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Tired of watching life from the sidelines, Baylee Kunkel wonders who she would be if she weren’t wearing the body of a fat girl. Although Baylee projects a confident version of herself, she is wildly insecure, judging herself and holding on to negative feelings about her body image. When it comes to the way she looks and the way she presents herself to the world, Baylee lives by a strict fashion code: She does not tuck her shirt into her pants and she does not knowingly accessorize with something that will accentuate her adipose tissue. Yearning to be seen, to be wanted, and to beRead More →

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Charlene Allen’s debut novel, Play the Game is one rich with riddles and layered with mystery. It tells the story of Ed Hennessey, a fifteen-year-old game designer with a brain that works like that of a scientist. A Black teenager, Ed is a lover of rebus puzzles, fart jokes, and imagined worlds. In the Ed-i-verse, Ed has created mutants and monsters to make-up for what isn’t working in his life. Sadly, he is tragically shot in the parking lot of Yard restaurant by Phillip Singer, a White huckster of stolen goods. Now, a year later, Singer has been shot, and Victor (aka VZ) Gleason’s friendRead More →

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In: Middle Grade Reviews, Realistic Fiction
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With her novel Green Eyes and Ham, Mary Penney explores multiple topics relevant to middle grade readers. In her protagonist Abraham Hudson, readers will find a relatable character who confronts familiar conflicts. After all, the junior high years are fraught with challenges revolving around issues like first love, sexuality, friendship, and finding a sense of belonging where everything looks different, smells different, tastes different and where the language and customs are also unknowns. For twelve years, Ham has been homeschooled, but when his mother, who is a priest, experiences a cardiac event and needs to pare some of the stress from her life, Ham isRead More →

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Reading You Don’t Live Here left me wowed and gushing that author Robyn Schneider is a genius at capturing the search for one’s true self!  In her novel, Schneider not only shares insight into human nature and how keeping parts of ourselves hidden has consequences but includes multiple metaphors for the therapeutic power of art.  I also laughed out loud when she referred to high school as a “uniquely hellish social experiment” (70). Sixteen-year-old Sasha Bloom is a photographer, an identity she gravitated towards after her mother bought her a camera because Sasha would rather be invisible behind a camera lens than be a continuedRead More →

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Readers of Patricia Wrede, Rainbow Rowell, and Maggie Stiefvater will likely enjoy The Fascinators by Andrew Eliopulos.  For his debut young adult novel, Eliopulos writes a story about friendship, first love, feeling out of place, and delayed dreams.  Through his characters, Sam Fisher and James Dawson, Eliopulos illustrates how waiting for life to begin often gives way to forgetting how to live.  It is also a story about the volatility of life and our magical thinking: that life will start when __.  All readers will be able to fill in the blank with their own wishful thought.  From this book’s characters, readers learn that livingRead More →