Review of Kill Her Twice, by Stacey Lee

Historical, Mystery, Teen Fiction Review 0

Kill Her Twice

by Stacey Lee

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2024. 393 pages.
Review written May 29, 2024, from a library book.

Kill Her Twice is a murder mystery set in 1932 Los Angeles Chinatown as the powers that be are contemplating knocking down all the homes and businesses in Chinatown to make room for a Union station.

The perspective alternates between two main characters, sisters Gemma and May, who are keeping their family’s florist business open while their father is in an asylum being treated for tuberculosis. One morning Gemma and May find the body of May’s friend Lily Wong in a lot where they stopped to prepare their flowers for the market. Lily had been the first Chinese American movie star, and all of Chinatown was proud of her. In the past, she’d always been cast as the villain, but was now working on a film where she was the romantic star.

When the police arrest a kind but eccentric old man for the murder, the girls are sure they are just trying to pin it on someone Chinese to get the murder “solved” – and give one more excuse to level Chinatown. So the sisters take on the job of trying to solve the murder themselves.

Now, I thought the mystery unfolded rather slowly, and I was skeptical of some of the ideas Gemma had for unearthing clues, but I did enjoy the time with these young ladies. Their personalities are distinctly different, but both are likable, and reading even a slow-moving book was fun once I started enjoying their company.

I also enjoyed the look at 1930s Los Angeles. I spent a few years living in downtown Los Angeles in the 1980s, and didn’t recognize much. In fact, I thought I might have caught the author in a couple of errors, but looked them up and it turns out at that time, LA may have been exactly as she described it.

I also enjoyed how she pointed out that public perception of Chinese Americans could be translated into policy which would then affect thousands of lives. “Kill her twice” refers to Lily Wong’s first death followed by her reputation being destroyed in the press so that officials could justify tearing down Chinatown to make room for the railroads.

If you’re in the mood for a leisurely and atmospheric historical mystery, this book will fill the bill.

StaceyHLee.com
PenguinTeen.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 Between Perfect and Real, by Ray Stoeve

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Between Perfect and Real

by Ray Stoeve
read by MW Cartozian Wilson

Recorded Books, 2021. 7 hours, 24 minutes.
Review written from a library eaudiobook
Starred Review

Between Perfect and Real gives us the coming-out journey of Dean Foster, who has recently figured out he’s a transgender guy, but doesn’t quite know how to tell people. His classmates and even his girlfriend think he’s a lesbian, and coming out as a lesbian to his mother was hard enough.

But then the drama teacher casts Dean as Romeo in their school production of Romeo and Juliet, thinking to play it as a lesbian romance. But Dean quickly discovers he wants to play Romeo as a guy — which means coming out.

The journey isn’t easy. Some people are supportive, some are hostile, and some are “trying.” This audiobook takes us with Dean on that journey, with all the ups and downs.

I had recently read another young adult book where a senior in high school had their heart set on getting into Tish, the drama program at NYU, so that sounded almost too familiar. However, once the book got going, it was a very different story, and a story I wanted to hear, a story told with compassion, helping the listener understand a little better how it feels to be transgender.

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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 Hedgewitch of Foxhall, by Anna Bright

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Hedgewitch of Foxhall

by Anna Bright
read by Fiona Hardingham, Alister Austin, and James Meunier

HarperTeen, 2024. 12 hours.
Review written May 29, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

This is another eaudiobook I chose because it is wildly popular with our library customers. And this time, I struck pure gold! I loved this book with all my heart.

Now, as any time where the narrators have gorgeous British accents, listening to these readers made me love it all the more. But the tale itself has everything I love in a fantasy novel — characters who defy expectations and live by their own rules, magic that is easy to understand and makes sense, a plot that gets you wondering how they’ll make it through but ties up brilliantly, and of course some romance. [In this case, plenty of romance but no sex between the characters. Nowadays, I like to let people know.]

This book is set in medieval Wales, and the Author’s note reveals that she took pains to be true to what we know of that history. Our title character is Ffion. She’s a hedgewitch, not affiliated with the giant coven in Foxhall her mother and sisters are part of — a coven that charges for people even to wait in line to request help. Ffion does small magic for people who can’t afford their prices. But much worse is that the coven doesn’t care what price they take from the land to work their magic — and Ffion’s fox familiar is caught up and killed in a fire of their making. Ffion is determined to do a summoning spell to bring him back — but she will have to do it before the new moon, when his spirit will depart for good.

There are two more viewpoint characters in this book. They are the princes Dafydd and Taliesin. They are being set against each other by their father the king. The court magician — before losing his magic altogether — prophesied the death of the king at the New Moon. Everyone’s sure it has to do with fighting the encroaching Mercians and their king, King Offa. So the king sets the princes on a task of destroying the dyke King Offa has built at the border of Wales. They believe this dyke is what has leached the magic from Wales and caused sightings of magical creatures to stop.

Taliesin goes to the coven at Foxhall to get help to destroy the dyke with magic, and gets no help from them — but does recruit Ffion to his cause. Instead of using the land to give her power, Ffion gains power from her work, and she plans to walk the entire length of the dyke to gain the power to bring it down — and gain the power to summon her fox while she is doing that. But also in their travels, they realize they will need to gain the use of three magical objects important to Wales — but it will take some work to convince the current possessors of those objects to relinquish them.

Tal’s competition is his older brother Dafydd, who has long said he doesn’t want to be king. Instead of spending time in court, he works as a blacksmith, where he feels he can do unambiguous good. But their father wants Dafydd to follow after him, and as it happens, he’s been having visions of Ffion for years – to be his court magician when he is king.

Something I love about this book is that I loved all the characters and honestly wasn’t sure who I wanted to win the kingdom or who I wanted to end up with Ffion. Both princes have their own strengths and weaknesses, and since both were viewpoint characters, they each had my sympathy as the reader.

And so most of the book is traveling through Wales, ultimately trying to bring back Welsh magic. With plenty of obstacles and interactions, adding up to a marvelous tale.

And I’m super excited to find another stellar author! I found another of her books already available as an eaudiobook, so expect to hear more.

annabrightbooks.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 The Assassin’s Blade, by Sarah J. Maas

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Assassin’s Blade

by Sarah J. Maas
read by Elizabeth Evans

Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. 12 hours, 52 minutes.
Review written April 25, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.

I select youth and children’s materials for a large public library system, and by far the most popular author of all the books I purchase is Sarah J. Maas. All of her books consistently have long waiting lists. Since I love fantasy novels, I decided to see what the fuss was about. Now, it’s not clear that I picked the correct order. It turns out that this book I picked up was written as a prequel – so the events happen before the first book written. Anyway, Overdrive had it listed as number one in the series, so this is the one I’ve started with.

It turns out that The Assassin’s Blade is a collection of five novellas, all of them about Celaena Sardothien, at sixteen years old her kingdom’s most notorious assassin. I enjoyed the fact that each part was a contained story. Each novella had a sort of heist scene. Each novella has a complete storyline and a satisfying resolution (or, well, at least a resolution). Each novella happened directly after the one before, but I liked the way the action moved into each story as its own entity.

And the stories were compelling. Each one had a big challenge for Celaena. I definitely did not like the way it all ended, though I’m sure if I had read the books in publication order, I would have known where Celaena would end up. She’s a character worth following – forced to train as an assassin, she became the best. But when the king of the assassins wants her to facilitate a deal with pirates to get into the slave trade, she decides to free the slaves.

I got the flavor of a brutal world, with a ruthless king who has banished magic from the kingdom, but assassins and pirates and crime lords all doing their own thing. Celaena finds love in these stories and dreams of leaving the assassin’s guild and the continent altogether. The fantasy world where she lives is dark and sinister – but I enjoyed Celaena’s character, learning to shine in a difficult world.

I wasn’t completely hooked on this world, but I was hooked enough to put the next (first?) book on hold.

sarahjmaas.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 Wide Awake, by David Levithan

Contemporary, Teen Fiction Review 0

Wide Awake

by David Levithan

Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. 221 pages.
Review written May 9, 2024, from a library book.

Notice the copyright date on this book of 2006. I checked out this book because I got to hear an author talk by David Levithan with him talking about his new book, Wide Awake Now. He described it as an update of this one — which he’d written in 2004, when George W. Bush defeated John Kerry for a second term.

This book features Duncan, a gay high school student who’s not old enough to vote, but involved in volunteering for a presidential candidate in a near future election. As the book opens, this candidate has just been elected as the first gay Jewish president of the United States. But there’s a problem. Though he won the popular vote, he only won the electoral college vote by one state, and the governor of Kansas has announced that he’s doing a recount. As the recount happens, he’s finding reasons to throw out votes. President-Elect Stein calls on his followers to come to Kansas in protest, and this book is about that road trip. Duncan’s boyfriend is on the trip, as are other campaign volunteers they’re already friends with, and more people they meet along the way. We get lots of Stein speeches about building community and caring for others and more great things.

Something I loved about the book was that a big part of Stein’s support came from people who were part of “the Jesus Revolution” – a group all about really living Jesus’s teachings of love and caring for the poor. How I wish he’d gotten that part of the future right! The opposition party call themselves the “Decents” and are against gay marriage and saying many of the same things Christians are known for saying today (sadly), but I was pleased to see at least one large group of Christians in this imagined future were firmly about actually following Jesus’s teachings.

Some omissions were interesting. Although he said these teens had been born “decades” after 9/11, there had never been a Black president, and gay marriage was not legal. That this wasn’t even imagined happening in 2006 was interesting to me.

I was actually a little disturbed by a presidential candidate on the “good” side calling for his followers to protest about election results. To be fair, he won the popular vote and had already been declared the winner of the election. They were protesting the recount that the Kansas governor was trying to manipulate. Protesting that the results must stand. There was also no violence, and they didn’t break into any government building or threaten any government officials. So it wasn’t really obstruction of an official proceeding.

But speaking after January 6th, which forever changed my perspective, I don’t like the idea at all of determining official election results because of a protest. Because as we all know, no matter what the outcome — even losing by six states instead of one — any candidate can work their followers into a frenzy demanding that results be changed. And that’s just not how I want these things to be determined. By all means, put scrutiny on anything the governor in question may have done to change the results, but ultimately, I really do think we need to be able to trust the courts to determine legality and illegality.

All that said, it was a fascinating look at someone twenty years ago projecting what politics might be like around this time. Of course, someone like Trump wasn’t imagined at all. It’s also a good story – with interactions between Duncan and his boyfriend and parents and friends and teachers. And does paint a picture of a bright future. I’m definitely going to read the more recently written follow-up and hope the author has not gotten more cynical.

davidlevithan.com
randomhouse.com/teens

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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 Indivisible, by Daniel Aleman

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Indivisible

by Daniel Aleman
narrated by Adan Rocha

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2021. 8 hours, 35 minutes.
Review written November 2, 2021, from a library book
Starred Review

This audiobook tells the story of Mateo Garcia, who’s a junior in high school in Brooklyn and wants to get involved in theater like his friend Adam. His parents came to America from Mexico before he was born. Then his whole life gets turned upside down when his parents get detained by ICE. Suddenly the things he used to be concerned about fade into insignificance.

Mateo doesn’t want to tell his friends at first, but big secrets like that take a toll. And meanwhile, he needs to take care of his 7-year-old sister Sophie and help at the store his parents spent years establishing. Mateo and Sophie hope against hope that things will work out, but have to figure out several new setbacks. They just want their family to be together again.

This novel has lots of heart, mixing regular high school concerns like romance and friends with fundamental concerns about housing and family.

Listening to the audiobook did pull me into this story, rooting for Mateo and his family, and frustrated about the situation so many have been thrust into, when they just want to make a home for their family.

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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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*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 Sheine Lende, by Darcie Little Badger

Audiobooks, Paranormal, Teen Fiction Review 0

Sheine Lende

by Darcie Little Badger
read by Kinsale Drake
illustrations (in the print book) by Rovina Cai

Recorded Books, 2024. 13 hours, 47 minutes.
Review written May 20, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

I was so excited when I heard there was a prequel to Elatsoe coming out! Obviously, you don’t have to read them in any order. The events in this book happen first, but Elatsoe was written first. Reading Sheine Lende definitely made me want to reread Elatsoe, which was a Sonderbooks Stand-out and CYBILS Award Winner in 2020.

Like Elatsoe, Sheine Lende is set in a world just like ours – except that magic is a normal part of life. Different people have different kinds of magic available to them, and humans have contact with people from other realms, such as fairies.

Sheine Lende features Elatsoe’s grandmother Shane when she was a teen. Like Ellie, Shane has a ghost dog companion — well, it’s really her mother’s companion. Shane’s mother Lorenza has a pack of three hounds who are trained to track down missing persons. One of those hounds, Nellie, happens to be dead.

But when Lorenza goes missing herself when searching for two missing children, Nellie comes back to Shane, distraught. When Shane tries to take up the search again, she gets transported hundreds of miles away — and finds one of the children. But obviously, magical transport is involved and who knows where Lorenza and the little boy were sent? This was when humans were beginning to use transport by fairy rings. Going on the rescue ends up taking Shane on an epic journey. Also like Elatsoe, Shane gets an opportunity to use her powers to right an injustice against her people, the Lipan Apache.

Again like Elatsoe, this is a beautiful and uplifting book with characters it’s a delight to spend time with. I like the way Shane sees and cares for animals (Even insects! And mammoths!) and her little brother and people who are lost — basically anyone who needs help.

darcielittlebadger.com
levinequerido.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 Excuse Me While I Ugly Cry, by Joya Goffney

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Romance, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Excuse Me While I Ugly Cry

by Joya Goffney
read by Jordan Cobb

HarperAudio, 2021. 9 hours, 39 minutes.
Review written October 25, 2021, from a library eaudiobook
Starred Review

Excuse Me While I Ugly Cry is a teen romance with a lot of depth. Quinn is a senior in high school and one of the few Black girls at her private school. She pours out her private thoughts in her list journal. But one day, she accidentally picks up the journal of that cute guy in her study group instead of her own.

She works to fix the switch, but he’s lost her journal. Or so he says. Then someone anonymously starts blackmailing Quinn. If she doesn’t complete the items in her list to do before the end of high school, the blackmailer will start posting embarrassing pages from her journal on the internet – beginning with the revelation that she didn’t actually get into Columbia.

Quinn’s parents met at Columbia, and they’ve been planning on her going there since she was born, so Quinn didn’t manage to tell them she didn’t get accepted. She even forged an acceptance letter – and then they made the news known far and wide. Part of her list was to tell them the truth, but Quinn isn’t sure she can ever do that. Another item is to tell the guy she’s had a crush on for years how she feels – though that may be changing. Yet another is going to visit her grandmother, who’s in a nursing home with dementia. Quinn’s afraid she won’t even recognize her.

So she begins by tackling an easier item – visiting the two colleges where she did get accepted. And Carter, the cute guy who lost her journal, is willing to come along and help. Maybe he isn’t the blackmailer after all – though Quinn still isn’t sure she can trust him.

As Quinn works through all of this, she makes some new friends and gains some new experiences. And she does some things she was afraid of doing.

It all adds up to a fun read about a teen who made some mistakes, but is trying to pull herself out of them.

The only thing I didn’t like is that Quinn’s use of the list journal is seen as a bad habit. She wrote in the journal so she wouldn’t have to open up to actual people. I don’t think that’s the way it works. Journaling is good for you! And I think that opening up to a journal makes it easier to open up to actual people rather than harder. I think you’d be a lot less apt to stuff your emotions. So I hope she won’t give it up forever.

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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.

What did you think of this book?

*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 A Tempest of Tea, by Hafsah Faizal, read by Maya Saroya

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Teen Fiction Review 0

A Tempest of Tea

by Hafsah Faizal
read by Maya Saroya

Macmillan Young Listeners, 2024. 11 hours, 2 minutes.
Review written May 8, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.

I put this audiobook on hold because it’s wildly popular with our own public library customers. A Tempest of Tea is a heist novel with vampires.

By day, Arthie Casimir runs an upscale teahouse in the bad part of the capital city. By night, secret panels come open, and it transforms into a bloodhouse serving vampires, so they can sate their thirst with folks willing to be paid for the privilege, or with special coconut-mixed blood drinks. The bloodhouse is illegal, but Arthie has paid informants to warn her before raids so she can put the bloodhouse gear back into hiding.

Arthie’s an immigrant to the kingdom. When she was a child, colonizers killed her parents and took their land. Later on, she teamed up with another young orphan named Jin, and she figured out how to pull a magical pistol from stone and win the respect of the city. (Between her name and pulling the weapon from stone, I expected Arthurian overtones, but didn’t really find any more than that.) Together, she and Jin built up their teahouse and peddle tea and secrets.

But as the story opens, Arthie learns that the future of her teahouse is threatened. A mysterious figure comes and tells her she can save it if she will help him steal some compromising material about the king of the empire — housed in a citadel kept by elite vampires that is opened once a year for an exclusive charity auction.

So that’s the heist novel part. Arthie and Jin assemble a team and lay plans to pull off the heist. Of course things don’t go completely according to plan….

I wasn’t the best audience for this book, because although I do enjoy heist novels, I’m not a big vampire novel fan, and am also not a big fan of blackmailers and others consistently slipping under the law. They gave Arthie strong reasons for her contempt of people in authority, and I was won over to be on her side. My other problem, though, was that the plot was fairly complex and there was a pretty big cast of characters with the perspective switching frequently. I listen to audiobooks while I’m doing other things (makes housework so much more pleasant!), but I think maybe I missed some crucial details and wasn’t following along all that well in the middle. All the same, I wasn’t going to stop listening. And there is an annoying cliffhanger ending, and I think I will be compelled to find out how things turn out. (It’s said to be a duology, so yay, this is the only suspense required.) One of the most delightful things about this audiobook was at the end, they give us a conversation between the author and her husband about the book, which is truly delightful.

If you do like vampire novels or heist novels, and don’t mind a little not-quite-legal dealings from characters who have good reason to be upset with the authorities – then give this book a try!

hafsahfaizal.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 Nigeria Jones, by Ibi Zoboi

Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Nigeria Jones

by Ibi Zoboi
read by Marcella Cox

Balzer + Bray, 2023. 9 hours, 50 minutes.
Review written March 22, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
2024 Coretta Scott King Author Award Winner
Starred Review

I wanted to read this book from the minute the publisher sent me an advance reader copy last year. But I was on the Morris Award Committee, so I wasn’t able to fit in very many books that weren’t debut books. When it won the Coretta Scott King Author Award, I was reminded I’d been meaning to read it and got it in my eaudiobooks queue.

Nigeria Jones is a 16-year-old girl who’s been brought up in her father’s Black Liberation Movement. The book opens on July 4th, her baby brother Freedom’s first birthday, and the movement is having a gratitude celebration marking the one-year anniversary that Freedom Sankofa Jones chose them as his family.

Nigeria loves her baby brother, but she wonders if Mama will come to Freedom’s celebration. She left them a year ago, but Nigeria keeps getting glimpses of her. And the movement and life in the Village House has not been the same since Mama left.

When Nigeria learns that her Mama had made plans and filled out an application for Nigeria to attend a private school, Philadelphia Friends School, she knows her father won’t like it. Her father essentially cut off his own sister when she sent her son Kamal to that school. Her father says that schools and hospitals are all run by white supremacists, and they should have nothing to do with them. Nigeria has been home schooled all her life and has rarely been around white people at all. She knows her people’s history, and she knows about oppression, so why is she so fascinated by the thought of going to this school? But if Mama wanted her to go there….

This book is a fascinating and nuanced look at a girl reclaiming her freedom and exploring what freedom even means. She doesn’t condemn her father or even disagree with everything he says. But what does freedom and revolution mean for her as her own person?

This book surprised me at every turn. No stereotypes here, and plenty of hard truths, but along with Nigeria, the reader gets a chance to look beneath the surface. A powerful story.

ibizoboi.net

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. 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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