As I’m trying to come to grips with the perennial fact that the number of books I read far outpaces the books I’m able to review, I thought I’d try doing a monthly round-up to catch the ones that I’ve read and want to share but don’t have time to do a full review of. Please let me know what you think of this in the comments!

Middle Grade

• Dragonslayer by Tui T. Sutherland. Read by Shannon McManus. Scholastic, 2020 – My teen and I have now listened to all of the Wings of Fire books together. This is the first one to star humans rather than dragons, with plenty of appearances by favorite dragon characters.
• What Fell from the Sky by Adrianna Cuevas. Read by Giordan Diaz, PJ Morgan and 6 other narrators (!). Dreamscape Media, 2025. – Cuban-American and Texan Pineda Matlage loves being a prankster, but life produces much bigger adventures when an extraterrestrial arrives on the planet, separated from her parents, at the same time the US Army shows up pretending to be two different sides, but taking over the town for real. Great fun while reflecting on differences and community.

Teen

• Brewed with Love by Shelly Page. Read by Sandra Okuboyejo. Joy Revolution, 2025 – Sage, a teen witch, tries to invent a potion to cure heartbreak and save her Nana’s potion shop from a large conglomerate while trying to ignore her former best friend and first crush, Ximena, who’s started working at the shop. Sweet and cozy with realistic looks at the hard parts of relationships.
• Brownstone by Samual Teer and Mar Julia. Versify, 2024 – In this Printz and Cybils award-winning graphic novel, Almudena is sent to live with the father she’s never met in the Bronx for the summer. She doesn’t speak Spanish and he doesn’t speak English, but with the help of the community, they muddle through their relationship and fixing up a brownstone. Funny and deeply heartfelt, with spot-on observations about issues from gentrification to homophobia. Also, it made my teen cry, a rare thing indeed. It would be interesting paired with Tangleroot by Kalela Williams, which also features a teen exploring roots she hadn’t been particularly interested in before.
• Guava and Grudges by Alexis Castellanos. Bloomsbury, 2024 – Ana Maria (Amy at school) dreams of bringing her family’s Cuban bakery to renewed prosperity with fusion baked goods, and of winning an online baking contest to earn the money to go to a real pastry school. When the boy she had an intense one-day relationship with on college tour in LA shows up in town, part of the family of the rival bakery across the street, will love be able to triumph over the ingrained hatred? Mostly lots of fun, though I got a little tired of how many times Ana Maria fell back into distrusting the boy who was clearly meant for her.

• Shadow Thief by Intisar Khanani. Snowy Wings Publishing, 2023 – This prequel novella introduces Hitomi, a street orphan in a cosmopolitan city she wasn’t born to as she struggles to earn a place in the legendary Shadow League, the most coordinated resistance to the evil mage who’s controlling the sultan and disappearing people. I read it first, but having been written afterwards, the characters might mean more to you if you start with Sunbolt.
• Sunbolt by Intisar Khanani. Snowy Wings Publishing, 2023 – This story kicks off with a bang as Hitomi struggles to evade soldiers (her features mean that she stands out in her city), work with the Shadow League to rescue the one noble family that’s been resisting the evil mage, and escape when things go wrong. Hitomi has just the right blend of courage, integrity, and stubbornness to keep me riveted to her story, so that I proceeded directly on to the next book in the series.
• Memories of Ash by Intisar Khanani. Snowy Wings Publishing, 2024 – There’s very little that I can say about this book without spoilers for the first two. Mostly, I cared intensely about Hitomi and her journey. At every turn, things are made harder for her with stakes so high that I often finished reading sessions with my hands shaking. I’m very much looking forward to Debts of Fire, due to come out in July!

Adult

• A Duke Never Tells by Suzanne Enoch. Bramble, April 2025 – A young noblewoman disguises herself as her aunt’s companion to investigate the household of the new duke she’s engaged to but has never met. Meanwhile, the duke has his man of business pretend to be the duke so that he can escape the role and visitors he never wanted in this light kisses-only double romance. It took me halfway through to really care about the characters, and then I did enjoy it.
• Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett. Read by Ell Potter and Michael Dodds. Del Rey, 2025 – The long-awaited finish to the trilogy! What could possibly go wrong if you put a professor decidedly lacking in people skills in charge of a fairy kingdom? Especially if the new king’s stepmother might have found a way to exact vengeance on him for taking the throne back. I waited in line at the library for the first two audiobooks, but just went out and bought this one. I’m sure I’ll be going back to this trilogy.
• The Elements of Baking: Making Any Recipe Gluten-free, Dairy-free, Egg-free or Vegan by Katarina Cermelj, Mobius, 2024 – This is an exhaustive and life-changing coverage of baking for special diets, with the first quarter devoted to the theories and chemistry behind substituting out these major baking elements, then going through a suite of basic recipes one by one to make each of the changes in turn. Finally, there are a handful of recipes for each of these special diets. This is more science than I usually read, but as I can’t have gluten or dairy and we have a housemate allergic to eggs, this is opening up recipes like Swiss rolls that I never thought would be possible – so exciting!

• Payback’s a Witch by Lana Harper. Read by Jeremy Carlisle Parker. Berkley, 2021 – I believe this one was recommended by Stephanie Burgis. I don’t usually enjoy revenge stories, but this tale of a woman returning to the small magical town she was raised with and joining with friends from two of the three other magical families in town to take down the man who cheated on them all, and whose family has been managing to hoard the shared power of them all, was intensely satisfying. Also, a nice spicy sapphic romance, with the remaining two in the trilogy also out.
• Somewhere Beyond the Sea by TJ Klune. Tor, 2024 – I just love these books. I need to track down the rest of them.
• The Turner House by Angela Flournoy. Read by Adenrele Ojo. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015 – Read to see if it would make a good pick for my ESL book club, as it’s set in nearby Detroit. Way too many characters for the learners, plus a tad depressing for me. It covers several generations of a large Black family from the South to finding their way in Detroit and its collapse, and you should perhaps trust the opinion of the National Book Award Committee more than mine.

• Watson’s Sketchbook by Molly Knox Ostertag. 2025 – So delightful! Ostertag’s sketches and comic sequences go story by story through the Sherlock Holmes canon, focusing just on the interactions between Sherlock and Watson with the understanding that they’re gay. The dialogue is nearly all direct from the source, but thought bubbles, expressions, and other comments make it both funnier and more heartfelt. You can read it for free on Substack or buy it from their website.
• Wooing the Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis. Bramble, 2024 – I loved this book enough to buy both regular and special editions of it (a first for me) and may purchase the audiobook at some point, too.