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Finish Lines by Sarah Broyles

Review: Finish Lines by Sarah Broyles

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Finish Lines
Sarah Broyles
First Second
Published June 16, 2026

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About Finish Lines

Miranda needs something to write about in her college application essays. But what?

Miranda has a plan: ace her junior year, get into an Ivy League school, and skip anything that doesn’t look good on a college application. But the pressure is getting to her, and now her parents have cut her off from every club, competition, and committee she’s a part of.

Desperate to get back on track, Miranda sets her sights on the Texas Water Safari—a 260-mile canoe race her mom was set to do with her granddad. With her mom sidelined by an injury, Miranda joins her grandfather. It’s grueling, messy, and scorching hot.

Can a perfectionist survive the wild long enough to find out who she is outside of a college checklist?

My Review

I love seeing sports books celebrating activities beyond the traditionally represented ones, so I was especially excited to stumble upon this book about competitive canoeing. To describe this simply as a sports book, though, doesn’t leave room for some of the other wonderful components that Broyles has stitched together here.

At first, Miranda sees the canoe race with her grandfather as a way to skirt her parents’ new rule requiring her to take it easy and reduce her commitments. The race will make a great college essay topic, she reasons. Plus, it’ll be amazing if she and her grandfather win the race this year.

As Miranda and her grandfather prep for the race, Miranda realizes that the trek will be more challenging than she predicted. She’s also stunned to learn that her grandfather doesn’t approach the race with any intention of winning. Finishing the race, he reasons, is the real victory.

This attitude and some of the rules on the river challenge Miranda’s desire to push herself beyond what’s reasonable (and sometimes safe). She has to decide how to balance the elements of the race, her relationships with her family, and her school work.

I thought the parallel stories of Miranda’s overcommitment and her mom’s addiction recovery and chronic illness were really nicely done. We don’t think of socially acceptable forms of addiction as problematic, but they can be just as harmful to ourselves and our relationships with others.

This book made me want to get out on the river and spend time in nature. It also made me appreciate intergenerational relationships, especially those within families.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 14 up.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Mild profanity used very infrequently.

Romance/Sexual Content
None.

Spiritual Content
None.

Violent Content
Situations of peril on the river.

Drug Content
Miranda’s parents are recovered addicts. The story peripherally follows her mom’s struggle with chronic pain as an addict in recovery and frames Miranda’s tendency to overcommit as a kind of addiction.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use but help support this blog. I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

Review: Thirsty: A Novel by Jas Hammonds

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Thirsty: A Novel
Jas Hammonds
Roaring Brook Press
Published May 14, 2024

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About Thirsty: A Novel

It’s the summer before college and eighteen-year-old Blake Brenner and her girlfriend, Ella, have one goal: join the mysterious and exclusive Serena Society. The sorority promises status and lifelong connections to a network of powerful, trailblazing women of color. Ella’s acceptance is a sure thing—she’s the daughter of a Serena alum. Blake, however, has a lot more to prove.

As a former loner from a working-class background, Blake lacks Ella’s pedigree and confidence. Luckily, she finds courage at the bottom of a liquor bottle. When she drinks, she’s bold, funny, and unstoppable—and the Serenas love it. But as pledging intensifies, so does Blake’s drinking, until it’s seeping into every corner of her life. Ella assures Blake that she’s fine; partying hard is what it takes to make the cut.

But success has never felt so much like drowning. With her future hanging in the balance and her past dragging her down, Blake must decide how far she’s willing to go to achieve her glittering dreams of success—and how much of herself she’s willing to lose in the process.

My Review

What an incredible book. I felt as though I was right there with Blake, riding the high of being deeply in love and long summer days. But even from the early pages, you get this sense that something is off. Blake doesn’t see it yet, and at first I thought maybe it was just me not buying into the narrative.

(Can we pause for a sec and just appreciate the kind of writing that can do that? Draw you into a story so completely that you both root for the main character and suspect she’s lying to herself? Amazing.)

As the story progresses, it becomes crystal clear that Blake’s relationship with Ella comes at a high personal cost. Even though Blake loves her. Even though Ella loves Blake.

I don’t want to give away what happens, but I do want to say that I appreciate that Hammonds doesn’t end the story where I expected. We follow Blake into the first chapters a life she couldn’t have imagined at the start of the story. We get to see the working out of some of her choices. I love that, and I think that kind of representation is incredibly important in young adult literature.

Thirsty is the second book by Jas Hammonds that I’ve read. Their debut, We Deserve Monuments was fantastic, and yet, somehow, I think Thirsty might be even better. I’m pretty sure Hammonds is now a must-read author for me.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 14 up.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Strong profanity used fairly frequently.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing, references to sex and showering/undressing together.

Spiritual Content
None.

Violent Content
Non-consensual outing. Transphobic rhetoric. Toxic relationship elements. Racial microaggressions. Suicidal ideation and self-hate.

Drug Content
Blake and other teens drink alcohol and smoke using a vape pen. While a lot of scenes show drinking, they also show the consequences and regrets that Blake has later. The scenes explore the harm that drinking causes. The character who smokes decides to quit during the book.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use but help support this blog. I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

Review: Under the Fading Sky by Cynthia Kadohata

Book Review and Content, Contemporary, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , , ,

Under the Fading Sky
Cynthia Kadohata
Atheneum
Published April 22, 2025

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About Under the Fading Sky

A teen boy thinks his vaping habit is harmless until it becomes a crippling addiction of nightmarish dimensions in this searing young adult novel from Newbery and National Book Award winner Cynthia Kadohata.

Sixteen-year-old Elijah is pretty damn sick of his parents always being on his case about vaping. It’s not like he’s shooting up or knocking back pills. Until something changes, so slowly Jacob isn’t even aware it’s happening. Instead of vaping every now and then when he wants to, he’s vaping all the time because he has to.

And soon, Elijah and his friends need even more than vaping and are stumbling their way into the sprawling drug culture of Southern California, where girls sell pictures of themselves for vape and pill money, and the dealers are cutthroat. The more desperate the teens become, the more money they need. And to get that money they’re being blackmailed into an impossible choice—and an end you won’t see coming.

My Review

Under the Fading Sky gets pretty dark. It has a strong, conversational voice. Elijah speaks directly to the reader in what sometimes feels like a stream-of-consciousness narrative. It creates the sense that we’re figuring things out right alongside him.

Elijah is a biracial sixteen-year-old. His dad and grandfather served in the military, and they talk about things they witnessed in combat. While Elijah isn’t part of a military campaign, he views the experience of his generation as being at war, citing the high numbers of teens who die from drug overdose or suicide each year. As someone deeply interested in history, he sometimes connects events from his current life to moments or trends from history, which draws some interesting comparisons.

As Elijah becomes more deeply enmired in drug culture, he and his friends begin doing things that are far out of character for themselves. Elijah has moments of clarity, where he can’t believe what he’s doing, but he also has a lot of moments where he’s so fixated on what he wants that he isn’t able to feel discomfort or shame about his other choices.

One thing that I found myself really wishing for with this novel is an author’s note at the end. I listened to this novel as an audiobook, and it didn’t include any extra material, like resources for getting help for drug or mental health issues or any clarification for what elements of the story are based on research. I would have liked to know what led her to write the novel and, more importantly, what she learned in her research as she wrote the story.

Conclusion

Under the Fading Sky will appeal to readers who like gritty contemporary young adult novels about kids who face addiction and mental health issues. Please take care reading this. The book contains suicide death and a character who repeatedly tries to pressure others to commit murder.

Content Notes for Under the Fading Sky

Recommended for Ages 16 up.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Strong profanity used somewhat frequently.

Romance/Sexual Content
A man Elijah and his friends buy drugs from exposes himself to them. References to sexual abuse and coerced sex. Kissing.

Spiritual Content
References to Elijah’s family identifying as Christian and praying together before their meals. Elijah describes some of the people with bad intentions that he meets as demons, and meeting them makes him feel as though he has stepped into a demon world.

Violent Content
A boy gets injured doing a dangerous skateboarding stunt. Elijah’s dad and grandfather briefly share war stories from their time in combat, including reference to buddies who were killed. One describes a person severely injured who begged for death. References to sexual abuse and assault. One character repeatedly encourages another to commit murder for money. References to blackmail and drug overdose. One character dies by suicide. It doesn’t happen on page, but the main character is immediately aware and is first on-scene/first to call emergency services afterward.

Drug Content
Elijah and his friends vape and take pills. He attends recovery meetings with other kids who have used other drugs. The story explores the ways in which vaping and the pills affect Elijah’s attitude about school, his family, and his behavior/boundaries. Elijah learns about a person who overdosed.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use but help support this blog. I borrowed a copy of this book from my library. All opinions are my own.

Review: The Fragments That Remain by Mackenzie Angeconeb

Book Review and Content, Contemporary, Poetry, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , , , , ,

The Fragments That Remain
Mackenzie Angeconeb
Cormorant Books
Published March 8, 2025

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About The Fragments That Remain

First-year college student Andy can’t afford to slow down. Study, volunteer, work, make new friends, fall in love ― whatever it takes to keep her from obsessing over her brother Ally’s death, which was ruled suicide by overdose. Navigating a new life chapter without her “honorary twin,” Andy writes letters to him as she strives to embrace her bisexuality and her Indigenous identity. Once she discovers Ally’s hidden poems, Andy pours over them to make sense of her brother’s life ― and his death.

Back in senior year, Ally dreamed of being a poet. His parents encouraged him to write as a hobby, but they always expected him to inherit the family-owned bookshop with his sister. Ally wrote to cope with his emptiness, until he turned to drugs to fill the void.

Reaching for her brother through unanswered words, Andy must reckon with living a once-shared life alone.

My Review

This novel is divided into three parts. Andy’s letters to her brother make up the first and last parts of the book. The middle part is made up of poems her brother Ally wrote and left in a box she finds partway through the story.

The letters read like diary entries. They show Andy processing her brother’s death, dealing with grief, and her struggle to form new connections with others. At times, Andy circles between grief and depression, vividly describing her emotional pain. When she discovers the poems, she wrestles with wanting to know Ally’s thoughts and worrying she’ll discover something she can’t unknow.

I found her journey easily relatable. She had a lot of guilt over her brother’s death. At one point, she experiences rejection and has an explosively angry reaction. She doesn’t become violent, but she feels incredibly betrayed and says some hurtful (ace-phobic) things. As she processes her feelings and reflects on her behavior, she realizes she acted badly and apologizes.

I love her mom’s reaction when she tells her parents she’s dating a girl. Her mom is so chill about it that her dad thinks maybe she doesn’t realize what Andy is telling them, so he repeats it, and her mom is like, yeah, I know, but what’s her name? It is a sweet moment.

On the whole, I enjoyed the book. I think readers who enjoy stories that reflect on unexpected tragedy or address the fallout of addiction or loss will want to read The Fragments That Remain.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 14 up.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
None.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing, references to sex (not shown on-scene).

Spiritual Content
Andy reads her letters aloud and thinks of it as reading them to her brother’s spirit. Vague reference to praying to whatever gods are listening.

Violent Content
References to drug overdose/death by suicide.

Drug Content
References to drug use.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use but help support this blog. I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

Review: A Fragile Enchantment by Allison Saft

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A Fragile Enchantment
Allison Saft
Wednesday Books
Published January 30, 2024

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About A Fragile Enchantment

In this romantic fantasy of manners from New York Times bestselling author Allison Saft, a magical dressmaker commissioned for a royal wedding finds herself embroiled in scandal when a gossip columnist draws attention to her undeniable chemistry with the groom.

Niamh Ó Conchobhair has never let herself long for more. The magic in her blood that lets her stitch emotions and memories into fabric is the same magic that will eventually kill her. Determined to spend the little time she has left guaranteeing a better life for her family, Niamh jumps at the chance to design the wardrobe for a royal wedding in the neighboring kingdom of Avaland.

But Avaland is far from the fairytale that she imagined. While young nobles attend candlelit balls and elegant garden parties, unrest brews amid the working class. The groom himself, Kit Carmine, is prickly, abrasive, and begrudgingly being dragged to the altar as a political pawn. But when Niamh and Kit grow closer, an unlikely friendship blossoms into something more—until an anonymous columnist starts buzzing about their chemistry, promising to leave them alone only if Niamh helps to uncover the royal family’s secrets. The rot at the heart of Avaland runs deep, but exposing it could risk a future she never let herself dream of, and a love she never thought possible.

Transporting readers to a Regency England-inspired fantasy world, A Fragile Enchantment is a sweeping romance threaded with intrigue, unforgettable characters, and a love story for the ages.

My Review

I’ve been a fan of Allison Saft’s books since her debut, DOWN COMES THE NIGHT. She is so good at delivering intricate story worlds and complicated characters navigating some kind of mysterious circumstances. In A FRAGILE ENCHANTMENT, a tailor who can imbue the clothes she makes with magic and a younger prince fight their growing attraction to one another as an entire kingdom seems ready to crumble around them.

It’s got a bit of a grumpy vs. sunshine vibe, which I really enjoyed. The story also explores chronic illness and addiction pretty openly. Neither of those is often explored in fantasy novels, so that was nice to see.

The romantic arc absolutely hooked me. I read this book in two sessions because I really could not stop thinking about it and needed to know how it would end. I loved the directions the story took, especially the ones I hadn’t anticipated. There were a couple of times that things took me by surprise. That was fun.

All in all, I had a fabulous time reading this book, and I’m as big an Allison Saft fan as ever. I’m already excited about whatever story she has coming up next. I think fans of Kiera Cass would like this book a lot.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 16 up.

Representation
Regency-England inspired. Some people groups seem to be inspired by Spanish or Irish people. The main character had a past relationship with a girl. Some characters are interested in same-sex relationships, but it’s stigmatized in their society. One character is an alcoholic in recovery. Another is chronically ill.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Extreme profanity used somewhat frequently.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between boy and girl. Kissing between two girls. One scene contains explicit sexual content.

Spiritual Content
Some characters have the ability to perform magic. This is passed down in families from the old days when the Fair Ones walked among people.

Violent Content
Situations of peril. One character can control plants and threatens violence through them. Another can control lightning and tries to kill someone.

Drug Content
One character is a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for a year. In several scenes, people around him drink alcohol. Sometimes, people make disparaging remarks about his drinking or assume he is drunk again.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support this blog. I received a free copy of A FRAGILE ENCHANTMENT in exchange for my honest review. All opinions my own.

Review: The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman by Gennifer Choldenko

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The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman
Gennifer Choldenko
Knopf Books for Young Readers
Published June 11, 2024

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About The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman

Readers will be rooting for a happy ending for Hank in Newbery-Honor-winner Gennifer Choldenko’s gripping story of a boy struggling to hold his family together when his mom doesn’t come home.

When eleven-year-old Hank’s mom doesn’t come home, he takes care of his toddler sister, Boo, like he always does. But it’s been a week now. They are out of food and mom has never stayed away this long… Hank knows he needs help, so he and Boo seek out the stranger listed as their emergency contact.

But asking for help has consequences. It means social workers, and a new school, and having to answer questions about his mom that he’s been trying to keep secret. And if they can’t find his mom soon, Hank and Boo may end up in different foster homes–he could lose everything.

Gennifer Choldenko has written a heart-wrenching, healing, and ultimately hopeful story about how complicated family can be. About how you can love someone, even when you can’t rely on them. And about the transformative power of second chances.

My Review

This book is as good as everyone says it is. Every review I’ve seen has raved about how full of heart and unbelievably fabulous this book is.

Well. It really is! Oh my gosh. Hank’s relationship with his little sister Boo is the absolute sweetest. He takes care of her so attentively. They have these little rhymes or songs they do together, rituals that he uses to comfort her or help her settle.

After he takes Boo to a family friend’s house to wait for his mom to return, the story really kicks into high gear. Hank has a challenging relationship with his new caregiver, who keeps referring to him (age eleven) as a teenager in a way that leaves no doubt she’s got some baggage or past trauma somewhere in there. Their relationship makes so much sense, though. Sometimes Hank does kid things, and she reacts as if he’s deliberately trying to be hurtful. It’s not all bad, though. She is an excellent caregiver for Boo and helps Hank regear their relationship into one more appropriate to siblings rather than child and caregiver.

Hank is awesome, too. He draws pictures, plays basketball, and skateboards. I could see him being a really relatable character at a lot of levels.

I thought the story did a great job showing some of the big feelings that kids experience in a family in crisis and some of the layers to those feelings. Hank shuts people out, not wanting to connect since he doesn’t know how long he’ll be with his caregiver. He holds his anger close. Because his ability to trust adults (starting with his mom) has been broken, he has a really hard time trusting the other adults in his life. His behavior felt pretty realistic.

I can easily see why so many people love this book. I felt like I flew through the pages and could not stop reading. If you enjoyed Kyra Just for Today by Sara Zarr, definitely check this one out.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 8 to 12.

Representation
Hank enters the foster care system shortly after the book begins. His mom is an alcoholic. He has a diverse group of school friends and is close to a Latine family.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
None.

Romance/Sexual Content
References to someone getting a divorce in the past. References to Hank’s mom’s past boyfriends.

Spiritual Content
None.

Violent Content
Situations of peril. Someone has gotten in a car accident (off scene), and the car shows the damage still. A toddler sits in the back seat of a car without a car seat. A drunk person attempts to operate a vehicle with children inside it. A caregiver abandons children at a store.

Drug Content
Hank sees his mom drink alcohol. In one scene, she’s very drunk. At one point, he tries to reconcile her behavior and her statements about it. He rationalizes that every adult drinks sometimes. It doesn’t mean his mom has a problem. It sounds like he’s regurgitating things that his mom has said about her drinking. He can’t escape the knowledge that when she drinks, she doesn’t take care of him or Boo very well.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use but help support this blog. I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.