Review of The It Girl, by Ruth Ware, read by Imogen Church

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

The It Girl

by Ruth Ware
read by Imogen Church

Simon & Schuster Audio, 2023. 17 hours, 9 minutes.
Review written August 9, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Well, I have to confess – as I began listening to this audiobook, I was sure right from the start that I knew who the killer was and that I’ve been listening to too many Ruth Ware books. Reader, I was wrong. I’ll say no more except that she can still keep me guessing! And even when I thought I knew the solution, the story still kept me listening.

The It Girl is about a murder that happened ten years ago at an Oxford college to April Clarke-Cliveden, the roommate of Hannah Jones, at the end of their first year.

April was everything Hannah wasn’t, beautiful and rich and popular. She did have a habit of playing practical jokes that edged on mean-spirited, and she obviously wasn’t faithful to her boyfriend Will – a guy Hannah had a crush on – but April was vibrant and alive and drew a circle of friends around them.

As the book opens in the present, the man who was convicted for April’s murder, the creepy porter of their college, has died in prison, still maintaining his innocence. It all makes Hannah very uneasy, since she gave the evidence that put him away. Could she have been wrong?

We get the story told us “Before” and “After” – the story leading up to April’s death, their happy days at Oxford, and in the present, ten years later, with Hannah happily married to Will and expecting their first child. But a reporter who’s friends with one of their friends from Oxford gets under Hannah’s skin with the idea that maybe that porter wasn’t guilty after all.

And yes, Ruth Ware managed to surprise me. She tells a story so engaging it’s hard to stop listening, with characters you feel like you know, and then she adds a compelling mystery with of course danger to the main character when she learns too much, too late.

There are still some Ruth Ware books I haven’t read, and let’s see how long I can stand to wait before putting the next one on hold.

ruthware.com

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Review of How Do You Spend? by Cinders McLeod

Animal Characters, Mathematical, Picture Book Review, Starred Review 0

How Do You Spend?

A Moneybunny Book

by Cinders McLeod

Nancy Paulsen Books (Penguin Random House), 2024. 32 pages.
Review written October 31, 2024, from a book sent to me by the publisher.
Starred Review

How Do You Spend? is a perfectly pitched introduction to spending money for very young children.

Here’s how it begins:

Carrots are money in Bunnyland,
and Bun has saved a lot!

How will Bun spend her carrots?

The following spreads show how Bun spends her carrots. Each page has the format across the top, “Sometimes Bun spends…” with an adjective. The picture shows that day’s spending, and across the bottom you have in a child’s print: “Today I spent x carrots.” with the x filled in with the number spent. I appreciate that on every page, you can see and count the carrots spent.

I appreciate that the book starts with adjectives a young child is more familiar with – Fast (and a picture of Bun running with a shopping cart that is filling up) and Slow (and Bun taking a ride on one of those stationary rides in front of a grocery store).

But the book does go on to pairs like Expensive and Cheap, Ordinary and Exciting. And I like the pairs For Tomorrow (showing piano lessons that cost 2 carrots per month and 24 carrots for a year) and For Today (buying Bunny Hop tickets), and On Herself (ice cream), and On Others (flowers she gives to another bunny).

It’s just a super simple conversation-starter for a young child, ending with the question, “How do you like to spend?” So simple, but so engaging. Basically, you can talk about feelings or the physical act of spending or about numbers – or anything that enters a child’s head.

This book is part of a series. Our library already has one, and I’m planning to order the rest.

Moneybunnies.com
CindersMcLeod.com

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Review of Gwen & Art Are Not in Love, by Lex Croucher, read by Sarah Ovens and Alex Singh

Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Gwen and Art Are Not in Love

by Lex Croucher
read by Sarah Ovens and Alex Singh

Macmillan Young Listeners, 2023. 10 hours, 48 minutes.
Review written October 26, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Okay, this one is just lots of fun. It’s set in England a few hundred years after Arthur Pendragon. Gwen’s father, a descendant of Arthur Pendragon, has moved the capital to Camelot to try to hold onto the kingdom. He’s also made an alliance when Gwen was a baby to win over the cultists, and betrothed her to Arthur, now 19 years old and also a descendant of Arthur Pendragon.

Gwen and Art have despised each other since they were children and Gwen broke Art’s arm and Art put a toad in her bed. Now? Well, as it happens, Gwen spots Art kissing a boy, but then Art discovers Gwen’s diary and learns she’s in love with Lady Bridget, the only female knight in the kingdom, who is currently competing in the big tournament in Camelot.

And then Art starts falling for Gabriel, Gwen’s brother and the heir to the throne. But both Gwen and Gabriel thought that someone in their position wasn’t allowed to be happy. But maybe Gwen and Art should go through with their engagement, because who could understand them better?

I’m calling this Fantasy because it’s a fantasy England where Arthur was real, and many in the story believe in magic, but no actual magic happens in the book (that we can be sure is magic, anyway).

The story has lots of hijinks and laughs and scrapes, but there’s a serious side because there is unrest in the kingdom. The narrators are lovely (I always like British accents!) and this is one I’m sure I enjoyed all the more from listening to it. Just plain fun.

lexcroucher.co.uk

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Review of Stella & Marigold, by Annie Barrows and Sophie Blackall

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

Stella & Marigold

written by Annie Barrows
illustrated by Sophie Blackall

Chronicle Books, 2024. 102 pages.
Review written October 26, 2024, from a library book.
Starred Review

Oh, this book is charming. We’ve got a new classic beginning chapter book duo on our hands here.

Stella and Marigold are sisters. Stella is seven, and Marigold is four. And they have quirky, wonderful, imaginative adventures together. They loved each other, from the moment Stella told the new baby, “I’m Stella. I’m your sister. I’m going to tell you all the secret things I know. I would never tell them to anyone else, but I’ll tell them to you. Forever and ever.”

The adventures are quirky. Like a plumber discovering something Marigold put into bathroom drain, and Stella telling a story that helps Marigold deal with being found out. Or going to the zoo and Marigold getting lost in the Meerkat Mound, and Stella cheering her up by telling a story of when the Vice President came to town and her driver got lost, and Marigold gave them directions.

A lot of the stories are about the girls’ imaginations getting activated together – as truly happens best with sisters.

And it goes without saying that Sophie Blackall’s illustrations bring everything to life and make the book that much more charming. Definitely a treat for reading aloud or for a kid ready to read their own chapter books.

chroniclekids.com

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Review of Poverty, By America, by Matthew Desmond, read by Dion Graham

Audiobooks, Current Issues, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Poverty, By America

by Matthew Desmond
read by Dion Graham

Books on Tape, 2023. 5 hours, 40 minutes.
Review written October 3, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

First I have to apologize. I know that I grasp more details of an information-packed book like this one when I read it with my eyes instead of with my ears, because my memory is very visually oriented. But at the same time, I had this book checked out in print for months and didn’t get to it, but when I put it in my audiobook queue, it was no problem. So I’m glad I heard all that information, but I won’t be able to cite much of it in my review, since it’s not there in front of me to quote from.

This book is a study of the Why of poverty. And unfortunately, it shows the way we who are financially better off are complicit. We like buying things for lower prices, never mind if it means that workers are exploited. And then there are zoning laws that keep multi-family housing out of upscale neighborhoods because the current residents don’t want to mix with the poor.

There are many more things pointed out in this book. Did you know that when you look at tax breaks, the well-off get vastly more government assistance than those below the poverty line? Things like the Mortgage Interest Deduction give more benefit to those who purchase a large home, and nothing to those who can’t afford a mortgage. (I know that after my Dad gave me a down payment for my condo, my cost of housing went down, helped by that tax deduction. But I never ever could have saved up for the down payment, because I was only getting further in debt every year. All that changed after the gift from my Dad.)

Another aspect is that on its face, the Earned Income Credit helps the working poor. But you can also think of it as subsidizing employers who offer low wages. All told, there are many, many factors keeping the poor at a disadvantage, and this book explores many I’d never thought about before, along with some I had.

But he also challenges the reader to look at the ways you benefit from the exploitation of the poor, and see what you can do to mitigate that. Don’t buy from companies that exploit their workers, for example. Look into the zoning laws in your neighborhood, for another. Support laws and politicians (on both sides of the political spectrum) that seek to benefit the least of these.

I did jot down some quotations I liked from the last chapter, knowing I wouldn’t remember them any other way. He was talking about the opposite of using the “Scarcity Diversion” to keep from implementing programs to help reduce poverty. He said we have an “Economy of Abundance” and a “profusion of resources.” Why do we treat scarcity as a given? And here’s a quotation I especially liked:

Wealth means having enough to share.

So if you want a book that will open your eyes to many injustices, as well as challenging you to see how you can help, pick up this book. It will certainly make you think.

matthewdesmondbooks.com

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Review of Death at Morning House, by Maureen Johnson, read by Katherine Littrell

Contemporary, Mystery, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Death at Morning House

by Maureen Johnson
read by Katherine Littrell

HarperTeen, 2024. 9 hours, 23 minutes.
Review written October 28, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

I believe that in reading this book, I’ve caught up on all the Maureen-Johnson-authored murder mysteries. And they’re good! As you can tell from her guidebook for adults, Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village, she knows the conventions of the great mystery novels and how to use them to create something modern and new.

Death at Morning House is a stand-alone murder mystery, not part of the Stevie Bell Truly Devious series, but like those books, there’s a place where mysterious deaths happened almost a hundred years ago – and there’s a more recent death – and then someone goes missing in the novel’s present day. We do get the story of the old deaths slowly revealed, and our teen protagonist Marlowe Wexler discovers clues to the modern-day deaths. And yes, finding those clues puts Marlowe in great danger – in this book, before she even knows who’s responsible.

As the book opens, it’s the start of summer, and Marlowe is taking the girl she’s long had a crush on to her aunt and uncle’s cabin – a place Marlowe is paid to watch over in their absence. Marlowe had gotten a special scented candle in a scent her crush likes – and while they are kissing, the candle explodes and the house sustains serious fire damage.

Marlowe does not respond well. She’s afraid to talk to her crush. She becomes famous in her small town as a pyromaniac (even though the police confirm it was an accident), and she decides the only way to cope is to mope around in bed.

But then her history teacher tells Marlowe about an opportunity to spend the summer on an island in the St. Lawrence River, part of a team of teens offering tours of a historic home there. It sounds like a great way to get out of town, but the teacher doesn’t tell Marlowe that the reason there’s an opening is that one of the local teens who was planning to be there recently died at a party after prom. And part of the history of the house is the two children who died there from the original family that owned the house.

It all adds up to a great story with interesting characters and a strong sense of place. And of course, a big storm comes in not long after someone new goes missing, so there’s no way to get off the island for help if anything bad should happen.

I have to say that I am completely on board with Maureen Johnson’s recent trend of writing mysteries. She’s good! The situations and characters are varied, but there’s always an intriguing puzzle and characters you enjoy spending time with – and hope will stay alive.

maureenjohnsonbooks.com

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Review of Ernö Rubik and His Magic Cube, written by Kerry Aradhya, illustrated by Kara Kramer

Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Ernö Rubik and His Magic Cube

written by Kerry Aradhya
illustrated by Kara Kramer

Peachtree, 2024. 36 pages.
Review written October 30, 2024, from my own copy, sent by the publisher.
Starred Review

Ernö Rubik and His Magic Cube is a picture book biography of the man who invented the Rubik’s Cube, especially focusing on the process that went into the invention.

I love the way the art in this book uses lots of squares and other geometric shapes, and the bright colors that show up on the cube.

Ernö grew up in Budapest, Hungary, and loved puzzles right from the start. The book shows him playing with tangrams, pentonimoes (shapes of five squares stuck together), and pentacubes (shapes of five cubes stuck together).

The book shows that later, as a teacher, he made three-dimensional models to teach his students. And then he wondered:

Would it be possible to build a big cube out of smaller cubes that moved around each other and stayed connected?

He decided to try it!

The book shows some of the things he tried first – for example, a four-by-four cube held together with paperclips and rubber bands. After he switched to twenty-seven cubes with nine on each face of the big cube, it took him days of thinking – and then a walk by a river gave him the thought of putting a round object in the center and getting the other twenty-six cubes to flow around it. (I love the way the illustrator portrays him walking around with a cube-shaped head as he was thinking about it!)

Once he figured it out, he put colors on the cubes’ surfaces and started playing with it. And that was when he discovered he had a puzzle. He was the first person who had to figure out how to solve it.

At the time the book was printed, more than 450 million Rubik’s Cubes have been sold worldwide. I remember when the phenomenon started – when I was just out of college – and I love that it’s still a wildly popular toy. In fact, last year, my niece showed me that she’d learned how to solve them. So this book about their inventor is all the more relevant to kids.

kerryaradhya.com
karakramer.com
PeachtreeBooks.com

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Review of The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, Volume 7, by Beth Brower

Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion

Volume 7

by Beth Brower

Rhydon Press, 2023. 302 pages.
Review written August 27, 2024, from my own copy, purchased via amazon.com
Starred Review

Alas! I’ve read all the volumes of Emma M. Lion’s Unselected Journals currently available, so now I will have to wait for Beth Brower to write more. On her website, she says she’s treating this series like a television series with successive seasons (a year’s worth of journals), and there are a few more seasons to go. You’ll notice the volumes are getting longer. When I picked up the first one, it was a quick read, so I thought nothing of quickly consuming the first few volumes. Now there are more pages, which I’m glad of, because I’m well and truly hooked, and I like spending more time in Emma’s world.

For those I haven’t yet convinced to give these books a try, yes, you should read them, and also yes, you should start at the beginning. I’ll just give tidbits from this volume to let you know I continue to be enthralled with Emma, her friends, and the other quirky characters she encounters.

I’ve mentioned that I appreciate the friendship portrayed between Emma and three very different single gentlemen. By this volume, Emma and one of them are considering whether they should dare pursue a relationship. But at the same time, something accidentally happens to potentially cause a scandal involving Emma and another of them. One must consider appearances in 1884 London!

Emma is also still trying to make her Aunt Eugenia believe she has a strict chaperone, and she prepares to help Aunt Eugenia’s daughter, the beautiful Arabella, find the most suitable partner of Aunt Eugenia’s choosing during the upcoming Season. All while Emma is trying to ward off the man whom Aunt Eugenia will then allow to marry Emma.

It’s all told with lots of humor and wit, a big dose of mysterious secrets, and with the gossips of St. Crispian’s beginning to take note. Emma came of age in the last volume, but can she indeed keep her independence? The back of the book promises the next volume “soon,” and it had just better be true!

[Update: Volume 8 is promised in December 2024! Hooray!]

bethbrower.com

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Review of The Dictionary Story, by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston

Delightfully Silly, Picture Book Review, Starred Review 0

The Dictionary Story

by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston

Candlewick Press, 2024.
Review written October 18, 2024, from a library book.
Starred Review

This is probably the first picture book I’m recommending for the sake of the parents, not so much the kids.

Sure, the story for the kids is fun – we’ve got a dictionary that’s jealous of all the other books that have stories inside. So she decides to bring some words to life, and an alligator gets loose and starts going after a donut, which doesn’t want to be eaten, so they start racing through the pages and causing chaos. It’s got Oliver Jeffers’ zany illustrations and silly straight-faced sense of humor.

The illustrations show the characters frolicking through a standard dictionary’s pages – or so I thought until I paused to read the fine print. And that’s when the true brilliance of the book hit me.

I started with the “How to Use This Dictionary” page pictured toward the beginning, was enjoying its quirkiness and noticed that the editors are “Woliver Effers & Jam Spinston.” Then I had to read every single visible entry. (The endpapers are filled with definitions, and there’s also a column of them running along the bottom of most pages.) This meant that it took me much longer to read this book than an ordinary picture book, but I also gained lots of laughter.

I’ll list some of the quirkier definitions:

ajar – A word to describe something as slightly open. Not to be confused with a jar (which works best when mostly closed).

author – The writer of a book, poem or news. They move tiny black marks around (see letters) to discover what interesting shapes they can make in people’s heads (see stories). Sometimes this results in writers being paid. (See good times, donuts and coffee.)

dream – A word for things people see while asleep. Dreams are the brain’s way of showing you that you’re a lot more imaginative than you think. In the day, we fill our heads with sensible things, but dreams prefer to create strange images, such as glow-in-the-dark marmalade and inflatable chicken’s teeth. Some dreams happen when we are awake: Martin Luther King Jr. had a great one. We’ve been studying dreams for ages, and we still don’t really know what they are.

hippopotamus – A very large mammal with short legs that lives near water in Africa. Hippopotamuses are vegetarian. Their idea of a good time is not wearing clothes, floating in water and wallowing in mud. (See spa.)

minnow – A very small freshwater fish that lives in rivers, streams and sometimes lakes. They feed on insects, among other things, and often dream about a time when they will rule all known galaxies.

tall – Above the average height. Which can get quite complicated because a tall turkey is tiny in comparison to a tiny tiger, and a tall tiger is tiny compared to Thailand.

zero – Zero is a word that means nothing. Nothing is a word that means nothing. Even though zero is a different word for nothing, both mean nothing. This definition has just told you nothing.

And here are some excerpts that are especially delightful and completely won my heart:

words – Even though they are small, they are great at making the inside of your head big.

library – Libraries are a bit like forests; they are enchanted places to get lost in.

story – Books carry stories around until someone like you finds them a home in their imagination.

May you find a home for this story in your imagination.

oliverjeffers.com
samwinston.com

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Review of A Drop of Venom, by Sajni Patel

Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

A Drop of Venom

by Sajni Patel

Rick Riordan Presents (Disney/Hyperion), 2024. 393 pages.
Review written October 26, 2024, from a library book.
Starred Review

Here’s the idea behind this book: What if Medusa’s wrath was justified? The story is told by the victors, after all. A Drop of Venom combines the idea of Medusa with Indian mythology to give us one of the Nagin people with an affinity for snakes.

We’ve got two protagonists throughout the book. One is Manisha, a girl who when she was small was sent away from her family for her own protection when her family’s home was attacked. Manisha was sent to the temple, to hide her origins and become a temple priestess. There she meets our other protagonist, the king’s slayer, Pratyush.

Pratyush is the last in a line of supernatural monster slayers. His father and mother lived in hiding from the king, but when the king’s soldiers found them, a monster killed him. They took Pratyush to the king, and he had to slay monsters in order for his sister to be cared for. But after his sister got married off to a noble who abused her, and she eventually died, Pratyush has lost enthusiasm for killing for the king. He wants to settle down and marry that beautiful priestess he’s been flirting with at the temple. The king agrees, if he brings back the head of one last monster, the Serpent Queen who’s been turning men into stone.

What Pratyush doesn’t know was that while he was gone, Manisha was raped by a powerful man and kicked off the temple mountain in the clouds. But she didn’t die. In fact, a pit of vipers cushioned her fall, and the snakes gave her magical powers. She has a golden snake familiar that keeps growing bigger and bigger, and she’s traveling south to find her family. But she encounters people along the way, and some of them are very bad, and Manisha now has power to fight back.

There is violence in this book, and some horrible deaths. But for the most part, it’s a book about the powerless fighting back against injustice.

The book is atmospheric and pulls you along with each character. Unfortunately or fortunately (there will be more!), the story is not finished with this book, though we do have a face-off between the supposed monster and the slayer.

This is a fantasy story with many overtones about justice and power. It felt good to watch Manisha coming into her power.

sajnipatel.com
RickRiordan.com
HyperionTeens.com

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