-Shaky, who can no longer go up the stairs, and traveling to the beach to escape the heat, and watching her neighbor’s baby, who makes an escape.

It all involves everyday life for Tola, and we get to enjoy the kind and wonderful people she interacts with every day, as well as appreciate Tola’s ingenuity.

These books always make me smile.

atinuke.co.uk
onyinyeiwu.com
candlewick.com

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Review of Holding Up the Sky, by Rebecca Alasdair

Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Holding Up the Sky

by Rebecca Alasdair

Southscript Press, 2022. 334 pages.
Review written March 14, 2023, from a library book.
Starred Review

Holding Up the Sky is a coming-out story, and one that is tough. We’re following Carter, who’s got so many burdens in his life as a senior in high school, it feels like he’s holding up the sky.

He used to have a big brother looking out for him, but his brother and his father were killed in an accident that happened the afternoon of his brother’s graduation dinner. Since then, Carter knows he’s a disappointment to his mother. She has to work long hours so they can stay in their home. And Carter works to keep his grades up so he can be a doctor one day and make his mother proud of him.

And then one day, as Carter is trying to hold things together, a new boy comes to school who is flamboyantly and proudly gay. Carter doesn’t dare admit how much he’s attracted to him. Because if his mother finds out, she’ll be horrified.

We get a warning at the very front of the book that Carter’s going to end up turning to suicide to find freedom. All the plot points from there on out are predictable – but they still had my heart aching along with Carter.

I don’t usually cry over young adult novels any more, unlike when I was a teen myself. But this one had me in tears. I figured out what was coming, but it still seemed all too much. Why couldn’t this kid see how precious he was? How dare a parent treat him like that? Yet I read this book after having just learned about the suicide of a young transgender woman after her parents forced her to detransition. It was all too easy to believe this story.

I will say this: The story does end both hopefully and realistically. In many ways, it’s a message book (with a good message), but it also had me absorbed and invested in the story.

rebeccaalasdair.com
southscriptpress.com.au

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Review of As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow, by Zoulfa Katouh

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

by Zoulfa Katouh
read by Rasha Zamamiri

Hachette Audio, 2022. 12 hours, 16 minutes.
Review written August 13, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Wow. This is a book about ordinary people who become extraordinary during wartime.

Salama is 18 years old and working in a hospital in Homs, Syria, in 2011. She got to attend two years of pharmacy school before people had enough and rose up against Assad. Her father and brother were taken to prison to be tortured after a protest, and her mother died when a bomb struck their home. Now Salama volunteers every day at the hospital and has learned to do surgery such as removing bullets and sewing up wounds.

Salama’s been through trauma, and she knows it. She knows that the man she sees named Hawf is someone created in her brain that no one else can see. He is relentlessly trying to get her to leave Syria before her 8-months-pregnant sister-in-law Layla gives birth. She’s torn because she’s needed at the hospital. And what about the cost? And will they even survive the journey?

In the middle of all these hard things, she meets a boy a little older than herself, who brings in his little sister with an injury. It turns out the boy was the same one her mother was arranging for her to meet just before the revolution started and their lives blew apart. He, too, feels he is doing important work in Syria – posting YouTube videos of the protests and the response. As their attraction for each other grows, they both need to decide at what point the risk is just too great and when staying alive is simply the most important goal.

The characters speak eloquently of their love for Syria. There is plenty of horrific violence in this book, including a chemical attack on children. Salama is badly traumatized, and she knows she’s traumatized – but she still wants to help people.

The author tells us at the end that she was trying to show ordinary people in wartime, trying to show the beauty of Syria – that was crushed by the regime in power. And that people are still people.

The romance in this book is wonderful. I appreciate that when the characters are Muslim, the romance isn’t focused on physically getting together – and to me, it makes the attraction all the stronger. The author said she was trying to copy Jane Austen’s romances, and she did a wonderful job. We can watch these two fall in love on the page – even while horrific things are happening around them and they each fear for the lives of those they love.

It does leave me wondering: When will humans stop doing this to one another? Until that day comes, this book is an amazing look at some young people who manage to find love and beauty even in the middle of war.

zoulfakatouh.com

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