Review: Paola Santiago and the River of Tears

Paola Santiago and the River of Tears by Tehlor Kay Mejia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not unlike Roshani Chokshi and Aru Shah, Tehlor Kay Mejia is a case of an author whose YA fantasy debut wasn't exactly my fave (sadly I couldn't even finish Chokshi's The Star-Touched Queen to this day, but someday maybe I'll give it a revisit), but I liked her Rick Riordan Presents MG fantasy debut even more. For sure, this Mexican-inspired tale of the terrors wrought by the notorious spirit La Llorona in a small Arizona town - and beyond - feels like a perfect companion to Aru Shah's books in the Rick Riordan Presents lineup. It feels like somewhat of the perfect middle ground between Aru Shah's stories and those of Sal and Gabi as well - it has an Aru-like tone, but Pao is quite the science geek, lover of all things space-related in particular, so on that level, she and Sal would make pretty fast friends. Her and Min from Dragon Pearl as well. Mejia, though, perfectly captures not only the oppressive heat of the Arizona summer, but also the fear of all the elders' old superstitions - and the old ladies' chanclas - permeating every aspect of life for Pao and her neighbor Dante. Especially when one of their closest friends becomes just the latest in a string of mysterious disappearances...boy, is this a wild adventure for the ages, and luckily, Mejia's already working on a sequel!

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Review: Darius the Great Deserves Better

Darius the Great Deserves Better by Adib Khorram
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I almost didn't expect that Adib Khorram would write a second book about Darius the Great, but after the well-deserved acclaim his debut novel got, why the hell not? And so it goes, two years down the line in real time, and months enough that Darius has actually grown up quite a bit. Physically and psychologically. He's not only six foot three, he's also lost some weight from taking up soccer at school - a bit of Sohrab's influence there, am I right? - though he's still pretty self-conscious about having a little more tummy than he'd like. God, that's so relatable. And as for his mental health, he's got a new and improved balance of medication, he's taken several levels in self-confidence, and he's openly gay and has a boyfriend now.

Review: Love, Creekwood

Love, Creekwood by Becky Albertalli
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Mmmmmmm...I dunno. I mean, Becky Albertalli is just one of those authors with whom my responses to her books have always been up and down, very middling, and typically either rising or nosediving in hindsight. Does that make sense? I dunno. But I just feel like this little novella was trying too hard to be an epilogue to both Simon Vs. and Leah on the Offbeat, and as someone who didn't really like Leah's book all that much - and has absolutely soured on it more and more over time, mostly because Leah is just too abrasive and Tumblr-y for my taste - I really wish this story could've just been a Simon/Bram epilogue instead. Now that, I would've loved to have seen - those two have my heart like no other characters Becky has ever created. But even so, just the way this story was formatted - all emails, and many of them a bunch of email strings within strings - was aggravating to read in ebook format from my local library. Maybe it would've been better off if I'd read it in print - and hey, at least Albertalli made it clear she was donating all the profits for this one to charity. I know a lot of people are kinda down on Albertalli for "writing outside her lane" with Simon, but let's be honest, Simon is the best character she ever wrote, and it shows in the ending he and Bram get. But as far as a follow-up to his story, I think I'm going to be much more enthusiastically following Love, Victor instead.

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Review: Peace Talks

Peace Talks by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ahhhhhhhh. Six years since the last Dresden Files book, and look, Jim Butcher's finally got us fans really truly well fed with the promise of two full-length novels this year alone. Also, the promise of both of them being a pretty full-fledged duology within the series' greater scope - aptly titled with opposing names too, Peace Talks and Battle Ground. So yeah, let's be real, this book is setting up a lot of nasty, nasty crap to be resolved in its immediate successor, but fear not - Butcher's giving us the next book only two months after this one came out, perhaps to make up for the extremely long absence he's had since Skin Game. (To say nothing of the even longer wait we've had since the first book of The Cinder Spires - but hey, at least this isn't a Patrick Rothfuss or a George R.R. Martin situation going on here.) While it's pretty clear that this book is a Prolonged Prologue to Battle Ground, though...what's no laughing matter is the cliffhanger this one ends on. Damn, but that one hurt, right in the gut, Harry.

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Review: Harrow the Ninth

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tamsyn Muir got off to a pretty kickass start with her complex, obscenely disturbingly cool Gideon the Ninth, but after the horrifying twist ending to that one, where could she go next? Why, into even deeper levels of instability, of course. Harrow the Ninth now gets into the head of the young princess of the Ninth House, now one of the Emperor's new Lyctors, but the ending of the first book has left her with a pretty serious mental split. In addition to half the book being told in a peculiar second-person perspective (like Muir got possessed by the spirit of N.K. Jemisin), we get a good three or four fifths of the book kinda lowkey pretending like that big twist from Book 1 didn't happen. But then right around pages 350-400 or so, the veil falls away, and we finally get a ton of answers and even more unexpected and scary twists, murders on top of murders and truths on top of truths...holy Necrolord Prime, Batman! Only one more to go in this trilogy, which of course I'll be autobuying next year. I hope...

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Review: Felix Ever After

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: transphobia, allusions to homophobia, allusions to deadnaming, assorted bullying, catfishing.

There's a lot of YA contemporaries in recent years that I'll give a 3.5 and either round up or down. This one, I'll round up because of how much Felix Love, as a Black, queer, trans teen, needs the love. Yeah, I know, bad pun, bad Ricky...but I'm sure Felix would approve.

Review: Something to Say

Something to Say by Lisa Moore Ramee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Much like her debut novel, last year's A Good Kind of Trouble, Lisa Moore Ramee's Something to Say is a pretty sweet, and pretty important, MG contemporary with lots of on-point commentary about social justice. Especially in a year when Black Lives Matter, and protests of the kind seen in Ramee's first book, have come into sharper cultural focus than ever before - and, pretty presciently, this book deals with the potential renaming of a public SoCal institution away from John Wayne, since I'm pretty sure I saw a recent news headline about a petition to rename the airport in Orange County after his infamous pro-white supremacy quotes from the 70s resurfaced for at least the third time in as many years.

Review: The ​Crow Rider

The ​Crow Rider by Kalyn Josephson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Last year, I was lucky enough to get an ARC of The Storm Crow, and now I get to complete Kalyn Josephson's debut duology - which, while (I know it's a bit wearing of me to say) I still don't understand why duologies have become such a thing in YA, especially, it's a pretty well-done conclusion here in The Crow Rider. (Though let's be real, that crow on the cover looks stressed as hell, though it also reminds me a bit of a character my friend Koda created recently...hmm...) But anyway. As YA fantasy goes, this series does a damned good job of exploring resistance to a nefarious colonial power, with a lot of twists piled up on top of it so such a topical storyline doesn't just play out in the simplest of terms either. Though the first half of the book moves pretty slowly, the second half loads in all the high action and amazement that makes this duology worth recommending. So with that, I hereby declare ave atque vale to this series, and wait with bated breath for Kalyn Josephson's next work...

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