Review of A Study in Drowning, by Ava Reid

Audiobooks, Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid
read by Saskia Maarleveld

HarperTeen, 2023. 10 hours, 32 minutes.
Review written May 13, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

This is another eaudiobook I checked out because it was very popular at Fairfax County Library — and one of the best results of that curiosity. I loved the heroine, Effy Sayre, a first-year university student in another world somewhat like ours in the 1950s or so. Effy was put into the school of Architecture even though her scores were high enough for the school of Literature, and literature is where her heart is — because no woman has ever been admitted to the school of Literature.

But when a chance comes from the estate of her favorite author Emrys Myrddin to redesign his family’s home, Effy jumps at the chance, and to her surprise, wins the competition. Effy loves Myrddin’s work so much, she can quote from all of his books, but especially his masterpiece, Angharad. The book is about a girl who loves the Fairy King and is taken as his wife, but who gradually realizes his cruelty — and is his undoing.

The book means a lot to Effy because all her life, she’s been plagued by visions of the Fairy King. Her mother never believed her and took her to a doctor who prescribed pink pills to make the visions go away. But Effy clung to the story of a girl who also saw the Fairy King and ended up triumphing over him.

But when she arrives to the far south coast of the country, things are not at all as she expected. The house she’s supposed to remodel is falling apart with decay, and the nearby sea is finding its way in. She’s greeted by Myrddin’s son, who has some very strange moments, and she never sees the author’s wife. And she begins seeing the Fairy King even when she’s taken her pills.

It turns out there’s a literature student also working at Myrddin’s estate, trying to access his letters and papers to write a scholarly paper about him. He’s pompous and stuffy. But when Effy learns he’s not even sure Emrys Myrddin actually wrote the Angharad, that seems a bridge too far.

But… things happen. This book continues on with a bit of a mystery and a big climactic scene full of danger. Ava Reid did an amazing job with the atmosphere of this book. The house is so decayed, so remote, so sinister, so close to the angry sea, and you get the feeling that the Fairy King might be real. And if so, he’s dangerous.

I do feel like I should mention when a novel for Teens has a sex scene. This has one, with a little bit of description. I did think the romance was beautifully done, with kindness and gentleness toward someone who’d formerly been abused.

Now, there were what felt to me like some big coincidences that allowed them to find crucial documents. And I can’t really believe that papers could have managed to stay intact in a metal box underwater. But those are quibbles. Overall, this wonderful book had me enthralled throughout and wanting to find more rote tasks to do so I could keep on listening. A truly wonderful book about a girl whose salvation has always been books — learning to stand up for herself in real life, despite all those who want to use her.

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

Version 1.0.0
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin
read by Jennifer Kim and Julian Cihi

Random House Audio, 2022. 13 hours and 52 minutes.
Review written May 3, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

I’m behind everybody else on reading novels for adults, but not being on an award committee right now, I’m trying to catch up on some of the titles that are popular at Fairfax County Public Library. (I can see how long the Holds lists are.)

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the story of Sadie and Sam, both video game designers who treat their work as art. The book covers decades of their lives, as their friendship – and their art – evolves and changes over time.

They first met when they were kids. Sadie’s sister was in the hospital with cancer, and Sam was in the hospital having his foot put back together after a devastating car accident. They used to play video games together for hours. Sam’s parents were excited because Sadie was the first person Sam had talked to after the accident, and he’d been in the hospital for weeks.

But the book doesn’t start there. It begins when Sam and Sadie spot each other at a subway station in Boston, where Sadie is attending M.I.T. and Sam is at Harvard. Sam hadn’t spoken to Sadie in years – and we find out their history as back story.

Eventually, Sam and Sadie make a video game together and go into business together. And this book is far more interesting than that summary sounds.

There were times when I didn’t like the characters and thought about quitting reading the book, but was just a little too invested. Then later, I was mad at the author because I thought she’d completely cheated to resolve a love triangle.

But it turned out that wasn’t what was happening, and the event I thought was a cheat led to some innovative storytelling as the book went on and the characters were dealing with some tough things.

In a lot of ways, this author was like the characters: Trying to tell a story in innovative and creative ways, going beyond entertainment into art. I think she succeeds.

gabriellezevin.com

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Review of Threads That Bind, by Kika Hatzopoulou

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Threads That Bind

by Kika Hatzopoulou
read by Mia Hutchinson-Shaw

Listening Library, 2023. 12 hours.
Review written February 20, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
2023 CYBILS Award Winner, Young Adult Speculative Fiction

This year I was Category Chair for the CYBILS Awards Young Adult Speculative Fiction category, but because I was reading for the Morris Award, I didn’t get to take part as a judge or panelist. So I’m making up for lost time and reading the great books they picked.

Threads That Bind is a distinctive fantasy. It’s set in a world after an apocalypse with separate city-states divided by barren wastelands in between. In the city of Silts, where tides regularly flood, Io has grown up with her two sisters, all of them descendants of the Fates, the Mira. Like all Otherborn, the Miraborn have inherited powers. All three can see people’s life threads, the connections between people and the things or people they love, including life itself. The oldest can weave the threads, the next can draw the threads, and the third, Io in this family, can cut the threads.

As the book opens, Io is doing work as a private investigator, afraid she’ll have to report that her client’s husband is indeed having an affair, and she can see by the strong thread between him and his lover that they are in love. But then a person shows up and attacks and kills him. This person is alive, but shouldn’t be alive — because she has only one thread, her life thread, and it’s been cut.

But someone shows up at the crime scene — and it’s the person Io’s been avoiding — the boy she shares a Fate thread with, before she’d even met him. His name’s Edei, and he works for the Mob Queen who rules their city. The Mob Queen orders Io to investigate this wraith, because it’s not the first one to show up in the Silts. Who is making this happen, and how are they choosing their victims, while talking about justice?

What follows is a long and somewhat convoluted investigation, trying to find out who’s behind it all and what they are plotting. Io must talk with many different Otherborn and dig around lots of people with power — including the new mayoral candidate — and her oldest sister, who abandoned them years before.

Like I said, the plot seemed a little convoluted to me — but the problem may have been that I didn’t listen closely enough. The magic system is intriguing, but I had to not look at the details too closely. (If Miraborn always come in sets of three, why are they not triplets? What happens if the third is never born? And why are all the threads not hopelessly tangled up?) I also didn’t completely understand all the motivations revealed at the end, having to do with the Gang War many years ago.

But all the same, it’s a great story also looking at questions of emotional abuse, justice, and violence. Although the book does solve the mysteries presented, there’s an overarching story that isn’t finished yet. I just checked and see that Book Two, Hearts That Cut, is coming out in June, and I’ve already ordered copies for the library.

kikahatzopoulou.com
penguinteen.com

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Review of Dragonfruit, by Makiia Lucier

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Version 1.0.0
Dragonfruit

by Makiia Lucier
read by Mapuana Makia

Clarion Books, 2024. 8 hours, 12 minutes.
Review written April 29, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Makiia Lucier is a relatively new fantasy author I’m watching closely. I read her second book when I was on the Newbery committee, but it was for young adults, so I took note but I had to keep quiet about books I was reading at that time. Then later her book Year of the Reaper was a Cybils Finalist, and I was impressed with the way it handled a population traumatized by plague and war. I snapped up this new book, and got something completely different – a fantasy set in a tropical island world.

This story features 18-year-old Hanalei, whose father fled with her from the island of Tamarind ten years ago, and 19-year-old Samahtitamahenele, Sam, the prince of Tamarind. But the crown passes only to women, Sam’s grandmother is getting old, and his mother has been in a coma for ten years. So Sam needs to find a wife. But more than that, Sam is searching for Dragonfruit – the eggs of a sea dragon. The eggs of a sea dragon, dragonfruit, are said to have the power to undo a person’s greatest sorrow. But with that hope comes a warning: Every wish demands a price.

Ten years ago, Hanalei had been a page at court, and she had eaten the same poison that still keeps Sam’s mother asleep. When dragonfruit was found, her father stole it and fed it to Hana instead of leaving it for the princess. And then fled the queendom with Hana. Hana did recover, but a few days later, her father died. She’s had a hard life since then, working in the factories that process the valuable body parts of sea dragons until she was fourteen, when her hands got too big. Since that time, Hana has been studying sea dragons, sending information to the academy on the largest island.

But as the book opens, Hana warns a set of dragons so they can escape the dragoners ready to kill them. Two of the dragons escape, but Hanalei doesn’t. However, they all see by the color of the frill that this dragon is pregnant, soon to lay eggs.

Further adventures bring her back to Tamaraind. Now Sam, too, is looking for the Dragonfruit, to at last wake his mother. But so is the ruthless dragoner. And what will the price of the wish be?

The setting of this book is delightful. Some additional magic of their island is many of the teens on the island develop magical tattoos of an animal. That animal can move around on their skin and even materialize off their skin in the real world, a companion who communicates with them and is always close at hand.

There’s a gentle romance in this book – indeed, I expected more drama than I got – and no sex at all, so it feels completely appropriate for younger teens, too. Hana and Sam are almost adults and it is a coming of age book, so older teens are the main audience. The book ended at a good place, but I can’t help hoping more stories are coming about this lovely island world, the sea dragons, and these two characters coming into their own.

makiialucier.com
EpicReads.com

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Review of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride

Audiobooks, Fiction Review, Historical 0

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

by James McBride
read by Dominic Hoffman

Books on Tape, 2023. 12 hours, 22 minutes.
Review written April 13, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a sweeping historical novel about the 1930s Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, outside Philadelphia, where immigrant Jews from all over Europe and African Americans from the South were trying to live a good life — despite the annual parade where prominent white members of the town council marched in their KKK regalia.

The main focus of the book is Chona Ludlow, who lives above the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store with her husband Moshe, who runs a theater, and found business got better when he brought in Black performers. Chona grew up in Pottstown, with a limp from polio, and Moshe fell for her when he began working in her father’s store.

There are lots more characters, and each one is introduced with a rambling tale of their back story and how they relate to the other characters we’ve met. I didn’t approach this literary novel the right way — taking an unplanned break from it for three days when I went with a group of friends to see the total solar eclipse. It was already hard to keep the various characters straight, and that about did me in.

But as I was thinking about quitting in the middle, I read the audiobook description and was reminded that the book began with a dead body found forty years later in an old well. And it sounded like things were heating up about the deaf Black boy that Chona was helping keep hidden from the authorities, who wanted to put him in an institution.

So I was glad I finished. The various plot lines and various characters all came together at the end of the book, forming a kind of heist novel — trying to rescue the deaf Black boy.

Read or listen to this when you’re in the mood for a literary novel, and don’t pause for three days in the middle — and I’m sure you’ll find it’s well-crafted. I did listen to the beginning all over again when I was done to more fully appreciate how the author brought things full circle and explained everything they’d found with the body in the well.

jamesmcbride.com

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Review of Stand Up, Yumi Chung! by Jessica Kim, narrated by Greta Jung

Audiobooks, Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary 0

Stand Up, Yumi Chung!

by Jessica Kim
narrated by Greta Jung

Penguin Random House Audio, 2020. 6 hours, 57 minutes.
Review written July 4, 2020, from a library eaudiobook

Yumi Chung hoped to spend her summer working on her comedy routines, studying her favorite YouTube star, Jasmine Jasper’s directions. Instead, her parents’ Korean Barbecue restaurant is struggling, and they want Yumi to win a scholarship to stay at her private school, even though Yumi isn’t happy there. So they sign Yumi up for an intensive study class and tell her to go straight to the library after class.

But a new comedy club has opened up across the library parking lot. When Yumi peeks inside, she sees Jasmine Jasper herself! And she’s leading a summer camp to train kid comedians – and thinks that Yumi is the missing Kay Nakamura who didn’t show up the first day.

What’s a girl to do? If Yumi goes along with it, she gets to learn about comedy in person with her hero. She also makes new friends at the camp. But are they really friends if you don’t tell them your real name?

Yes, things do fall apart for Yumi before the end of the book. A strength of the book was how she dealt with it and her relationships. I thought the original coincidence – that Yumi’s YouTube hero would show up in person and be running a camp – was way too big for my personal suspension of disbelief. But I did like the characters and that Yumi’s parents, while being overly pushy immigrant parents, did show more depth when Yumi took the time to talk with them.

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Source: This review is based on an eaudiobook from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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*Note* To try to catch up on posting reviews, I’m posting the oldest reviews I’ve written on my blog without making a page on my main website. They’re still good books.

Review of The Reappearance of Rachel Price, by Holly Jackson

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Reappearance of Rachel Price

by Holly Jackson
read by Sophie Amoss

Listening Library, 2024. 16 hours, 34 minutes.
Review written April 22, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.

The Reappearance of Rachel Price is by the author of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, so I knew to expect a thriller where you couldn’t count on police to do the right thing and there’s going to be scary danger by the end.

The book begins with Bel Price being interviewed for a documentary about her 16-years-missing mother, Rachel Price. In the context of the documentary, we learn that Rachel Price disappeared twice, first in a mall when she vanished from the cameras with Bel (who was then two years old), and second from a car off the side of a road, where baby Bel was found in the back seat, with the door closed and the heater running, but Rachel completely gone.

Bel’s father Charlie went on trial for Rachel’s murder, but he had an alibi and was acquitted. Now Bel relies on him as the only person who will never leave her.

But then, as they’re filming a reenactment of the event, Rachel Price returns. She says she’s been held in a basement all that time and the guy finally let her go.

But things aren’t as Bel dreamed they would be when her mother came back. And her mother doesn’t tell her story the same way each time. What if Rachel Price is lying? But why would she lie? And what actually happened to her? And why won’t she leave Bel alone so she can get back to her normal life?

To me, this book dragged a bit in the middle. I wasn’t completely tracking with Bel’s suspicions. I was also taken out of the story by the time they played a video of two-year-old Bel, because she was babbling like a not-quite-one-year-old, only able to say “Mama,” which isn’t consistent with a two-year-old at all.

However, as usual with a Holly Jackson book, by the time we started finding out what actually happened, it didn’t drag a bit. In fact, I turned on the audiobook as I was working on a jigsaw puzzle and when the audiobook finished, it was fully two hours later than I’d thought it was.

Holly Jackson doesn’t go for realism, but she does go for pulled from outrageous headlines, and she did surprise but satisfy me with the outcome of this twisty thriller.

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Review of Dial A for Aunties, by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review 0

Version 1.0.0
Dial A for Aunties

by Jesse Q. Sutanto
read by Risa Mei

Penguin Audio, 2021. 10 hours, 22 minutes.
Review written April 16, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.

I checked out this audiobook because of how much I enjoyed the author’s book Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers. This one, too, had a lot of madcap fun.

Dial A for Aunties answers the question, at least for one Chinese Indonesian American twenty-something young woman, “Who would you call if you have to dispose of a dead body?”

Since graduating from college and breaking up with the love of her life so that she wouldn’t hold him back, photographer Meddelin Chan has been working in her family’s wedding business. Her mother and her mother’s three sisters provide flowers, make-up, cake, and entertainment, especially at big Chinese or Indonesian weddings.

The night before one of their biggest events ever, Meddelin goes on a blind date that her mother set up for her by posing as Meddy on an online dating site — and completely missing the sexual innuendoes of what the guy was going to expect. When the date goes south, Meddy pulls out her taser — but causes an accident.

She comes to in a deserted area of Los Angeles with a dead cellphone and nobody coming by. The guy appears to be dead. What’s a girl to do? She ends up putting the body in her trunk. (Not necessarily thinking clearly, but hey, extenuating circumstances.) She calls her mother, who calls in the Aunties. They all rally together to figure out what to do.

But the next day they’ll be leaving early for the wedding at a resort on an island off the coast. They don’t want the body to stink, so it needs to go in Big Aunt’s cooler, because she’s the one who has enough room.

But in the morning, the very helpful assistant brings all the coolers to the island. So now there’s a body in one of their coolers at the island wedding, and they need to get rid of it with no one noticing and hundreds of people coming and going.

Oh and then? Turns out the love of Meddy’s life (Remember him?) is the new owner of the resort. This is his first big wedding and it needs to go well.

Madcap hilarity ensues. This author was definitely not going for realism. However, since every coincidence serves to make things worse, the reader buys it, because what can go wrong will go wrong, right? It’s pretty much over-the-top silliness, but it adds up to a whole lot of fun. The bickering Aunties are wonderful in what they will do for Meddy — even if their ideas don’t always work out in the best ways.

jesseqsutantoauthor.com

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Review of Accountable, by Dashka Slater, read by Ariel Blake

Audiobooks, Current Issues, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction, True Stories 0

Version 1.0.0
Accountable

The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed

by Dashka Slater
read by Ariel Blake

Macmillan Young Listeners, 2023. 9 hours, 12 minutes.
Review written April 18, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
2024 Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction Award Winner
2024 Capitol Choices Selection
Starred Review

I did not enjoy listening to this audiobook. But it completely deserves the recognition it’s won. This book is on an important and timely topic, and it is thoroughly researched and presented clearly and in great detail, with lots of nuance and with respect for the people involved. It gets you in the heads of all the kids, not simply the ones on one side of the issue, and you fully appreciate how complicated and complex the matter is.

The subtitle explains what’s in this book. A high school kid in a small California bay area town made a private Instagram account and invited thirteen of his friends to follow it. He posted “edgy” memes trying to get approval from those friends — and they got more and more racist, targeting mostly Black girls who attended their high school. The images progressed to pictures of nooses and other horribly racist content.

When the targets found out, it started a big scandal. But staff and administration didn’t really know how to handle it. Should those who followed the account but never commented receive consequences, too? The whole high school community got involved and the account followers — not only the account owner — were shamed and threatened. Eventually even the courts got involved – mostly as to whether the schools had violated their students’ first amendment rights in their response to the account followers.

But every single kid on either side of the event had their life disrupted by it. The girls who were targeted had visceral reactions, from not feeling safe at school to having nightmares and going into deep depression. But the perpetrators, no matter how remorseful they felt, seemingly had no possible way to live it down and get past it, so their lives, too, were dramatically affected.

But shouldn’t their lives have been affected? I like the author’s choice of title, because that’s the question: In what ways should 16-year-old kids be held accountable for terrible things they did when they didn’t fully understand how terrible they were? And what is the appropriate way to make them understand? And how can we bring healing to those who were harmed?

Before I listened to this audiobook, I didn’t begin to understand how difficult and complex answering those questions can be.

This book is a resource for administrators and teachers everywhere in the age of social media. But I’m especially glad that it’s written for teens and targeted to teens, because it’s also a cautionary tale and will surely save at least some kids from making similar mistakes.

dashkaslater.com

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting, by Sophie Irwin

Audiobooks, Fiction Review, Historical 0

A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting

by Sophie Irwin
read by Eleanor Tomlinson

Penguin Audio, 2022. 9 hours, 40 minutes.
Review written April 4, 2024, from a library eaudiobook
Starred Review

As A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting opens, Kitty Talbot is getting jilted by the man she’s been engaged to for two years. She should have never put it off after her mother died, because now her father is dead, too, and his debts will come due in a few months, and Kitty has four younger sisters to care for. How can a young woman in Regency England pay off exorbitant debts and pay for expenses of four younger sisters? Becoming a governess or a lady’s maid would never pay enough. No, Kitty must find a man in possession of a large fortune to marry. Her former fiance was the only local prospect, so to London she must go.

Now, in Jane Austen’s novels, the fortune-hunting girls were more the villains, with a sympathetic exception of pity for Charlotte Lucas. So it took me about an hour into this audiobook to have sympathy for Kitty. But when she makes a spirited defense of her plans, saying that men could go off to war to find their fortune, is husband hunting any worse? — then she started to win me over. It didn’t take much longer of seeing her resourcefulness and determination to be fully on her side. Though I was pretty sure things wouldn’t turn out quite as she expected at the start.

Kitty goes to London with one of her younger sisters, and tries to get introductions to the men who will have enough money to meet those debts. Although Kitty’s father was a gentleman, her mother was, well, a courtesan. They find a chaperone and a place to stay with one of her mother’s former coworkers, who is posing as a widow and person of quality. Now Kitty must meet young gentlemen of sufficient income and not only win them over, but also win their mothers over.

And her plans go so well at first! Not only does she win the affections of a wealthy second son, she even endears herself to his mother. But when his older brother, Lord Radcliffe, comes to investigate, this brother does a little research and quickly warns her off, if she doesn’t want the entire London social scene to know about her background.

Well, that might have been the end for any other girl. Here’s where Kitty thoroughly won me over, because she doesn’t roll over and go away. She negotiates. Sure, she’ll leave his brother alone, but at the price of some help with her fortune-hunting.

It wasn’t hard to guess where this story was going, but how it got there was absolutely delightful.

The characters in this book are what make it so wonderful. Sure, Kitty’s mercenary, but we soon see it’s all for the sake of her sisters. And her cleverness and determination shine through. It’s a fun new perspective on Jane Austen’s world, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

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