Before I get started with the review – the Cybils Award winners were announced today! And while I really like reading through as many of the finalists as I can, going for just the winners can be a lot less overwhelming.
I really enjoy Stacey Lee’s books, and I try to read all of Rick Riordan Presents books I can, so I couldn’t resist reading this one – just out this month!
Winston Chu vs. the Whimsies by Stacey Lee. Read by Brian Kim McCormick
Rick Riordan Presents, 2023
Listened to the audiobook through Netgalley.
Ebook and audiobook available through Libby.
Winston Chu has just baked his father’s favorite shoofly pie in his cooking class, in honor of the anniversary of his death – “Dadiversary”. He’s confident in his skateboarding skills, but somehow as he and his best friend, Mac, are heading home, he trips, flipping the pie onto a pair of truly scary-looking men. As they also drive the men away from the store they’re outside, the owner of Mr. Pang’s Whimsies gives Winston an ancient broom and dustpan as a reward. But when things start going missing at home – his soccer jersey, his older sister’s favorite stuffie – even his baby sister – Winston knows he needs to figure out what’s going on before it’s too late.
I had mixed feelings about this book. I loved the mixture of humor, his family’s working through the pain of losing his father, and his four best friends from the soccer team, and the blend of Chinese mythology with modern-day San Francisco. The narrator had a great basic voice for most of the story, but voiced a couple of Winston’s friends in voices that felt just too cartoony for me to really get behind. Stacey Lee writes mostly teen books with strong romance plots, and this had a small romance plotline as well. I was never quite sure why Winston likes the girl he does, but I liked that the relationship developed from pretty epic awkward adoration to a real friendship. Despite all these positive elements, the story never quite came together enough for me to love it in a way I haven’t been quite able to put my finger on. Still, if you’re a fan of the Rick Riordan type, especially the ones with higher silliness quotients like Sal and Gabi Break the Universe, this is an excellent choice.
The Cybils winners will be announced next week – I’ve read all but one of the middle grade fiction finalists and am excited to see which one wins.
Attack of the Black Rectangles by Amy Sarig King. Scholastic, 2022. ISBN 978-1338680522. Read from a library copy. Ebook and audiobook available through Libby.
Mac and his two best friends, Denis and Marci, are most worried about their new 6th grade teacher’s reputation for enforcing good posture and no sweets. Both of these are true, as well as a strict dress code, only enforced for girls. Things really come to a head when they’re assigned to read The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen in a small group, and find that key phrases have been blacked out with Sharpie. All the kids are outraged – but the adults just smile indulgently and tell them that not all boys are as mature as they are.
At the same time as Mac is figuring out how far he trusts himself to take this fight, his always odd father starts to act even weirder. Though the dad doesn’t live with Mac and his mother and grandfather, he starts showing up in the middle of the night to take Mac for drives in Mac’s grandfather’s vintage convertible, which he tells Mac is his spaceship, all while saying increasingly dismissive things about Mac’s mother.
Interspersed with the chapters are letters from the comment section of the local newspaper (lucky Mac to live in a town that still has a locally operated print newspaper!) where people argue about the town’s restrictive regulations. My daughter found this book on my library shelf and read it through before I did. The regulation she was most incensed about was one requiring all houses to be painted white, because of white being the best and most historically accurate color. This is a solid look at censorship from a middle school perspective, with Mac also learning to deal with a bummer of a dad and a first crush. And it’s a rare one that my daughter pulled off the shelf and read straight through before I got to it at all. While looking the author up, I discovered that she just recently had a stroke – I’m sure she could use the support of you going to buy one of her books!
Freewater by Amina Luqman-Dawson. Little, Brown, 2022. ISBN 978-0316056618. Read from a library copy. Ebook and audiobook available through Libby.
Twelve-year-old Homer and his seven-year-old sister Ada flee their plantation in the night, planning to go north with their mother. Unfortunately, their mother is captured and they get lost – but find a guide who takes them to the hidden swamp community of Freewater, where escaped formerly enslaved people and some freeborn children make their home, living off of the swamp and raiding plantations. Meanwhile, we follow several other characters. One of the children of Freewater, Sanzi, chafes at not being able to leave Freewater and longs to help with the work of raiding that Homer and Ada’s guide provided. And at the same time, Homer’s best friend Anna, long ago sold away from her mother, plots to make her own escape, while the Master’s youngest daughter feels more at home in the kitchen with Homer and Ada’s mother than with her own family, and only slowly comes to realize how much separates them. Even as Homer plans to rescue his mother and Anna, he learns of danger to Freewater itself. All of these strands wind tightly together into a climax at Nora’s older sister’s wedding, an event that will be as memorable as her mother hoped, though definitely not in the way she planned. This is a gripping look at a resistance too long forgotten. It deserves the notice it’s been getting – I just felt so lucky that I already had it checked out because it was a Cybils finalist before it won the Newbery.
Thirst by Varsha Bajaj. Nancy Paulsen Books, 2022. ISBN 9780593354391. Read from a library copy. Ebook and audiobook available through Libby.
12-year-old Minni and her older brother Sanjay live with their parents in a shack in the slums of Mumbai. The ocean views are beautiful, but fresh water comes from a slow and unreliable communal tap. Then her brother and his friend run into some water mafia in the city, while Minni and her best friend watch from a car. Soon Minni’s life has changed dramatically: Sanjay and his friend must go to the country to hide from the mafia, while Minni’s mother gets sick and goes to her mother’s house to rest. Minni has to fetch and boil the family’s water and take over her mother’s job cleaning for a wealthy family, all while trying to keep up with her studies so she can pass her exams to go on to the next grade. As Minni contrasts her life with that of the 12-year-old daughter of her employer, she has more and more questions about the inequality she and her community experience and is determined to do what she can to change it.
This is a brief book that manages to paint Minni’s relationships with her family and friends, the struggles for water and phone connection, and her school’s rigid focus on punctuality and memorization in vivid colors. Her community’s needs are many and deep, but while Minni starts to fight as she learns more, she wants to bring positive change to the community she loves, not leave it. Short poems at the ends of chapters reflect her changing feelings. I felt while reading this that it would make a great read-aloud, and found when I looked the author up on Twitter that it is also a Global Read Aloud Selection.
Here are two very funny and fast-moving books – one more realistic and the other fantasy – certain to draw young readers in. I read Ben Yokoyama based on a recommendation from Alison L. Morris on the Book Friends Forever podcast (a year or two ago *cough*), while Winnie Zeng was a Cybils nominee.
Ben Yokoyama and the Cookie of Doom by Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr
Knopf, 2021
ISBN 978-0593302750
Read from a library copy.
8-year-old Ben, whose father is Japanese-American and whose mother is white, is having dinner at a Chinese restaurant with his aunt when he is stunned by the fortune in his fortune cookie: “Live each day as if it were your last.” He takes this very literally and makes a list of goals for his potential last day on earth, and then gets his best friend Janet involved. Soon they are racing around the neighborhood trying to accomplish their goals, including eating forbidden cake from the freezer and racing to finish a complex latch hook project. Behind the humor, though, is some serious heart as Janet deals with the loss of her dad and their entering into a scary backyard leads to befriending an elderly neighbor. The book is filled with copious notebook-style drawings, some of the actual happenings and some metaphorical, like one of an aardvark eating noodles when Ben is described as eating noodles like an aardvark. I promptly went out and bought this for my nephew, as the over-the-top humor and fun illustrations make it perfect for elementary kids who are bridging between early chapter books and middle grade fiction. This is the first of five books in the Cookie Chronicles series.
Winnie Zeng Unleashes a Legend by Katie Zhao
Random House, 2022
ISBN 978-0593426579
Read from a library copy.
11-year-old Winnie is as prepared for middle school as she can get: she’s studied anime and manga and her older sister. Though her dance moves are polished, she wasn’t prepared to be in school with her long-time Chinese school rival, David Zuo. When she tries to find a recipe to beat his class in a bake-off, she opens her family cookbook – which turns out to be magical. Before she knows quite what’s happening, the spirit of her grandmother has taken over her pet rabbit as she’s trying to figure out how to bake mooncakes. When a demon invades her house, the only way she has to defend herself is by using the mooncakes as weapons. And as more and more demons start appearing, she has to work with her grandmother – and very unfortunately, David as well – to learn how to be a shaman to send the evil spirits back where they belong.
This is a funny and fast-paced contemporary fantasy adventure that deals with Winnie trying to find a balance between fitting in and being herself both in middle school and in her family. Bonus points for magical mooncakes, and some sneaky Michigan references.
Now that I’ve put together my statistics, it’s time to get back to reviewing some of my favorite books of last year that weren’t lucky enough to be in the few I managed to write up right away. I was excited enough about the reviews for this book to buy it with one of our audiobook credits rather than waiting months for a hold to come through, and I don’t buy books from previously unknown-to-me authors often.
A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys Read by Kate Handford
Macmillan Audio/Tor, 2022
ISBN 9781250210982
Listened to purchased audiobook. Ebook and audiobook available on Libby.
As the story opens in 2083, Judy Wallach-Stevens is disturbed from a night of not sleeping well by an alarm announcing pollution in the bay near her. As Judy’s a water specialist for the local Chesapeake Watershed of the Dandelion Network – working to restore the Earth to health – she and her wife Carol, along with their nursing baby Dorrie call a van to take them to the site. But what awaits them is not a faulty sensor, but a spaceship with members of two symbiotic species. Their captain, Cytosine, introduces her babies Chlorophyll and Diamond to Dorrie, and says they’ve come to rescue humans from Earth, as they can tell that it will soon become uninhabitable.
From here, more and more strands are introduced into the braid of the story. There’s the part where Cytosine only wants to talk to Judy rather than the Chesapeake’s diplomatic expert because only mothers with babies are important enough to talk to. NASA quickly finds an expert on maternity leave to send in to represent them, while the corporations, exiled to man-made islands off Australia, send in their own representatives. There are of course many different attitudes to conservation and space travel, but also a strong thread of looking at different possibilities around gender expression, as each culture in the book has their own very different customs. Relationships are built, strained, examined. All of this considering the possibility of leaving Earth is grounded – literally – in the rhythms of Judy and Carol’s household’s garden and the Jewish year, as well as the realities of life with babies. Even though the circumstances are dire, it’s filled with love and hope. I couldn’t stop talking about it for at least a month afterwards (which is saying something as Cybils season started immediately afterwards), and it was so rich that I’m sure I’ll go back to it again.
Every year since 2014, I’ve tried to do an audit of my reading, as well as a list of my favorite books of the year. It’s my way of keeping myself accountable,
2021 Overview
I read 209 books in 2022, finishing 204 of them. I reviewed just 55 of them – my worst reviewing year on record – and rated 43 o them at 9 or above.
For the second time, I split out the print library books from the library ebooks. Total library usage was 79.8%, up 3% from 2021. Review copies totaled 9.7%, just slightly more than books I purchased for myself.
Audiobooks and graphic novels are both holding relatively steady from 2021. My ebook reading edged up a couple of percentage points this year – I was unable to drive for the last two months of the year.
Audiobooks and graphic novels are both holding relatively steady from 2021. My ebook reading edged up a couple of percentage points this year – I was unable to drive for the last two months of the year.
What I Read
Fantasy still far in the lead, as usual, with jumps in Romance and Sci-Fi. 2022 needed lots of escapist reading!
Nearly unchanged from last year, but books for younger readers sinking ever lower.
The Authors
I’m trying not to be hard on myself for only a 1% increase in my reading by authors of color over last year.
I got curious about what I’m sharing here vs. what I’m reading for myself. I’m much happier with these percentages.
I haven’t made any effort to read authors outside of the US. It’s just fun to see the map! Other countries represented here are Canada, the UK, Ireland, the Phillipines, Ghana, Nigeria, Germany, Australia and Brazil.
This is about the same as last year. The tiny unlabeled slices are multi-gender author partnerships.
The Characters
In 2019, my percentage of white characters was 39%, in 2020 34%, and in 2021 40%. I’m not doing great here, though I would say I have fewer books by white people about authors of color than I once did.
Changing things up a bit, I split my one column for other diversity types into four. Here’s my total book count of non-Christian religions. Native American, Chinese, and Korean traditional religious practices are all shown in one category.
Here’s the other diversity stats besides ethnicity and religion, mirroring the diversity aspects we’re now tracking in my library’s book orders. In actual book numbers, this translates to 46, 30, and 36 respectively.
I’ve been doing these graphs for several years now – here they are from 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. As always, if you know of any middle grade or teen books, especially fantasy books, that would help me round out the diversity of my reading, please let me know! And if you have thoughts on these stats or other things you’d like to see, let me know in the comments.
It’s always fascinating to read the Cybils Middle Grade Fiction finalists, which include both contemporary and historical middle grade fiction. I’m not quite sure why I hadn’t gotten around to reading Tae Keller’s latest, which was definitely on my radar. I have also written a review of Yonder by Ali Standish, but since it’s published by HarperCollins, I looked into their union strike more deeply than I had, and am now withholding that review until they reach a settlement.
Air by Monica Roe
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022
ISBN 978-0374388652
Read the ebook on Libby.
“What other people think I can or can’t do doesn’t matter. These are the things that matter. I’m Emelyn Ethrige. I’m twelve and a half years old. Alejandra Che is my best friend.
I like Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
And I love speed.”
Air by Monica Roe, 2022
Emmy’s skateboarding father taught her to do tricks with her own wheels. Since her mother died, though, he’s gotten a lot more cautious about her using the skating setup he built in their yard, and too busy with work and night classes to spend time with her. Emmy is undeterred. She and her best friend Ale have made their own online business, selling both natural things like pinecones and Spanish moss from the surrounding woods, but also Emmy’s custom wheelchair bags. They’re almost halfway to their goals: a custom sports wheelchair for Emmy and new, fancy beekeeping equipment for Ale. Then, a mishap at school brings Emmy to the new principal’s attention, and suddenly he wants the school to raise the money for her wheelchair – and for Emmy to have a personal aide at school instead of doing things on her own, as her mother had worked so hard for her to do. Even though her friends at school are excited to help, something just doesn’t feel right. Emmy’s journey includes relationships with family, friends, a developing crush, lots of wheelchair tricks, and tons of Emmy’s firecracker personality. Pair this with 2019 Cybils Finalist Roll with It by Jamie Sumner and Song for a Whale by Lynne Kelly for other stories of kids more limited by others’ perceptions of their disabilities than by the disabilities themselves. As I was writing this review, on a snow day, my daughter picked up my e-reader and finished the whole book before I got it posted.
Jennifer Chan is Not Alone by Tae Keller
Random House, 2022
ISBN 978-0593310526
Read from a library copy.
Before Mallory met Reagen, she was filled with anxiety, capable of fainting at the most embarrassing moment. Now that she, Reagen and Tess are best friends, Mallory feels like she has a place and a handle on the rules to follow to stay popular rather than being a middle school target. But right before eighth grade, a new girl moves in across the street. Jennife Chan believes in aliens so wholeheartedly that Mallory is drawn in, even as she believes that going to school talking like that and wearing t-shirts about aliens rather than trying to look cute would be social suicide both for Jennifer and for Mallory, if she’s seen with her. So when Jennifer Chan goes missing – at the very beginning of the book – Mallory is forced to reckon with the role she might have played in Jennifer’s disappearance, and work with both her current best friends and the ones she left behind when she became popular to figure out what might have happened.
Middle grade books where the MC must overcome bullies are tediously common. This story flips that narrative around, with a rare sympathetic portrait of a girl who never meant to be a bully and who only realizes in retrospect that that’s what she’s become and sets out to fix it. It’s as impressive as I’d expect from Tae Keller, whose How to Trap a Tigerwas a personal favorite as well as a Newbery winner.
Although I love all of our Cybils finalists, not all of them are books that I would have loved myself as a child. I have been a fan of fairy tale retellings as long as I can remember, and 10-year-old me would have loved this book just as much as I think modern kids will.
Mirrorwood by Deva Fagan
Atheneum, 2022
ISBN 978-1534497146
Read from a library copy
Fable and her family, who read as white, live on the outskirts of the magical wall of thorns that surrounds an enchanted castle. Magical Blight has spread from that site, infecting Fable before she was born. With no face of her own, she must borrow the faces – and energy – of her family members to survive. But when a neighbor reports her to the Hunters, she (and her talking cat, Moth) flee into the forest and through the wall of thorns. She takes the time on her flight to make a wish to the one of the Subtle Powers, Lady Mirachne, who set up the wall to prevent the Blight from spreading. Even though her cat warns her that the Powers are not to be trusted, Fable feels that this is her best chance.
Unsurprisingly, since they’ve been cut off for a century or so, the world on the other side is different than either Fable or her young hunter, Vycorax, were led to expect. It’s soon clear that the Blight affects the residents inside the forest much more than Fable had realized – and that Fable and Vycorax will have to work together to survive the Blighted landscape. Though Fable had wanted to ask a favor just of Mirachne, Lady of Dreams, she soon has the unwelcome attention of the trickster Lord Bannon, who created the Blight in the first place. By the time she and Moth make it to the castle, everything she believed to be true has been turned on its head.
This is a lovely, gender-swapped reworking of Sleeping Beauty, with great characters (including a two-mother family in the village and a the few residents left in the castle) and lots of adventure, as well as deeper thoughts about developing identity and the dangers of a life lived not knowing what suffering is.
Here’s a story of adventure, secrets, and betrayal, with delightful gear-punky twists.
The Counterclockwise Heart by Brian Farrey
Algonquin, 2022
ISBN 978-1616205065
Read from a library copy.
At the edge of Kingdom of Rheinvelt sits the tiny town of Somber End, bordered by and at risk from both the fearsome forest that is the domain of the Nachtfrau and the mysterious and aggressive residents of the Hinterlands. On a single day in the past, a giant onyx statue of an armed maiden appeared in the town square of Somber End, while in the palace, the Empress Sabine (described as Black) discovered a tiny brown baby with a clock where his heart should have been and a riddle about “the counterclockwise heart” in his metal basket. She and her wife the Imperatrix Dagmar adopt tiny Alphonsus, who grows into a friendly boy beloved of all in the kingdom.
By the time Alphonsus is 10, he’s weighed down by sorrow and the need for secrecy about his clock. He’s torn between his desire to find out how he came by his clock and his mother’s command to keep the Stone Maiden company, as it has started moving, alarming everyone. Meanwhile, a pale-skinned, red-headed girl named Esme journeys from the frozen North where her people, the Hierophants, have been exiled for the last decade. Her mission is to induce the Nachtfrau to release the spells that have exiled the Hierophants. She’s a powerful magic user, but since the death of her father, has been raised without affection to value only her skills.
As much as neither Alphonsus nor Esme wants to trust anyone else, there are enough unknown magical forces as well as determined human enemies, that the two of them must join forces to solve their problems. (I really appreciated that even though Esme does learn to make friends for the first time, she’s still not a hugger by the end of the book, and that’s seen as something to respect.) And yet, in a land with so many mysteries, neither of them knows the truth of what’s happening…
This is an epic story filled with magic, mystery, a search for meaning and community, with enough twists and turns to keep me guessing as to what might happen next.
I’m always up for a story that’s a good blend of humor, scares, and good characters! Plenty of good food is great, too. This one is a little more intense than books like A Properly Unhaunted Placebut less so than Paola Santiago.
Omega Morales and the Legend of La Lechuza by Laekan Zea Kemp
Little, Brown, 2022
ISBN 978-0316304160.
Read from a library copy. Ebook available on Libby.
Omega is a member of a family in Noche Buena known for being odd – though only a few people in town know that it’s because of their magical powers. Omega, though, isn’t able to change people’s negative emotions with her empathic powers like her family members can. She can just feel people’s emotions – easily leading to her being overwhelmed in crowded situations – and hear things like trees talk, and feel the strong feelings around inanimate objects.
This has always been more trouble than it feels like it’s worth, but when Omega’s former best friend Abby accuses Omega and her cousin Carlitos of being behind the disappearance of several neighborhood cats, those skills might come in very handy indeed. (Warning for sensitive readers: the kitties are not all right.) A giant feather Omega and Carlitos find points to a giant owl – perhaps the vengeance-driven La Lechuza of legend?? Together with their best friend Clau, a ghost who’d rather pretend she’s still alive, they set out to solve the mystery, even as ominous happenings build up around them. All of this will require Omega to learn more about her own magical abilities than ever before.
All of the impending doom is balanced by lots of delightful elements – the poster of Selena Quintanella, the statue of La Virgen, and the lamp in her bedroom, all of whom freely share their opinions with Omega, Clau’s love of creating mayhem in public spaces, the warm and quirky members of Omega’s extended family and their delicious cooking. Omega’s godmother Soona is the school librarian, and the school library is able to access a magical trans-dimensional library. And although the focus here is on Omega’s Chicane family’s magic, the larger magical community in town includes people whose traditions come from all over the world. There’s also a hint of romance and increased understanding between Omega and Abby.
I first tried listening to this on audio, but unfortunately the narrator just didn’t work for me. Luckily I was able to get the print version as well, so that I was able to be charmed by the story. I hope you are, too.
Belated happy new year, dear readers! I’m officially back to work (from home) after two months of medical leave following foot surgery. It’s taken me a while to catch up with all the email, but I’m back, and will work on catching up with all the books I didn’t get to writing up during December. Meanwhile, here is the fabulous list of 2022 Elementary/Middle-Grade Speculative Fiction that my fellow panelists and I put together. As always, this was a lot of reading and discussion – I hope you all love these books as much as we do! Click through the links to read our officially blurbs; the links below will take you to my own reviews.
alibrarymama 