Review of The Forbidden Book, by Sacha Lamb

Historical, Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Forbidden Book

by Sacha Lamb

Levine Querido, 2024. 251 pages.
Review written February 18, 2025, from a library book.
Starred Review
2025 Sidney Taylor Young Adult Silver Medal

The Forbidden Book is another brilliant paranormal story playing off Jewish folklore, as with When the Angels Left the Old Country that I enjoyed so much. This one is set in medieval Eastern Europe.

As the book opens, a lumber merchant’s daughter named Sorel is about to be married to the rebbe’s son from the nearby city. She knows she feels like the girl dressed up in the wedding clothes is a stranger, and she wants to leave. But it’s when she hears a voice in her head saying that they’ll go with her that she leaps out the window and flees.

She steals the stable-boy’s clothes where he stashed them in the stable, along with a knife. She cuts her hair short and sets out, feeling oddly free.

I thought it was a story about a young transgender man, but it turns out there’s more to the voice she heard than her own wishful thinking. When asked her name, Sorel comes up with Isser Jacobs, and before long, she gets attacked in an alley by thugs looking for Isser Jacobs and something he stole. But a giant black dog interrupts the attack and Sorel escapes.

But she’s worried about the girl, a friend of the real Isser, that the thugs mentioned. One thing leads to another, and Sorel and a small group of others are trying to find out what happened to Isser and looking for a magic book that he stole, which was written by the Angel of Death.

The book is full of that touch of magic and reads like a mystical folktale. Sorel has some encounters with spirits before she’s through and needs to think about what she actually wants for her life.

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Review of Legendary Frybread Drive-In, edited by Cynthia Leitich Smith

Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Legendary Frybread Drive-In

Intertribal Stories

edited by Cynthia Leitich Smith

Heartdrum, 2025. 7 hours, 46 minutes.
Review written December 20, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Seventeen authors and seven narrators have created this delightful work of art. Here’s how editor Cynthia Leitich Smith describes the magical place at the center of these stories:

Sandy June’s Legendary Frybread Drive-In is a liminal (or in-between) space that feels like home, welcoming Indigenous young heroes and their chosen kin. It’s a refuge, a place of reconciliation, of romance, a warm meal, an Elder’s hug, and artistic inspiration. The grandparents who run it offer happiness, hope, and healing with frybread on the side.

The list of seventeen authors who collaborated on this book is impressive. The four I’d already read award-winning young adult novels from – Darcie Little Badger, Jen Ferguson, Byron Graves, and Angeline Boulley – did not disappoint, but neither did any of the other authors.

The idea behind the book is that Sandy June’s Legendary Frybread Drive-In is a place outside regular time and space. And indigenous people – teens in these stories – can find their way to Sandy June’s from wherever they are in Turtle Island. The path will open up for them when it’s needed. And the food is the best anyone’s ever tasted.

The stories bring together people across generations, show us teens finding true love, grappling with loss, and finding self-confidence and direction.

I probably should have read the book instead of listening (and I still may some day) – but it was easier for the book to get to the top of my audiobook queue than my visual reading queue. But I may have to visually read it again to catch more of the characters who show up in more than one story – and to appreciate it from the beginning as I understand better how the paranormal drive-in works. Or just for the fun of reading it again! This is a set of feel-good stories from a bunch of stellar indigenous authors.

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Review of If Looks Could Kill, by Julie Berry

Audiobooks, History, Paranormal, Teen Fiction Review 0

If Looks Could Kill

by Julie Berry
read by Jayne Entwistle

Simon & Schuster Audio, 2025. 15 hours, 24 minutes.
Review written November 14, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

This brilliant novel is Medusa vs. Jack the Ripper! But not a Greek Medusa. Instead, Medusas are something like vampires, getting created by a kind of infection. But then they stand against those who would prey on vulnerable women.

The setting of the book is the Bowery in New York City in 1888. Jack the Ripper, the Whitechapel Killer, is fleeing London after a very strange encounter with his last victim. Meanwhile, in New York, 18-year-old Tabitha Woodward is adjusting to her new life in the Salvation Army and her annoying partner, Pearl. Tabitha and Pearl visit the saloons and bars, selling the Salvation Army’s newsletter and coaxing people to come hear the preaching. They meet the people in the city and see a girl get pulled into the orbit of a notorious madam.

And I don’t want to give anything away, but yes, the story ends up being Medusas vs. Jack the Ripper. With the innocent and earnest Salvation Army girls in the middle of it.

I appreciated the long historical note at the back reflecting the author’s deep research. She chose a likely suspect for Jack the Ripper who actually came to New York after the murders. She even gave him a plausible motive, using the theosophical teachings popular at the time to use almost-living organs to try to cure his own illness. She honored his victims, who may not have been prostitutes at all. And I especially love the way she also researched the early Salvation Army and showed Tabitha and Pearl’s deep faith and desire to help people in trouble in the slums of New York. I was afraid when they showed up that they’d be a caricature, but they were the opposite of that.

And I do love a story where the helpless become powerful! But these Medusas don’t blindly use their power. It’s not a matter of one look turns the viewer to stone – they have to mean it. And they grapple with the meaning of that power. There are scary moments, and a few in-the-nick-of-time rescues, but it all adds up to a fascinating historical story with lots of suspense. There’s even a developing sweet romance.

I heard about this book at ALA Annual Conference last June, but wasn’t able to get an Advance Reader Copy, so I was looking forward to its publication ever since and got on the holds list for the audio the first day I purchased it for the library. I knew to expect good things from Julie Berry, and I was not disappointed.

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Review of The Alchemy of Moonlight, by David Ferraro, read by Will Watt

Historical, Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Alchemy of Moonlight

by David Ferraro
read by Will Watt

Dreamscape Media, 2023. 9 hours, 44 minutes.
Review written September 16, 2023, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Is it just me, or does anyone else get a crush on eaudiobook narrators with dreamy voices? As soon as I heard the first few sentences from Will Watt, I was hooked on listening to this book – never mind that he was talking about a young marquis discovering a severed hand next to the path on the estate where he was hiding out as a servant.

This book riffs off the gothic classic The Mysteries of Udolpho, except with a gay man named Emile as the protagonist instead of a young lady named Emily. (I’ve never read the original, but I have read Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey that spoofed it, and I checked Wikipedia for the basic plot after a castle called Udolpho was mentioned.)

There’s a love triangle in this version involving our marquis and the local doctor’s apprentice, as well as a count attached to the estate where Emile is serving. But Emile’s pose as a servant must not be found out, because his aunt is in charge of his own estate until he comes of age. If he doesn’t give up his fondness for men and marry, she will have him committed to an asylum.

And things get even more complicated. The reader will be much quicker than Emile to figure out the connection between body parts on the path and the fact that family members send almost all the servants away once a month, but those who remain administer injections all night long as they suffer and writhe in their beds.

I won’t say much about the plot. It’s based on a gothic novel, and yes, it’s over-the-top. But I think it helped to listen to a skilled narrator (with a dreamy voice) reading about the events completely in character, completely startled when supernatural things happen. Hearing his skepticism – but inability to discount the evidence of his own eyes – helps the listener keep their own skepticism at bay. I was with them every step of the way.

This book is an adventure with many gruesome moments, but if you’re in the mood for some melodrama at all, you’ll have a great romp with this. Not having read the original, I’m still quite confident that the ending in this version is quite different. And it certainly surprised me.

I do recommend listening to this one. (Is it just me? That voice!)

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Review of That Self-Same Metal, by Brittany N. Williams, read by Patricia Allison

Historical, Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

That Self-Same Metal

by Brittany N. Williams
read by Patricia Allison

OrangeSky Audio, 2023. 10 hours, 31 minutes.
Review written August 4, 2023, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

That Self-Same Metal is a historical fantasy set in the time of Shakespeare, in fact, among Shakespeare’s acting company, The King’s Men. This book happens in 1605, shortly after King James has taken the throne – and the patronage of Shakespeare’s company. Our heroine is Joan Sands, a Black girl with a magical ability to manipulate metals, a gift given to her by her Head Orisha, Ogun. She not only makes swords for the company, but she stages their swordfights. Her twin brother James is an apprentice with the players, taking women’s roles, because of course it’s illegal for women to perform on stage.

Joan and James, as followers of the Orisha, have always been able to see when the Fae are among them, because they give off a glow under their skin. But they know that Fae cannot harm humankind. However, Joan’s godfather tells her that he needs to renew the pact between the Fae and the new king – and then he is arrested. The pact is not in effect, and Fae very much begin to harm people.

When Joan defends herself and others using blades she’s coated in iron, she makes some powerful enemies, both among the Fae and in the royal court. Can she protect her family and those she loves from these enemies?

It’s all played out in a well-drawn historical setting, with Shakespeare himself one of the characters, and his plays going on in the Globe theater. It turns out the characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream are based on actual Fae, but they are quite different than he portrayed them. Joan’s adventures include needing to step in and act when James is injured, hoping no one will notice the difference, and watching another play with the queen and her ladies, who treat her like an exotic pet. And she’s not sure what to make of her attraction to one of the handsome players as well as to a mysterious girl who asks for her brother’s help.

It’s all woven together in a way that hooked me, and the narrator’s British accent is a delight. The author clearly did her research – naming the characters who were actual people at the end of the book.

My one word of warning is that there are some excessively gory scenes, so you may not want to listen if you get squeamish easily. They did establish that the stakes were very high.

There is a reversal at the end, and yes, I will want to read or hopefully listen to the next installment.

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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.

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Review of For Girls Who Walk Through Fire, by Kim DeRose

Paranormal, Teen Fiction Review 0

For Girls Who Walk Through Fire

by Kim DeRose

Union Square & Co., 2023. 307 pages.
Review written May 17, 2023, from an advance reader copy.

For Girls Who Walk Through Fire features Elliott, a teenage girl who’s attending a sexual assault survivors’ support group, but who hasn’t managed to talk about her own experience yet. And it all seems so pointless. What good does talking about it do?

When a member of their group who has anonymously taken her rapist to trial has the guy let off with a slap on the wrist, it just all seems too much for Elliott. At the same time, she finds a book in her dead mother’s things. The book promises to offer the spell she needs if Elliott can bring together a coven.

And so Elliott brings some girls together from the support group, and they begin casting spells for vengeance, because how else will justice be done? But there are some alarming results and the girls need to come to terms with what actually constitutes justice, and is the blowback worth it?

I won’t say how it ends except that the book does rise above a simple quest for justice. Some of the magic was a little murky in how it works, but this was an enjoyable read about a heavy but way too common topic.

If girls who have experienced this read this book, even though they may be sorry they don’t have a magic spellbook, I think they’ll be uplifted by the story of the power of having friends by your side.

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Review of The Deep Dark, by Molly Knox Ostertag

Award Winners, Graphic Novel, Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Deep Dark

by Molly Knox Ostertag

Graphix (Scholastic), 2024. 478 pages.
Review written February 18, 2025, from a library book.
Starred Review
2025 Printz Honor Book

This graphic novel is the story of Magdalena, a teen graduating from high school and living in a desert town in California. Mags has secrets, and she doesn’t let anyone get close. Her main secret is behind the trapdoor to the basement, but she keeps it closed when anyone is around. She takes care of her Abuela, works at the fast food place, and sometimes hooks up with a girl who’s cheating on her boyfriend. That suits Mags fine, since this girl doesn’t ask questions or ask for a commitment.

And then Nessa comes back. Nessa lived in town when they were kids, and Mags was the first person she told that she was a girl. Now she’s fully transitioned, and beautiful – and she has some memories about the basement in Mags’ house that she wants to clear up.

So Mags is pulled to Nessa – but that goes against everything she’s ever been told to do or even feels like she deserves.

There are plenty of metaphors to this powerful paranormal story. Funny how it’s so easy to see that a character is deserving of love, isn’t it? You’ll feel honored to travel this journey of self-acceptance with Mags.

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Review of The Antidote, by Karen Russell

Audiobooks, Historical, Paranormal 0

The Antidote

by Karen Russell
read by Elena Rey, Sophie Amoss, Mark Bramhall, Shayna Small, Jon Orsini, Natasha Soudek, Karen Russell, and James Riding In

Books on Tape, 2025. 16 hours, 56 minutes.
Review written June 22, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

The Antidote is a historical novel of the Dust Bowl, woven throughout with magical realism. When I began the book, I wasn’t sure I liked it, and the pace is literary and more slow-moving than the young adult and children’s books I often read. But by the last several hours – well, let’s just say that I stayed up until 3 am and finished a jigsaw puzzle to also finish this book. (Would I have stayed up to finish the jigsaw puzzle anyway? Maybe. But wanting to finish this audiobook meant I didn’t even try to resist.)

The “Antidote” of the title is a person. She’s a prairie witch, and that’s the name she uses for customers. She’s a vault for things you want to forget, memories that trouble you or that you want to stop thinking about for a time. The Antidote goes into a trance and the customer talks into her ear trumpet and the memories get transferred to her to carry. The customer doesn’t remember what they confided, and the Antidote never heard it, but they can come back at any time, read their deposit slip backwards, and this time the transfer will go the other way, giving the memories back to the customer.

But the book opens on Black Sunday, the day an enormous dust storm went through Nebraska. On the same day, the Antidote went bankrupt. She can feel in her body that all the deposits were lost. What will she do when the customers fleeing the dry prairie want their deposits back?

There are other characters we follow. Harp Oletsky is a farmer whose wheat crop was miraculously spared. Even the scarecrow survived intact! He starts seeing lights coming from the land.

Harp’s niece, Asphodel, is living with him after her mother was found dead in a ditch. She tries to escape her nightmares about her mother’s body by playing basketball. But the folks supporting their team one by one are leaving Nebraska. And Asphodel wants to make some money by working for the Antidote.

Then there’s a government photographer. She’s a Black lady traveling alone. She tries to follow the instructions for the pictures the government wants to support the New Deal – but then her camera reveals images that she didn’t see when she took the pictures.

And through all of this, we learn about life on the prairie and the hard things that happen there – things people are willing to pay to forget. For example, the Polish settlers don’t want to face that they were offered free homesteads in order to secure land that belonged to the Pawnee people. And in fact, the Pawnee people are being treated exactly the way the Polish people were treated in Europe.

It also turns out that the no-good sheriff has been forcing the Antidote to receive deposits in order to hide evidence. And that comes to a head when the Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Killer – who supposedly killed Asphodel’s mother – has a botched execution on Black Sunday when the electric chair malfunctions. The election is coming up, and the sheriff intends to win on his record, never mind what is really the truth behind the murders.

And it’s all wound together in a way that winds itself into your heart. I have to admit it got me thinking uncomfortable thoughts about my homesteading ancestors in a way I never faced before. The motto of the prairie in this book is “Better you than me.” And the book shows up the problems with that motto – and how deeply it’s embedded in the heart of America. Powerful stuff, and an engrossing read (once you get started).

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Review of The Moonlit Vine, by Elizabeth Santiago

Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Moonlit Vine

by Elizabeth Santiago

Tu Books (Lee & Low), 2023. 360 pages.
Review written November 6, 2023, from a book sent by the publisher
Starred Review

The Moonlit Vine is a contemporary story of Taína, a 14-year-old descendant of Taíno women from Puerto Rico, combined with the story of those ancestors and a touch of magical realism with an amulet and zemi they handed down to her.

In the present, Taína’s older brother was recently in trouble for fighting and has been sent to live with their father, who has been living apart from them since he was sent to jail a few years ago. Her mother is working hard, leaving it to Taína to care for her younger brother, 7-year-old Luis, and watch over their abuela with Alzheimer’s.

And then Taína gets in trouble herself at school when she speaks up for herself a little too forcefully. On top of that, there’s gang activity in her neighborhood and she can’t get a straight answer from her brother what happened between him and the friend she has a crush on.

Taína’s modern-day problems are interwoven with stories of the women who went before her, starting with a great cacique of the Taíno people, Anacaona, who welcomed Columbus and worked to protect her people. Anacaona was the one who created the contents of the box that has been handed down all the way to Taína’s abuela.

The story is beautifully done, pulling in themes of community and family and standing together for change. The light touch of magical realism gives us an image of her foremothers standing with Taína. There’s an impressive amount of back matter about the Taíno people, who are definitely not extinct. This author did her research!

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