About Ginger Kid
In Ginger Kid, popular comedian Steve Hofstetter grapples with life after seventh grade . . . when his world fell apart. Formatted as a series of personal essays, Steve walks his readers through awkward early dating, family turbulence, and the revenge of the bullied nerds. This YA nonfiction is sure to be the beloved next volume for the first generation of Wimpy Kid fans who are all grown up and ready for a new misfit hero.
My Review
A fun, easy, read that’s deceitfully informative. Each essay delivers laughs and lessons together, from things Hofstetter learned about girls and relationships to his development as a comedian. I liked the gently self-deprecating, funny way the stories are related. The short sections are perfect for readers with short gaps of time for reading—perfect for me right now!
I liked that even though the stories often have a moral lesson to them, it felt very personal rather than instructive. The scenes about improv made me want to play the games he described or join a local improv group—they sounded like so much fun!
Ginger Kid is a great read not just for misfits but for anyone who has ever felt awkward in a crowd or wrestled with self-discovery. If you’re looking for a lighthearted read, add this one to your list for sure!
Recommended for Ages 12 up.
Cultural Elements
Steve is from a Jewish family. He describes (very positive) experiences he had as part of a youth group for Jewish kids.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
Roughly a dozen instances of mild profanity.
Romance/Sexual Content Some descriptions of kissing girls. He alludes to more, describing one girlfriend as a “sexual person,” though he doesn’t specify further.
Spiritual Content See cultural elements.
Violent Content A bully threatens to hit Steve.
Drug Content
Some mentions of drinking alcohol.
Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Yay! I’m so excited to be part of the Winter Glass Blog Tour (Thank you for the invitation, Glasstown Entertainment!) because I’ve been waiting for this book since I first read Spindle Fire, part one of this rich duology. In fact, you probably saw Winter Glass listed on Gabrielle’s Top Ten Exciting YA Releases of 2018 post in January.
Winter Glass Lexa Hillyer
HarperCollins
Published on April 10, 2018
A curse comes undone. A kingdom shatters. But some bonds can’t be broken.
Princess Aurora, torn from the dream world, plots to assassinate the faerie queen Malfleur, only to confront temptations she never expected. Isabelle, meanwhile, opens her heart to Prince William as they attempt to unite their kingdoms and wage war against Malfleur’s army. But when the appearance of an unbreakable glass slipper prompts Isabelle to discover more about her lineage, her true identity begins to take shape and her legacy becomes as clear as ice.
Devoted half-sisters Isabelle and Aurora will grapple with their understanding of love and loyalty as they face a threat even greater than that of the evil queen—the threat of losing each other forever.
My Review There’s a certain kind of pressure that comes from picking up such a highly anticipated book. Sequel Anxiety, I guess it could be called. I find when I especially loved a first book in a series, I’m super eager to get to the second one, but then when I have the copy in my hands, lots of times I put off reading it, worried it will not live up to my memories of the other story. I did the same thing this time, too.
But as soon as I started reading Winter Glass, I remembered why I loved Spindle Fire so much. The prose strikes with poetry and power. I found myself instantly carted off to Deluce and the plight of two very different, very strong princesses. Hillyer’s writing makes emotions reach out from the page and take you by the throat. It’s intense and delicious at once.
Another of my favorite things about this book (both books really) is the way the author twists fairy tales together to form a new sort of story. Spindle Fire read a bit like a mash-up of Sleeping Beauty and Alice in Wonderland. Winter Glass doesn’t have quite the same overt story-for-story feel to it. Instead, familiar fairy tale elements (the glass slipper, the rogue who hunts the king’s deer and gives them to the poor) add flavor and depth to the story, but the tale itself stands on its own as something original.
I loved the themes about storytelling and the truth finding you. I’ve just finished another read-through of The Horse and His Boy by C. S. Lewis with my daughter, and it reminded me of the way Aslan says to Shasta that he only tells a person his own story. So that resonated with me for sure.
One of the things I found interesting about Winter Glass is the lack of older mentors. There are a couple brief moments where Isabella receives some wisdom from a mentor-type character, but all of the older characters are deeply flawed people, often deeply selfish. I missed the appearance of really admirable characters. Obviously every story doesn’t have to have them. I’ve realized for myself lately that it’s hard for me to connect with a story if I don’t find at least one of the characters admirable. (I think this is true for a lot of people.) I did admire both Aurora and Isabelle for their tenacity, self-sacrifice, and commitment to help others.
I totally enjoyed reading Winter Glass and recommend it to fairy tale fans for its unusual spin on familiar stories as well as its strong heroines.
Recommended for Ages 12 up.
Cultural Elements
Isabelle is blind and Aurora mute. Aurora also lacks a sense of touch.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
None.
Romance/Sexual Content Kissing between man and woman. Sensual references to more intimate contact—response to the memories, like blushing or feeling pulse race. Two scenes hint at sex, but very vaguely. One refers to a married couple. The other to two women. This scene shows a kiss and one character beginning to undress the other.
Spiritual Content Powerful faeries have the ability to tithe (take) things like sight or compassion. An evil faerie spread a sleeping sickness across the land and has taken other powers for herself. One character says no faerie or god can discern justice for anyone besides himself.
Violent Content Some descriptions of rotting corpses (victims of a plague). Descriptions of prisoners who’ve been tortured by starvation and solitary confinement. Several scenes describe battles—some in an arena-like atmosphere in which one character must kill an opponent. Other scenes describe warfare. Details are sometimes graphic.
Drug Content
None.
Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Lexa Hillyer is the author of the young adult novels Spindle Fire, Winter Glass, and Proof of Forever, as well as the poetry collection, Acquainted with the Cold (Bona Fide Books), the 2012 gold prize winner of the Foreword Book of the Year Award for Poetry, and a recipient of the Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured in Best New Poets 2012, and she has received various other prizes and honors for poetry. Lexa earned her BA in English from Vassar College and her MFA in Poetry from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. She worked as an editor at both Harper Collins and Penguin, before founding the production company Glasstown Entertainment along with bestselling author Lauren Oliver. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, their daughter, and a very skinny orange tree.
Valor risks everything to protect her friends in this second book in a thrilling fantasy series that’s Percy Jackson meets Frozen.
One month has passed since Valor broke her twin sister Sasha out of jail. But the girl who imprisoned her to begin with—Princess Anastasia—has gone missing. The queen, desperate to find her daughter, asks Valor and Sasha to track Anastasia down and bring her home.
But just as the girls and their friends embark on the search, the queen also vanishes, throwing the realm into utter chaos. If Valor can’t restore order, she risks getting sent back to prison . . . and tearing her newly reunited family apart once again. She must rely on people she can’t quite trust, as well as her own instincts, to protect the people she holds dear.
My Review
“Percy Jackson meets Frozen” is a great description of Seeker of the Crown. Two sisters with very different roles and talents team up with a couple of outlaws awaiting pardons to save their kingdom from a rebel princess who means to take all for herself.
The action never lags—from the first page to the last, Valor runs from one challenge to the next as the stakes get higher and higher. This plus the clear, smooth writing makes this book a quick, fun read.
Valor’s tenacity and independence set her up as a strong heroine. She struggles to trust others and depend on them for help. But when her impulsive actions get her into trouble, she has to accept that she can’t do things totally alone.
I liked that the two sisters were so different. Valor’s point-of-view leads us through the story, but we learn a lot about her relationship with her twin, Sasha. While Valor is impulsive and a fighter, Sasha is a thinker and more rules-oriented.
The only hiccup for me was that the girls are only thirteen. The story world describes them as basically being adults—beginning apprenticeships and having a lot of independence—but I found it hard to get my head around that sometimes. I don’t think there was anything wrong with it, I just struggled to connect with them as such young characters. I kept thinking they were fifteen or sixteen.
On the whole, Seeker of the Crown is a great adventure, and except for some mild-ish violence, it’s clean! I think fifth and sixth grade readers would enjoy it most, but the style of the storytelling should make it appealing to some older readers, too. I’m so glad I got to read it, and now I want to go back and read the first book. I had no trouble following the second book without reading the first one, but I’m interested in the story enough to want to know how it all started.
Recommended for Ages 8 up.
Cultural Elements
The characters and story setting have a Russian/Scandinavian feel to them.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
None.
Romance/Sexual Content None.
Spiritual Content None.
Violent Content Valor remembers her captivity in a terrible prison (where she had been wrongfully imprisoned) and makes some references to torture. I’d describe these references as dark but not graphic. They focus on her mental and emotional scarring rather than physical harm.
Battle scenes show soldiers in combat. Valor defends herself with a crossbow and is prepared to shoot enemies.
Drug Content
None.
Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.
Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr.
But what Starr does or does not say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.
My Review If you’re part of the YA community at all, chances are you’ve heard about or already read this book. It’s been on my list to read since before it came out, and I’ve finally managed to get a copy. Once I had THE HATE U GIVE in hand, it didn’t take me long to read it.
One powerful part of the story is the way it puts faces and names on an issue too often in the headlines. We see not only Starr, a young high school student with her whole life ahead of her, but also her loving family, and the community around her. And we see these elements not only for her but for Khalil, the boy killed by police, as well. We learn about his mistakes, but we also learn that those things aren’t the whole of who he is. We learn about why he made some of those choices, and it doesn’t make them less wrong, but it does make the truth more complicated.
One of the issues that comes up with regard to this book is how much profanity is included in the story. In a Twitter post, Angie Thomas talked about this issue, and said she hoped people would see the story and be moved by the importance of it rather than getting hung up on the language.
And while I absolutely appreciate what she’s saying—because the book does talk about a critical issue in an incredibly powerful way—I also understand that including so much strong language will prevent some people from reading the book and will give ground for some schools to opt not to carry it in their libraries. It may keep the story out of some of the hands of people who most need to read it. And I find that frustrating and sad.
I loved this story. It moved me. It made me connect with characters deeply. It made me realize that while I’ve been outraged and upset about police brutality, it’s been on an issue level—I’ve objected to ideas like racism and profiling and injustice. THE HATE U GIVE made me think about aspects I hadn’t faced or had only vaguely considered, made me think about the communities affected by police brutality and the friends and family members left behind. It made me see the victims as not simply blurbs in headlines, but as complex people. It showed the ripple effects of police brutality through a whole community.
Reading THE HATE U GIVE made me think about another story I’ve read called PIECING ME TOGETHER by Renee Watson. It also made me wonder what the novel would have looked like if it had been from Starr’s friend Kenya’s perspective. Her father is a local gang leader who abuses her mother. I don’t mean this as a criticism of the story at all. Telling it from Starr’s point-of-view really showed the tug-of-war in her life between the black community where she lived and the white community where she went to school, which was a powerful element. But I hope that someone tells Kenya’s story, too.
Content Notes
Recommended for Ages 14 up.
Cultural Elements Starr and her family are black. Starr dates a white boy, but hasn’t told her dad yet. Her best friends at school are white and Asian.
Profanity/Crude Language Content Extreme profanity used frequently.
Romance/Sexual Content References to making out, kissing between a boy and girl. Starr’s boyfriend asked her to have sex with him, but she refused, and was angry at him for even bringing it up. Later, she initiates some sexual contact (hand under clothes) but stops.
Spiritual Content Starr’s family prays together on multiple occasions.
Violent Content Starr hears gunshots at a party she’s attending and later learns someone was killed there. She witnesses police shoot her unarmed friend after pulling him over. Gang members threaten and attack a local business man and a young gang member. Starr doesn’t see the attacks, but does see the resulting injuries. Starr’s half-brother, Seven, worries about his mom, who continually lets a man live with her even though he beats her.
Protests turn violent. Protesters damage police cars, businesses, etc. Starr and her friends are upset and believe that only makes the conflict worse.
Drug Content Teen drinking at the party Starr attends at the beginning of the book. She smells pot smoke there, too.
About Chaotic Good Cameron’s cosplay–dressing like a fictional character–is finally starting to earn her attention–attention she hopes to use to get into the CalTech costume department for college. But when she wins a major competition, she inadvertently sets off a firestorm of angry comments from male fans.
When Cameron’s family moves the summer before her senior year, she hopes to complete her costume portfolio in peace and quiet away from the abuse. Unfortunately, the only comic shop in town–her main destination for character reference–is staffed by a dudebro owner who challenges every woman who comes into the shop.
At her twin brother’s suggestion, Cameron borrows a set of his clothes and uses her costuming expertise to waltz into the shop as Boy Cameron, where she’s shocked at how easily she’s accepted into the nerd inner sanctum. Soon, Cameron finds herself drafted into a D&D campaign alongside the jerky shop-owner Brody, friendly (almost flirtatiously so) clerk Wyatt, handsome Lincoln, and her bro Cooper, dragged along for good measure.
But as her “secret identity” gets more and more entrenched, Cameron’s portfolio falls by the wayside–and her feelings for Lincoln threaten to make a complicated situation even more precarious.
My Review I had a ton of fun reading this story for its inclusion of Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) references and even descriptions of play as well as the scenes where Cameron sews costumes. I liked her spunky attitude and soft heart made me root for her from the first page to the last. Wyatt (Why) had me at hello. Such a great, offbeat character. Loved him!
The DnD parts of the story cracked me up and made me wish I was in the middle of my very own campaign. It highlighted all the fun parts of the game but also drew some attention to some of the girl-bashing that can happen. I kind of wish there had been more resolution between Cam and the boy who harassed her in person. In the story it becomes clear he kind of doesn’t get how his behavior affects others and is deeply stuck thinking about his own past hurts. Obviously there are people like that in real life, and sometimes they just don’t grow out of those hurtful behaviors, so in that way the story kept it pretty real. I did like the way her parents both supported Cameron’s interests but also challenged her and protected her. (I know that’s really vague… I don’t want to reveal some of the story elements, but I liked the relationship between Cameron and her parents.)
Another great surprise in Chaotic Good is the way the DnD campaign is often relayed in the form of graphic novel panels. So clever! I loved that idea. It set the campaign story apart from the narrative in a really fun way and added some visual humor, too.
On the whole, I enjoyed this book and felt like I tore through the story, always eager for the next chapter.
Recommended for Ages 14 up.
Cultural Elements
Cameron’s twin brother Cooper and her friend Wyatt are both gay.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
Extreme profanity used pretty frequently.
Romance/Sexual Content Kissing between boy and girl and two boys. Cameron references climbing into bed with a boy she finds attractive. She and a boy get into some heavy kissing and making out. At every step, he asks for her consent. When he seems interested in getting under her dress, she asks him to stop, saying she’s not ready yet, and he respects her wishes.
Cameron finds herself the victim of some online bullying and pretty intense trolling. She torments herself by reading comments on her blog from haters. These commenters leave cruel and sometimes explicit comments, sometimes referring to her with derogatory language.
Spiritual Content Characters engage in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign in which one character pretends to be a wizard who can do spells.
Violent Content Some narration of battles described for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Mild violence.
Drug Content
None.
Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
About More Than We Can Tell
Rev Fletcher is battling the demons of his past. But with loving adoptive parents by his side, he’s managed to keep them at bay…until he gets a letter from his abusive father and the trauma of his childhood comes hurtling back.
Emma Blue spends her time perfecting the computer game she built from scratch, rather than facing her parents’ crumbling marriage. She can solve any problem with the right code, but when an online troll’s harassment escalates, she’s truly afraid.
When Rev and Emma meet, they both long to lift the burden of their secrets and bond instantly over their shared turmoil. But when their situations turn dangerous, their trust in each other will be tested in ways they never expected.
My Review I loved Letters to the Lost, which was Kemmerer’s debut novel, and as soon as I heard that one of the characters from that story—Rev—would be starring in his own companion novel, I knew I had to get ahold of a copy. Then once I got the copy in my hands, I worried about how it would stack up to Letters. I know—I always do this. So finally, I broke down and started to read.
And even though I’m still not getting a lot of sleep with my new littlest one underfoot, I could not put this book down. If I didn’t read it in one sitting, I read it in two. I flew through the pages.
Getting to know more about Rev and his history and getting to see him confront his inner demons sucked me straight into the heart of this tale. I also love that it features not only a hardcore gamer girl, but one who coded her very own online video game! Go, girl! The experiences she describes as a player—the way some other players say ugly things or harass her—is terrible but too true. I can’t help but hope that a story like this will continue to bring light to these situations and start some conversations or change some hearts.
Brigid Kemmerer is quickly becoming one of those authors whose books I want to pre-order as soon as the option becomes available. I loved both Letters to the Lost and More than We Can Tell and I absolutely can’t wait to see what story she tells next.
Recommended for Ages 12 up.
Cultural Elements
Rev is part of a multi-racial family. He’s white and his (adoptive) parents are black. Other characters are white.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
Moderate profanity used fairly infrequently. Rev himself feels negatively about cursing.
Romance/Sexual Content Emma receives threatening emails which contain sexual innuendo. Kissing between boy and girl. A man attempts to assault a girl.
Spiritual Content Rev was raised by an abusive father who misused scripture as an excuse to torture him. Nevertheless, he still feels a close bond with the Bible, though we more often see him use it to govern his behavior rather than as a source of comfort. Rev meets a girl outside a church several times, which also carries this unspoken feeling that he feels safe near religious things.
Violent Content Rev shares brief memories of physical abuse at the hands of his father: a forced tattoo, a burn, broken arm, etc. One scene shows a man slamming a girl’s head against a car window and attempting to assault her.
Drug Content
None.
Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
