Review of The Scammer, by Tiffany D. Jackson

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Suspense, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Scammer

by Tiffany D. Jackson
read by January LaVoy

Quill Tree Books, 2025. 9 hours, 10 minutes.
Review written December 15, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.

The Scammer is another young adult thriller by Tiffany Jackson featuring a Black girl protagonist. Jordyn has decided at the last minute, against her parents wishes, to defer her Yale acceptance and attend a historically Black university in Washington, D.C. Once there, she quickly becomes firm friends with her suitemates.

But one of her new friends has a brother who recently got out of prison (wrongly accused, of course), and she asks to let him stay with them. Devonte is everything charming. He cooks for the girls, cleans for them, and starts giving life advice.

But the life advice accelerates to controlling every part of their lives, giving them a curfew, telling them what they can do, and who they can be around. What’s more, it spreads to more people on campus turning to this charming older man to know how they should live. And then he starts asking for money, so their new family can build a community together.

I have to say that the middle of this audiobook when Devonte was getting more and more controlling was difficult even to listen to. Jordyn does make at least one friend who helps her get her head clear – but of course it all leads up to a dangerous crisis. As has to happen in any good thriller.

So yes, here’s some gripping escapism with a side of cautionary tale. And a thriller with a less typical heroine in the spotlight.

writeinbk.com

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Review of Bridget and Gabe Are Not Okay, by Lex Croucher

Audiobooks, Fantasy 0

Bridget and Gabe Are Not Okay

by Lex Croucher
read by Kishore Walker and Theodore Taylor

Macmillan Young Listeners, 2026. 12 hours, 4 minutes.
Review written August 26, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.

This book is a sequel to Gwen and Art Are Not in Love, where we’ve got an alternate-reality medieval England featuring descendants of King Arthur. You should read the first book first, and then, like me, you’ll be delighted that there’s a sequel and you can spend more time with these characters.

But the events of the first book have left their mark. Gabe is now king, and he doesn’t feel up to the task, and he keeps having panic attacks that get him hiding in a closet. And Bridget has what amounts to PTSD – except of course there’s no name for that in medieval times. And both of those conditions are messing up the budding romances from the end of the first book. On top of that, there are rumblings in the country about the “Lancelot Laws” – that it’s okay for men to love men and women to love women. Not everyone’s happy about that, and I’m afraid the Catholic church hosts the main opposition.

In this book, they go on a quest. Gabe has an aide who amounts to a publicist, and she convinces him to assemble his own Round Table of knights and go on a quest to verify the reported sightings from Arthurian legend – a Questing Beast, a person purporting to be the Green Knight, another said to be the Lady of the Lake, and of course the Grail. This way, Gabriel’s subjects will get to know him.

So the quest throws them into a company that includes the two couples in question, and they track down each reported Arthurian legend. Most of them indeed have a natural explanation – but there’s a touch of wonder thrown in before the book ends that I did enjoy.

I hate to say it, because I loved the book, but this one felt a bit long. The couples went back and forth on being harmonious or at odds with one another, and the quest didn’t feel very focused, kind of wandering from one thing to another. On the other hand, I enjoyed the characters, and it’s not like mental health issues would have been easily resolved in medieval times – these are handled well.

Bottom line: Read the first book first. If you enjoy it, and want more from those characters, I’m happy to report that you can read on.

lexcroucher.co.uk

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Review of Brigands and Breadknives, by Travis Baldree

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

Brigands and Breadknives

by Travis Baldree
read by the Author

Macmillan Audio, 2025. 8 hours, 25 minutes.
Review written July 13, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Brigands and Breadknives is the third cozy fantasy novel for adults that I’ve read from Travis Baldree, and now I’m sad that I’ve read all three he’s written so far. I’m happy, though, to discover an author whose books I love so much and who seems to be young enough to write lots more.

This is not a romance – it’s a tale of friendship and adventuring and navigating a sort of midlife crisis.

Do read the other two books before this one, because there are hints dropped of what went before. This one features Fern, the Ratkin who sold her bookshop in the seaside town where she first met her friend Viv the Orc lady to move to Thune and start a new bookshop there, right next to Viv’s coffee shop, Legends and Lattes.

But after Fern moves and her new bookshop in Thune is doing fine, she’s still discontented. It still feels like there’s a hole in her life. She doesn’t know what she wants, but it’s not this. She gets drunk and makes a promise to tell Viv how she’s feeling and apologize for all the trouble Viv had to set Fern up here.

But instead of telling Viv that night, Fern falls asleep in a cart – and a day and a half later wakes up to find she’s in a cart driven by a fabled adventurer known as the Elf Maiden. She’s 500 years old, and Fern has sold books about her. She’s got a chaos goblin in the cart and is currently on a mission to deliver the goblin to another town in exchange for a very high bounty.

And one thing leads to another, and Fern ends up going along on the quest, and even helping during life-threatening situations. Because the bounty is so incredibly high, there are many other adventurers who want a piece of the action. Even more threatening is the orc who doesn’t want any bounty but just wants the goblin dead. Along with anyone who will keep them from killing her.

So there’s lots of adventure, including fixes you’re afraid they really can’t get out of. (When I find myself reminding myself it’s a book and there’s no way the author will let that character die – will they? – I know the author has done a great job of raising the stakes.) But it’s also an exploration of friendship and life purpose, and simply a wonderful story.

I’ve decided that the new label of “cozy fantasy” is exactly what I was looking for when I started reading young adult fantasy as an adult – but now YA fantasy has moved away from. It’s not super dark, isn’t bogged down with world-building details, and has the feeling of ordinary people doing ordinary things – with a dash of magic involved. (In this case, there’s no obvious magic, but the fantasy characters make it firmly a fantasy world.)

Oh wait, did I say no magic? The elf maiden has a sword, an Elder Blade that was forged with the spirit of a warrior, and which talks. Well, after meeting this sword, we then discover that the chaos goblin has somewhere picked up an Elder Blade that’s now a breadknife. An Elder Blade in Reduced Circumstances, so to speak. So yes, there’s plenty of humor in this tale as well.

Why is it for adults and not teens? For starters, Fern is over forty years old and has adult concerns. I still find this refreshing in a tale. But there’s no need for content warnings if a teen picks it up. Nice and cozy – and a joy to listen to.

Oh, and the author was already an audiobook narrator before he wrote his own books, so he does a fantastic job reading his own work.

travisbaldree.com

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Review of Beauty, by Robin McKinley

Audiobooks, Fairy Tale Variant, Fantasy, Old Favorites, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

coverBeauty

by Robin McKinley
read by Charlotte Parry

Recorded Books, 2013. (Print book originally published in 1978.) 7 hours, 5 minutes.
Review written July 29, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

As part of #Sonderbooks25, celebrating my 25th year of writing Sonderbooks, I’ve been rereading books by one of my very favorite authors, Robin McKinley. When doing so, I was surprised to discover that I’d never written a review of several of her books – turns out I read them before I began writing Sonderbooks in 2001. Now, I do own copies of every one of them – but the easiest ones to fit into my queue were the ones my library has as eaudiobooks. I’m happy to say that, even after all these years, Beauty still has a holds list.

Beauty is a sweet retelling of the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast” – and is one of the books that made me realize I love fairy tale retellings. This was Robin McKinley’s debut book, and is a totally positive take on Beauty and her family. Even her sisters – who in the fairy tale are selfish and grasping and lazy – are wonderful and kind. After the family’s financial disaster, one sister’s fiance takes the family away to his home town by a magical forest – and they all build a good life together there. The other sister’s fiance was lost at sea along with their father’s ships, and the family has nothing but love for Beauty, the youngest.

This book was written long before it was acceptable to put sex into young adult novels, so the romance between Beauty and Beast is built on shared activities rather than blistering attraction – and indeed Beauty must overcome repulsion at the idea of him even touching her. This Beast is honorable and says he never would have killed her father – Beast would have sent him home if Beauty had refused to come – but he tells her that she would have been eaten up with guilt over sending him to what she thought was his death.

The book does not even broach the subject of Stockholm syndrome or how maybe Beast isn’t all that honorable if he’d deprive someone of their freedom. It doesn’t broach the vast disparity in their ages.

But what we’re left with is a sweet fairy tale with a heroine we can’t help but love. Yes, like the Disney version, Beauty loves to read. She also has a magnificent horse that only she can handle. And she’s someone who makes the best of things.

Read this book for a feel-good Happily-Ever-After tale. And it’s a great introduction to the grand mistress of fantasy’s work.

Note: It doesn’t look like the audiobook is currently available, but do check your local library.

robinmckinley.com

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Review of Red Star Rebels, by Amie Kaufman

Audiobooks, Science Fiction, Starred Review, Suspense, Teen Fiction Review 0

Red Star Rebels

by Amie Kaufman
performed by Max Meyers, Jessica Almasy, and a full cast

Listening Library, 2026. 7 hours, 33 minutes.
Review written August 14, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred review

The audio production for this book is amazing. It’s to the level of a radio play. There’s even a music soundtrack throughout. Occasionally, when the music turned happy in the romantic parts, it felt a tiny bit hokey, but mostly it dialed my tension way up. At one point I turned it off a couple times to make sure that machine sound wasn’t coming from inside my own home. This was a good thing – you’re completely immersed in the story. This one was hard to stop at any point in the story, and had me so riveted, it maybe wasn’t the best background listening if I was trying to do anything else. (But I didn’t miss any turns or get into any accidents while driving, so it all worked out.)

Red Star Rebels is set in a United Nations station on Mars – one of the last and lowest budget bases that was built on Mars. We have two viewpoint characters. First is Cleo, who got to Mars as a hitcher when she was trying to escape debt collectors after her for medical debt from the illness that killed her father. Since Cleo isn’t registered to be there, she’s got tricks for places to hide and stashes of food. And a pressure suit in case there’s ever an evacuation – because the system doesn’t know she’s there and rovers won’t wait for her.

Our second protagonist is Hunter Graves. He’s the billionaire grandson of the man who got to Mars first and put a compound there, breaking rules, but also breaking new ground. Hunter didn’t let his mother and sister know that he was coming, and used his money to keep them from finding out. He has just arrived at the UN station and wants to arrange passage to the Graves compound, but is told that a dust storm will make it impossible to travel for a few days.

And then an alarm goes off. A voice repeats a message in several languages that everyone needs to get to the evacuation rovers because a toxin has been identified in the air, and the station is going to be vented. Trouble is, Hunter wasn’t registered yet, so the system doesn’t know he’s there, so the evacuation rovers for visitors don’t wait for him. Fortunately for him, after he puts out a Mayday call (blocked by the dust storm from anyone outside the station), a girl with red hair wearing a pressure suit comes to him bringing a second pressure suit. (And on the audiobook, her voice sounds like it’s coming from a microphone in a suit.)

But after Hunter thinks this girl Cleo has saved his life, the station doesn’t start venting after all. In fact, some Rovers pull up to the station on the opposite side from where the evacuees left. A group of people enter the station and come to the command center. Cleo and Hunter hear them say there are six hours left before everything blows, and they see them doing something with the computer system.

Hunter and Cleo don’t make their presence known right away. Can they figure out a way to escape the station before it gets blown up to erase the evidence? And what, exactly, are these people planning?

There are different phases to the story as Cleo and Hunter grapple with changing situations, revisions in their information, and a dawning knowledge of what the intruders are planning to do.

Meanwhile, Cleo has every reason to hate anyone from the Graves corporation, who produced the medicine that her father needed and couldn’t afford. And Hunter has every reason to hate hitchers, since a group of them from “Mars For All” killed his father. Nobody has ever been there for them before, but they may need to rely on each other to get out of this alive.

I don’t want to say much more than that except that the tension doesn’t let up for a minute. When you think they’ve overcome one obstacle, something new happens to threaten them. But as they’re working for survival, it turns out they’re both good at thinking on their feet. Cleo’s knowledge of the base – from living in secret for months – is crucial, and so is Hunter’s knowledge of the computer systems used by all the bases on Mars. And it’s an awful lot of fun to hear about.

The story was excellent and made me believe that could be what life on Mars is like in forty years, including the part about rich people not caring about the lives of others, sadly. I’m going to strongly recommend if you read this book, do it via audiobook. The production was that good. Be prepared for high tension, though!

amiekaufman.com

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Review of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, by Sangu Mandanna

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Fiction Review, Paranormal, Romance, Starred Review 0

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

by Sangu Mandanna
read by Samara MacLaren

Penguin Audio, 2022. 9 hours, 59 minutes.
Review written June 12, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

I’m so glad that after I read A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping, I looked for more books by the same author. This cozy paranormal romantasy is like a warm hug. Well, okay, it’s a somewhat sexy hug – but the main point of the book is feel-good warmth.

[As it happens, the love interest in both books was a handsome librarian. I can get behind that!]

As the book opens, Mika Moon is a witch who’s used to being isolated. The witches of Britain only get together every few months for a couple hours, and they change the location every time. Too much power in one place will attract attention, and that can lead to disaster.

But then she gets a job offer for a job she hadn’t been looking for. There’s a hidden house in the country inhabited by an older gay couple, a fifty-something lady caretaker, a handsome librarian – and three little girl witches. The adults are looking for a witch to teach the girls magic. They tend to have magical accidents and need to learn to control their power before a lawyer comes by the day after Christmas. The owner of the house is a witch herself who took these girls in, and she’s been in South America for quite some time. Or so Mika is told.

So there are all the ingredients of Mary Poppins or Maria von Trapp. Two of the girls are easily won over, as Mika shares her love of magic, but the other is more challenging.

And the romance part is difficult. All witches are under a curse, or at least a spell gone wrong, and become orphans soon after their birth. Mika had a witch as her guardian, but she was raised by nannies and tutors whose memories were wiped when they figured out what Mika was. So Mika has spent her life moving from one place to another, never getting close enough so that people will find out what she is and want to use their magic for themselves.

And if the head witch of the local society finds out that four witches are living under one roof, Mika knows they’ll be split up. So it’s better to try not to get too fond of this feeling of family and home.

The characters filling the house help make this book the delight it is. Each of the girls has a personality, and all the adults have built a loving family for them. Mika herself shines with her love of magic and a desire to do good things with it.

sangumandanna.com

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Review of Sabriel, by Garth Nix

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Sonderbooks25, Stand-outs, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Sabriel

by Garth Nix
read by Tim Curry

Listening Library, 2002. 10 hours, 43 minutes.
Review written October 21, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
Original review posted January 20, 2004.
2004 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #3 Fantasy for Young Adults

As part of #Sonderbooks25, celebrating 25 years of posting Sonderbooks, I’m rereading many of my Sonderbooks Stand-outs from previous years and writing new reviews for the ones written before my 2006 revision of the website. The project is taking me much, much longer than I thought it would, because I’m reading more of my old reviews than planned and rereading (or listening) to more of the books – but I’m having a whole lot of fun with it, so what’s not to like?

And I don’t think I remembered just how good Sabriel is. I wish I could define why it’s head and shoulders above your run-of-the-mill current romantasy – because then maybe I could write one myself. But I’ll try to put my finger on some of the things that make the book so excellent.

First, Garth Nix does an incredible job with world-building. The world and the magic system is unlike any other fantasy novel I’ve ever read, and is incredibly complex, but he expertly pulls you along without ever a boring exposition drop. Sabriel has been brought up in a school close to the border with the Old Kingdom – full of Charter Magic – but her father has been teaching her the skills of an Abhorsen – a necromancer on the side of good who can send dead things back into Death.

But one day Sabriel gets a messenger from Death bringing her father’s bells and sword. She’s told she is the new Abhorsen. So Sabriel goes on a quest into the Old Kingdom to try to find her father’s body and free him from whatever trapped him in Death. And it turns out along the way, she is trying to save the entire Old Kingdom from the Greater Dead creature that trapped him there.

We get information about what she needs to do and how to do it as she goes – but it’s not done in a haphazard way. Sabriel starts with basic knowledge of how to use the Abhorsen’s bells against dead things – which she has to use in her journey. She finds broken Charter stones and decimated villages in her travels, and there are many terrifying moments when she is chased by powerful dead beings.

Yes, there’s a little bit of romance. The romance is shown to the reader rather than told. Though honestly, they could have said a little more about it – but I happen to like understated romance more than overstated romance.

And the story pulls you in, from Sabriel’s first small venture into death to save a friend’s pet to her frantic stand against a creature of Destruction. This book was even better than I remembered.

garthnix.com

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Review of Homeschooled, by Stefan Merrill Block

Audiobooks, Nonfiction Review, True Stories 0

Homeschooled

by Stefan Merrill Block
read by the Author

Harlequin Audio, 2026. 7 hours, 10 minutes.
Review written July 6, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.

Ouch. This true story had me doing lots of cringing for the author’s past self – as well as for some of my younger siblings who were homeschooled.

To be fair, he puts a detailed note at the end that every homeschool is different, as every family is different. He doesn’t at all advocate for abolishing home schooling, though he does think that for the sake of the kids, there should be more regulation and supervision to make sure kids aren’t sitting alone in their rooms reading comic books and not seeing other people – like he did.

This is his story of being homeschooled, from fourth grade through eighth grade. He went back to school in ninth grade, and after extremely difficult adjustment learning to take tests and write papers, he did well in high school.

His homeschooling happened in Texas when laws had recently been changed to pave the way for home schooling. His mother essentially wanted to keep him her little boy and have him with her at all times. She took him out of school ostensibly because school was crushing his genius. It wasn’t religious homeschooling, but the “unschooling” movement. The idea was that he would “follow his passions” and “learn to learn,” but in practice, the only curriculum he followed was math and Brain Quest cards.

To be fair, he did end up as an author – writing in his room, just as he had done in homeschool. But still, the picture he paints isn’t what you’d want for a child, and included long stretches of loneliness.

But the story itself is absorbing and compelling. It’s a story not only of being homeschooled, but also about his relationship with the complex person who was his mother. And trying to find out who he was apart from her – when him being apart from her was the last thing she ever wanted.

stefanmerrillblock.com

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Review of This Story Might Save Your Life, by Tiffany Crum

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review, Mystery, Starred Review 0

This Story Might Save Your Life

by Tiffany Crum
read by Julia Whelan and Sean Patrick Hopkins

Macmillan Audio, 2026. 10 hours, 39 minutes.
Review written July 15, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

This audiobook had me riveted from start to finish. I was in the middle of things last night, and when I woke up in the morning, my first thoughts were about this book. I made sure I found times to snatch a listen until it was done.

The book is a tale of two best friends who run a podcast called “This Story Might Save Your Life.” One of Joy or Benny introduces a life-threatening situation, based on a true tale of survival, and the other one ad-libs ideas for what they would do to survive. With banter and lots of humor at the terrible ideas. They finish when the person who researched the story tells how the actual person survived or what experts say you should do to survive in such a case. The podcast is crazy popular because listeners can sense the spark of devoted friendship and respect between Joy and Benny, who met not long after college.

We can tell the book begins on a momentous day, because they call it “Day 1.” The sinister Santa Ana winds are blowing, and they do the start of a podcast together. Joy slips Benny a note to come back and talk with her alone, but we don’t find out why. The next day, Joy and her husband Xander, the producer of the podcast, are missing.

The mystery is this: Where are Joy and Xander? What happened to them? We’re fed information in an exquisitely suspenseful way. Alternate chapters go back in time by giving us excerpts from a memoir Joy was writing with Benny about their friendship. I don’t dare say anything about the crucial developments in the story, because the author so expertly feeds us background and current information at exactly the right pace.

I will say some things we learn right at the start. Joy has narcolepsy, and has had it since high school. She takes a wide variety of medicines to manage it, but she still is known to fall asleep anywhere. This human failing of Joy’s makes her all the more likable from the beginning.

We also learn that the previous year has been tough. Their podcast is wildly popular, and Xander’s trying to arrange a lucrative deal with a production company. But Joy has had a stalker. She hasn’t left her house in six months. There are references to difficult things that happened, but we don’t get the details right away.

And Benny feels terribly guilty about what he said to Joy when they met at her house the night before she disappeared. What did he say? Does it have to do with her disappearance? And where are they now? And why is he hiding Joy’s computer from the police?

I wish I could say more! But when the plotting is just so very good, I don’t want to risk messing it up. I read in Libby that there are some extras on the audio version – the podcast that came at the end of the book is a fun bonus. And there are some nice sound effects thrown in. They include different people’s voices calling in to a Tipline about the missing people. So I’m going to recommend listening to this book if you get the chance.

tiffanycrum.com

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Review of Let Them Stare, by Jonathan Van Ness and Julie Murphy

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Teen Fiction Review 0

Let Them Stare

by Jonathan Van Ness and Julie Murphy
read by Jonathan Van Ness and Jeremy Arthur

Storytide (HarperCollins), 2025. 10 hours, 5 minute.
Review written July 1, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.

Let Them Stare is a light-hearted romp about a queer teen with a haunted handbag – with serious overtones about the history of how queer people were treated and how they fought back.

As the story opens, Sully is having a high school graduation party and looking forward to leaving Hearst – a small town near Pittsburgh – the very next day for the glamour of New York City as a junior assistant to an influencer. When their uncle misgenders and insults them while pretending to give them a gift, Sully is all the more ready to put it all behind them. They sell their car to Brad, the only gay guy in town, with a small last-minute make-out session to seal the deal.

But in the morning, the influencer decides to go to Tahiti and sends Sully notice that they won’t be needed after all. So Sully’s left with no job, no money, and no car – stuck in Hearst. However, when they go back to the thrift shop to try to get their job back, they don’t succeed – but they do score a vintage handbag worth potentially tens of thousands of dollars – enough to go to New York after all! Trouble is, when Sully takes it home and gets the lock open – a ghost comes out of the bag.

Rufus, the ghost, is a flamboyant drag performer (or, as he calls it, “female impersonator”) from Hearst in the 1950s. Rufus and Sully instantly recognize their similar ways of being. But Rufus doesn’t remember what happened to him or how he died young. And Sully can’t sell the bag with a ghost living in it. So Sully takes on the quest of researching Rufus and their history. Since they don’t have a car, they get rides with Brad, and Rufus is eager to give advice on Sully’s love life.

It’s all told with lots of humor. Sully has always been over-the-top, and they get into some comical situations when talking to the ghost in their bag. Rufus slowly remembers more and more of his life, leading them to various locations around Hearst to find out more. And along the way, the full story comes out of how queer people historically had to hide – and were punished severely if they didn’t.

The plot borders on melodramatic – complete with a nefarious politician who wants to sell off historical parts of the town. But the whole thing is as flamboyant as Sully, and this only adds to the fun. I appreciate how, even with such serious historical material to deal with, the authors keep it light and give everyone a happy ending. The good guys – or good people – win in this one.

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