Category: Reviews

Love, Hate & Other Filters by Samira Ahmed | ARC Review

Posted January 11, 2018 in Reviews / 1 Comment

*Thanks so much to NetGalley and Soho Teen for providing an ARC copy for review! What a better way to start 2018 off than to receive one of those coveted emails from NetGalley that one of my “wishes” had been granted? I was jumping up and down with glee when I saw the email come through only a few days into the new year, as Love, Hate & Other Filters is no doubt one of the most coveted YA releases of 2018. I eagerly downloaded the title to my Kindle and read Maya’s story about love, family, fear and hope […]

Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin | Review

Posted January 3, 2018 in Reviews / 7 Comments

“I refused to be shamed.”- Kindle Edition, Location 3718 Young Jane Young was my first read of 2018, and I couldn’t have asked for a better book to kick off the year with. Funny, feminist, and surprisingly poignant, Young Jane Young is a story about defining oneself, reinventing oneself, and embracing oneself at different points in a woman’s life. Borrowing heavily from the Monica Lewinsky scandal of the 1990s, Young Jane Young focuses on a political scandal with a young 20 year old Jewish intern, Aviva Grossman, who is caught having an affair with the Congressman she interns for (who […]

Far From the Tree by Robin Benway | Review

Posted December 22, 2017 in Reviews / 10 Comments

There’s a reason Robin Benway seems to be winning ALL THE AWARDS this fall for Far From the Tree– it’s a brilliant, emotional, evocative novel that takes a simple yet vast question from its dust jacket- “What does it mean to be a family,” and builds such a beautiful and layered world around exploring the answer, or many different answers between siblings Maya, Joaquin, and Grace. The novel begins with a brilliant parallel foundation of protagonist Grace following the fate of her family pattern and giving birth to her daughter as a teenager. As Grace struggles with the cascade of […]

Book Buddies Review: Bittersweet by Sarah Ockler

Posted December 18, 2017 in Book Buddies Reviews, Reviews / 4 Comments

Book Buddies is a fun, collaborative review feature that I participate in once a season with my friend Lauren who runs the blog Bookmarklit. We choose a themed book for the season, read it, and then answer fun questions that pertain to the book’s themes and each feature the book in our own way! Check out the second part of our feature on Lauren’s blog! Check out Lauren’s post here! Mini Review While I enjoy Sarah Ockler’s writing, I once again seem unable to truly find my groove with them. I was enticed by Bittersweet from the gorgeous cover, the […]

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez | Review

Posted December 11, 2017 in Reviews / 3 Comments

*Warning- this review will contain some mild spoilers.* I will be 100% honest and say that this book was not what I was expecting. With the Jane the Virgin reference in the synopsis and the “laugh out loud” funny claim, I was expecting something heavy but with moments of levity and a strong thread of self aware humor throughout, much like the 2018 release American Panda, which also focuses on a protagonist who is a child of immigrants navigating two cultures. However, I found I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter to actually be quite heavy, and at times hard […]

Prince in Disguise by Stephanie Kate Strohm | ARC Review

Posted December 4, 2017 in Reviews / 8 Comments

Anyone who knows me knows that I am obsessed with contemporary books that feature royalty (an obsession likely starting with my love of The Princess Diaries series and continued currently by the Netflix drama, The Crown). So when I saw this at the Disney-Hyperion booth at YallWest I KNEW I had to grab it despite knowing literally nothing about the plot or premise, but the cover and title were enough to know it would firmly fall into my modern day royal obsessed brain. Couple that with the recent news of Prince Harry’s engagement and I couldn’t have read Prince in […]

Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu | Review

Posted November 27, 2017 in Reviews / 8 Comments

It seems like no matter what social media platform I was on at the beginning of fall this year, Moxie was everywhere- Instagram, Twitter, news articles, etc. The punchy hot pink and black cover screamed feminism! in a way that I haven’t seen a YA book do in such a headstrong way before. I was thrilled to see Moxie was taking the internet by storm, and it took me back to my college days where I took several Women’s Studies classes and, like Viv in the book, truly understood what feminism was for the first time and learned about its […]

Shades of London by Maureen Johnson | Series Review

Posted November 20, 2017 in Reviews / 13 Comments

The first book of Maureen Johnson’s paranormal series had been collecting dust on my “shelf of shame” for several years after I picked it up from a Scholastic warehouse book sale, not completely sure what it was about but remembering that the title sounded familiar. This fall I’ve been going through a bit of a “spooky” reading phase (spooky being a highly subjective term as I do not do horror) and decided to pick up The Name of the Star on a whim one October weekend. I was enthralled by the books and by this introduction to Maureen’s writing (which […]

Black Dog Bay Series Review | My Obsession with Idyllic New England Coastal Towns Continues

Posted November 13, 2017 in Reviews / 8 Comments

I 100% blame Lauren for this binge read, as she recommended this series to me knowing my obsession with small, adorable New England Coastal towns (having lived my entire life on the West Coast, East Coast beach towns fascinate me). I found these books through my library’s Overdrive (hallelujah) and they proved to be the perfect books to binge toward the end of the summer, as a ridiculous heat wave (I am talking 113 degrees F) rolled through California and made the Labor Day weekend definitely feel like an extension of summer. The first book in the series started out […]

Boyfriend Book Reviews | There’s Someone Inside Your House

Posted October 30, 2017 in Reviews / 9 Comments

Boyfriend Book Reviews is a feature where my book-loving boyfriend, Max, reads and reviews YA that I either haven’t yet read or is outside of my current TBR. If you want a thorough and thoughtful perspective on a guy’s take on YA, keep reading! So as I’m sure if you’ve read one of my reviews before you know I’m a fan of the horror genre. When this one crossed my proverbial desk I will confess I was excited. “And so it begins,” I thought. Using my advanced knowledge of the “Teen Slasher” genre, I was ready to dig into […]