Review: "Doctor" by Andrew Bomback

Doctor by Andrew Bomback
Published September 2018 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★

Bomback's path to medicine was reasonably straightforward: with his own father a doctor, he had a clear sightline to what medicine could be. He went into nephrology, though, not pediatrics, and what he saw was a changing face of medicine—one that would eventually push his father, who was infinitely more comfortable with paper charts and quick, instinct- and experience-based diagnoses than he was with technology and insurance rules, out of practice.

I've read a lot of medical memoirs. I never had any interest in going into medicine myself, but I'll read about it until the cows come home. But...I think this book was a missed opportunity. It's part of Bloomsbury Academic's Object Lessons series—short books about common objects (or, in this case, I guess professions). The contents vary: sometimes the books are memoirs, but sometimes they're microhistories or cultural critiques. And there's a bit that is broader here (Bomback talks about where medicine is going—i.e., that everything now involves computers—relative to what it was in his father's heyday, although in 2025, now that the conversation is all about AI, Bomback's take already feels dated), but more than that it's personal story, which is to say memoir. Stories about Bomback's father; stories about Bomback's own patients; ventures into parenting (with a wife who is also a doctor and—Bomback mentions only in passing—both frustrated that she did not go into surgery and aware that balancing surgery and parenting would be difficult); and so on. And all of that's fine!*

But Object Lessons has the chance to do something so unique, and a medical memoir is not all that unique. I would have liked to see what this book was if it had taken the form of...the history of doctors, say. Or a cultural history of nephrology. (Is that a thing? Now we'll never know.) Or something specific to, oh, scalpels, or dialysis, or something like that. Maybe I just don't think that a doctor is a "thing"? Or perhaps I think it could be, but this book isn't exploring any of the questions I hoped it might. Fine if you're in it for anecdotal memoir, but with this series I always hope for something more.

* Well, most of it's fine. The chapter about callous doctor jokes felt unnecessary, and there's a moment when Bomback wonders who would love a blind and fat woman (a patient of his) and I wondered, not for the first time, just what they're teaching in medical school.

Review: "Sonita" by Sonita Alizada

Sonita by Sonita Alizada
Published July 2025 via HarperOne
★★★

"Can you buy me?" I asked the Iranian filmmaker who had been documenting my life for three years. Now, it seemed her protagonist was about to be sold into marriage. What a terrible ending for a documentary.

"You have six months before your wedding," my mother said.

Enough time to plan my escape. (loc. 65*)

Growing up in Afghanistan, Alizada's path seemed clear: at some point her parents would find a husband for her, and then she'd be married and have children. The end. As a child, she didn't question this—a wedding would mean new clothing, a party, excitement. And with girls not allowed to go to school, she couldn't conceive of another possibility. But the older Alizada got, the more she saw how bleak her projected future looked.

Now that her veil was up, I recognized her. We had been at her wedding just a few months before. Why was she marrying again? I was too young to understand what scared her so much that the spoonful of cake in her hand trembled: after her husband died, she had to marry her brother-in-law. (loc. 589)

What follows is a harrowing story of a girl growing up and desperately trying to outsmart a system that didn't allow her any choice. It sounds like Alizada's family was constantly on the brink of poverty; money aside, not only could she as a girl not go to school, nobody in her family could read, and none of them had a real concept of the wider world:

"I am from Herat too," the man said. "The war has scattered all of us like seeds. My oldest sister is in Turkey, and my brothers are in America. Do you know where Turkey and America are?"

"So far we only only about Afghanistan, India, and Iran—are there more countries?" asked Razeq. The man looked at all of us and told us that there are many more countries that we haven't even seen pictures of. (loc. 1351)

As refugees in Iran, their lives were safer—no threat of being snatched off the street by the Taliban—but not less fraught. As undocumented immigrants, they still had no rights; they still could not go to school. Besides, Alizada's parents didn't see the point: Nana and Baba reminded me that there was no need for me to know how to write names. Soon I would be married, and learning to write my husband's name was no accomplishment if I couldn't make him food. (loc. 1786) And they did not see a future in Iran, either; their homeland was Afghanistan, Taliban or no Taliban.

It's a difficult read. Alizada is so blunt about the things she saw and experienced, and it makes for the kind of painful and raw read that required, especially early on, reading in short bursts rather than plunging on through. The writing is a bit hit or miss, but it's a really valuable story. I read Khalida Popal's My Beautiful Sisters recently, and the similarities and differences are so striking—Popal's family had more financial advantages and was much more supportive of her going to school, using her voice, etc., but both women were trapped under the same regime and determined that there must be something better. They both got out (not a spoiler), but the details differ...except that for both women it required incredible amounts of determination and bravery. And it feels especially important to read women's stories from Afghanistan now, when so few women there can safely share those stories.

I won't get into the rap music part of things here, but it's an important part of the story—worth looking up Alizada's song "Daughters for Sale".

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Review: "Still Falling" by S.E. Bevin

Still Falling by S.E. Bevin
Published April 2025
★★★

Year twelve is approaching, and Tessa has it together—good grades, increasing gymnastics skills, a loving family. But her friend and teammate Jade is convinced that being lighter is the key to success at the gym, and Tessa can't help but think that Jade is right—that her shrinking figure indicates a level of control and achievement that Tessa too should strive for.

The writing is nice here and the story clear. The book is quite short (under 150 pages, according to Kindle), which I think is to its detriment; although it's nicely paced, there's no room in the story for anything but Tessa's eating disorder. I'd have loved to see more of Tessa and Jade's friendship before their eating disorders, as at the moment Jade is really nothing but a voice in Tessa's ear shaming her for eating. Would also have liked to see more of Tessa's family life; her family seems lovely, but their role is mostly limited to being worried over how little Tessa is eating.

So a little simple, but all in all a nice debut, especially from a self-published (and I think quite young?) author.

Review: "The Real Jaws" by Rachel Lee Perez

The Real Jaws by Rachel Lee Perez
Published June 2025 via White Owl
★★★

Did you know that the first known representation of a shark attack is from 725 BCE...? I did not! And did you know that the movie Jaws has some basis in fact—a series of 1916 shark attacks on the New Jersey coast? I did not know that either.

In The Real Jaws, Perez dives into the history of those shark attacks and, critically, how they impacted the way people viewed sharks. I'm not entirely new to shark research (I once upon a time wrote an essay that was partly about sharks and that referenced some of the same sources she uses, which amuses me), but I wasn't familiar with the 1916 attacks or the other seasons of increased shark activity in various places. I did read the Wikipedia article on the 1916 attacks before I read the book—which I then regretted, because there would have been a bit more suspense for that part of the book if I hadn't known what to expect.

So it's fascinating material. Perez takes to the subject with plenty of enthusiasm (if a few too many exclamation marks) and a lot of research—anyone who likes leaping from a book into the reference section will be satisfied here. The beginning of the book has a timeline, which is full of events (e.g., polio outbreaks, war activities) that I initially thought were just for context but Perez tied neatly into the context of sharks and shark-human encounters. I don't take every conclusion at face value (e.g., Perez says that even the ISAF [International Shark Attack File] suggests on their website that people actively menstruating should avoid swimming in open water to reduce one's odds of being attacked by a shark (loc. 1562*), but what the ISAF actually says is much softer: If someone is attempting to maximize reduction of risks, staying out of the water during menstruation is one step that can be taken. However, many people safely dive while menstruating, and we have continued to see no obvious pattern of increased shark encounters.), but that's probably smart for most nonfiction; treat one source as one source but not as a definitive source without, erm, consulting other sources.

Writing-wise, this could have used another extensive round of line-level edits. I liked the overall structure (starting with the 1916 attacks and then moving on to theories about what caused so much shark activity, more recent shark-heavy seasons, and of course Jaws), but I spent far too long on lines like this one: This [multiple bites] is outside the standard behavior when a shark mistakenly bites a human. Why did the shark repeatedly bite Bruder when surely it must have known that its victim was indeed a human being? (loc. 625)

Perez later gets into what science now thinks about sharks—among other things, that they use biting to examine unknown things (they don't exactly have fingers to do the same job!)—but I was stuck on the fact that even if a shark bit somebody once and realized in doing so that it wasn't a seal, it wouldn't know the thing was specifically human; most likely it would just know that the thing it had bitten was living but not a seal or fish or whatever. Given that Perez also notes that violent language (attack, bite, deadly, etc.; e.g., loc. 2168) has widely been used to describe sharks and their interactions with humans, and that such language contributes to a public view of sharks as monsters, I also would have liked to see her use quite a bit less of the same language (my Kindle counts some 718 uses of the word "attack", though I should note that this includes the references, the table of contents, etc.).

All of this said: I learned a lot, and I came home from work with my nose buried in my Kindle and said absentmindedly to my partner, "Can we watch Jaws?" (and then went back to my book). An engaging read if you want to learn a bit about a forgotten (and gory) part of history, or if you need a shark week read.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Review: "Danger on Midnight River" by Gary Paulsen

Danger on Midnight River by Gary Paulsen
Published 1995
★★★

Oh gosh, okay. I've been going through a...not really a Gary Paulsen phase, but a childhood-rereads phase, and I'm in the Gary Paulsen phase of my childhood-rereads phase. I think we must have owned a copy of this book—I know I read it multiple times, and some parts (eating pine cones warmed by a fire) I remembered pretty clearly.

Spoilers ahead. But also, the book is 30 years old, so chances are good that if you're on this page you too have read the book before.

As a kids' book I still think this is pretty great. It's lively, and it's a story where not only does the underdog prove his worth, but the bullies voluntarily (eventually) come to their senses. Plus, you never know; maybe one of these days I'll get lost on a mountain and survive by eating pine cones, and I'll have this book to thank for it.

But I reread it as an adult. And with an adult's eyes, I have some questions. Like: When Daniel crawls out of the van, he doesn't think for a second about the other boys? He gets to the bank and starts a fire and starts to dry out his clothes...and only gives the others (dead or alive) a second thought when he hears voices. (And even then he takes the time to build up his fire before going to check it out.) Granted, Daniel owes the other boys nothing (they've been consistently terrible to him), but my gosh.

The number of perils these kids face is wild. In addition to their van crashing and the driver dying (Paulsen really liked to kill off the adults, didn't he?), one of the boys is trapped and almost drowns. The boys split up (TERRIBLE DECISION, CHILDREN; LEARN FROM THIS), and the three of them who are not Daniel immediately get lost, get sprayed by a skunk, and spend a miserable night in the rain...and then one of them falls off a cliff and breaks his leg. Daniel shows up just in time to save the day, of course, and performs a heroic and improbable rescue with some belts. (I've read my fair share of wilderness rescue memoir, and I rather suspect that a real-life version of this would have the injured kid screaming quite a bit more rather than just the occasional wince.) And if that's not enough, there's still a rabid dog and another near-drowning to keep the boys on their toes.

Again, this is a kids' book. The fact pace makes a certain amount of sense, and you can do away with occasional logic. But as an adult I'm bad at doing away with logic (well, except when I'm very good at doing away with logic, but this is not one of those times), so here we are. When Daniel insists that they boil their water before drinking it, how? Like, sensible, I'm not complaining, but... Earlier in the book we see that he's found "a large rock with a hollowed-out center", and somehow if there's a small fire nearby this will boil (would love to test this in real life—can you boil water by just putting it next to a fire, not above one? How big a fire is required to boil how much water?). But that was ages ago in the book, and even if they found that rock again (he hasn't been lugging it around), how did they move enough water from the river to the rock that they could drink boiled water "until they thought they would burst"?

I miss being a kid and not questioning these things.

I will note that earlier in the book Daniel suggests that they have three options—stay put and light a signal fire, try to continue on the road they were going on, or try to cross the river again and go back the way they came. The other three boys want to continue on the unknown road, and Daniel wants to go back the way they came. And I just don't know what to make of this. Daniel estimates that they went maybe a hundred miles in the wrong direction and took random turns along the way, so I can't possibly imagine that he thinks they'll happen upon the right turns and so on. I suppose he's hoping they'll get onto a bigger road and run into someone. But I can't help but think that the smarter thing to do would be to start with a signal fire—Daniel's proven himself perfectly capable of starting that fire and keeping all four boys fed and watered, and they'd have a lot fewer chances to fall off cliffs and almost drown if they just stayed put and built a smoky fire.

Oh well. It was fun, anyway. Ooh, one of these days I'll have to find that Sweet Valley High book where there's an earthquake and Jessica tries (and fails) to use her belt to rescue someone who's fallen down a chasm in the earth...

Review: Essay: "The Shelter Within" by Stephanie Land

The Shelter Within by Stephanie Land
Published June 2024 via Amazon Original Stories

You may remember Land's first book, Maid, about poverty and single-parenting and, yes, cleaning houses. I read it long enough ago that I don't remember it terribly well, but in "The Shelter Within" she returns, briefly, to what that poverty looked like: mildew in the apartment, not enough money to put down a deposit on a new one, not enough money to feed both herself and her seven-year-old daughter, no chance of paid parental leave following the birth of her infant daughter, not enough money to do anything but scrape by.

This is a reminder that poverty can be white-collar too—in theory Land had now "made it", because she was living somewhere she wanted to be and had completed college, but she was working two part-time writing jobs, neither of which paid anything close to covering the costs of basic necessities. But more than that, it's a timely reminder that the US has not historically given much help to those who are financially floundering, and with the current administration that will only get worse. Land may not have been thinking about politics while writing this essay, but it's inescapable: she was already stretched to the bone in the period she describes here and could not have worked more hours, earned more money, especially without childcare—which would have been a whole 'nother expense. Maybe it's not the point, but it's hard not to see it in the current economic and political climate.

Ultimately this is a story of hope. That hope was eventually born out—Land wrote Maid, which changed the trajectory of her career and hopefully put her on permanently stable financial footing—but even before that she describes the small and not so small moments that gave her hope that things would work out. Most people won't write an instant bestseller, but most people will find those small and not so small moments.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "The River" by Gary Paulsen

The River by Gary Paulsen
Published 1991
★★★

Book 2 in the Hatchet books, which I read as book 3 because that was the order that makes sense to me. Here, Brian is asked to take on a government project—to return to the wild and show a psychologist, in real time, how he did what he did. Things go well, maybe even too well...until they don't. And then Brian has to take on a new task: get the psychologist, who is unconscious after a lightning strike, some 100 miles downriver.

As with Brian's Winter, this is an interesting addition to the series but doesn't have quite the same power as Hatchet. By this point in the series (again, book 2), Brian is an old hand at it all—anything outdoors that he sets his mind to he more or less immediately achieves. Not that I want a perfectly inoffensive character to struggle unduly, but Brian very much goes into this challenge thinking (and then executing), "okay, we need X, then Y, then Z". Might have been more realistic to put Brian in an environment he wasn't quite so familiar with and have him need to look for different kinds of berries, nuts, etc.? I'm not sure. Then again, even when Brian has to make a raft that will safely navigate two adults, one unconscious, down a river, it's nothing more than a half-day's work to him even when this is well outside his normal skill set. Maybe it would just be more realistic for a couple of months of ad-hoc survival to not turn him into an expert at all things outdoors.

Still glad to have given this series a reread, but next time I think I'd probably be okay with sticking with book 1 and then moving on to other things.

Review: "Brian's Winter" by Gary Paulsen

Brian's Winter by Gary Paulsen
Published 1996
★★★

This is book 3 in the Hatchet books, but I skipped ahead because in my fuzzy memories of childhood, this was the second of the books that I read, and it's a more direct follow-up to Hatchet.

Brian's Winter reimagines the end of Hatchet: instead of the survival supplies Brian pulls out of the submerged plane leading to his rescue at the end of summer, they improve his odds—but he's still lost in the wild when summer rolls into autumn and then into winter.

While still a reasonably gripping read, this one felt a bit more "checklist" to me than Hatchet. By the time winter rolls around, Brian is confident in his abilities; he's justifiably worried about winter, but pretty much every time a concern comes up he thinks about it and finds a way to solve it. Perhaps that's partly because this is so short a book, with less character development and so on than the first one; it's also not one that I'd want to read without the context of the first book. But as a nostalgia read, I'm on board.

Review: "Hatchet" by Gary Paulsen

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
Published 1987
★★★★

I read Running Wild and got a yen to reread this. They're very different books, of course, and Hatchet is ultimately a nostalgia read for me. (How many kids of my generation read this in middle school?) It's the ultimate survival story: a boy unprepared for the wild crash-lands alone in remote Canada after the pilot flying their small plane has a heart attack. At first he thinks he'll just have to survive a few days, and then it becomes clear that he'll have to learn to be sufficient for rather longer.

I'm thinking now that Hatchet played at least a supporting role in my love of wilderness and survival stories. This is so unlike a contemporary survival story, even one written for the same age group (YA and MG lit were not the same established categories in 1987, when this was written, that they are now). I mean, just the fact that Brian has a hatchet on his trip to visit his father! He's not terribly resourceful to begin with, but he gets there—he has to grow up so quickly, because it's immediately obvious that just about anything in the wild can kill him.

Curious now about what the contemporary equivalent of this is; Running Wild is grand but also spans only a few days, and with kids who are better prepared to face the wild. And now I have a yen to reread Island of the Blue Dolphins as well...and maybe some more Gary Paulsen...

Review: "The School at the Chalet" by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

The School at the Chalet by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer
Published 1925
★★★

Nostalgia reading at its finest. My mother grew up reading these, so my siblings and I grew up reading them too—we had piles of them. They were a huge part of my desire to go to boarding school (and a huge part of the reason boarding school—not in an idealized version of the Austrian Alps, and not in an idealized version of the 1920s/30s/40s—was so disorienting when I did eventually go).

Anyway, curiosity (and nostalgia) called, so here I am. And rereading this was...something. It's so much a product of its time and place that I'm not entirely sure what to do with it anymore: The girls are all basically (with a few exceptions) simple and sweet and good; the adults are all basically smart and sweet and good; the England Be Glad sense is real. Madge sets up shop in the Alps and immediately has people pounding on her door to enroll their daughters, because thank goodness there's now an English school in the Tyrol, how did we possibly educate our children without a good proper English school. She's making it all up as she goes—school fees are decided not by any calculation of costs but by Madge asking her brother if he thinks £120/year sounds reasonable. The local girls are considered the foreigners; the local adults inexplicably say "thee" and "thou" a lot; Madge begrudgingly appoints a "foreigner" as head girl because the English girls are too young.

Brent-Dyer doesn't seem to have been fond of Germans (she remarks that There is much more camaraderie between Austrians and their children than between Germans and theirs, and the Tyrolese middle class and upper middle class treat their boys and girls nearly conforming to English ideals), and there is an epic—not in a good way—running "joke" throughout the book about a fat German woman some of the girls meet. Everyone is appallingly rude—the kids, the German woman—but the adults who should be teaching the kids to do better seem to think that the German woman is automatically in the wrong because she's fat. It's one part of the book that has aged very badly (and it wasn't a good part of the book to begin with).

I'll read a bit farther into the series and see where it gets me. The lustre has come off a bit, though I expect I'll manage to forget some of my disappointment within a few years and do another read...

Counts:
Dainty: 10 (dainty uniform, dainty meal...)
Jolly: 38 (jolly clever, jolly man...)
Pretty: 28+ (her pretty head, her pretty little watch, her pretty broken German...)
Honest injun: 5. Joey is the culprit here, but everyone seems to think it's fine.

Review: "The Girls Who Grew Big" by Leila Mottley

The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley
Published June 2025 via Knopf
★★★★

The Girls have always been there. They've been pushed aside, told that they are nothing, told that they are less than nothing. But these Girls—in a forgotten corner of Florida—are determined that if nobody will help lift them up, they will do it themselves. They will carry each other through the waves of pregnancy and early motherhood, will keep each other from drowning.

There wasn't no way to satisfy the rest of the world, but the Girls didn't care whether I used cloth diapers or graduated or stayed with Kai's daddy. They lived on whims of want and need, nomadic and ravenous and naked in their hurt. We weren't nothing like what was expected of us, and, for the first time since my baby was born, I didn't feel like the sky was about to collapse on top of me. (loc. 496*)

The Girls Who Grew Big follows an informal cluster of Girls, but it focuses on three: Simone, parenting twins and facing a future with yet another child on her hip but determined to do right by both her kids and her Girls; Emory, who is torn between doing the expected thing—marrying the father of her child—and following the dream she's worked toward for years; and Adela, who has been sent to Florida to ride out her pregnancy and finds herself toying with an alternative to her college-and-competitive-swimming expectations. Adela is probably the character I understand best, and yet she is also the wild card in this group. She's still, I think, learning the rules; she's still learning which of the rules that apply to the other Girls don't really apply to her—and which do.

It was a lonely world, Florida, and I was on the outskirts of it, catapulted onto a shore that radiated disdain, full of people who were supposed to be family but felt more like relics of a life my dad had died in and then sent me to as a punishment, to live among his ghosts. (loc. 705)

This ends up being messy in the best of ways. The Girls are trying to be good parents and to do right by their kids, and they are also still kids themselves; they have strong senses of right and wrong, but they also have, by and large, such limited resources and limited options. And again: they're still kids themselves. I've never been to Florida and have no particular plans to change that, but there's a part of me that is always drawn to stories set in the deep and reckless South, in landscapes overrun by kudzu and, in this case, characters with one eye open for alligators. This is gritty and sometimes chaotic and by the end of it I just mostly wanted to hug each of the three main characters.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotations are from an ARC and may not be final.

Review: "Sticker" by Henry Hoke

Sticker by Henry Hoke
Published January 2022 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★

This is the fourth or fifth book I've read from Bloomsbury Academic's Object Lessons series. As a series, I love it—each book takes a brief look at an often unexpected object. To date Pregnancy Test is my favourite of the series, but I'm happy to keep reading to find out if another book might topple it.

As it turns out, though, Sticker isn't really about stickers. In Hoke's words, it's a memoir in 20 stickers, randomly arranged and full of contradictions (41). And I should love this anyway, because memoir is one of my favourite genres (if I had to pick one genre and stick with it for the rest of my life, memoir would be a finalist, and I'm still not sure what would win), but...in this case I was in it for the stickers, and they're only barely here. Instead this is about politics and Virginia and (not) coming out and feeling like a puzzle piece that doesn't quite fit.

This is still in line with the details of what's included in Object Lessons (I looked the series up again), but I think for my next dive into the series I'll aim for something a bit more object-focused.

Review: "The Scrapbook" by Heather Clark

The Scrapbook by Heather Clark
Published June 2025 via Pantheon
★★★

It's the mid-90s, and when Anna meets Christoph, it feels right. Their relationship cannot be easy—he's German, she's American, and to make it work they'll have to span an ocean. But their conversations are deep and the attraction is there and this is a relationship unlike any other that she's had. And: their grandfathers fought on opposing sides of WWII, and with Anna trying to understand her grandfather's experience better, her relationship with Christoph feels like something that can make it tangible. And if Christoph doesn't seem as invested as she is, well. They can make it work, surely. It's fate, or something like that.

The Scrapbook takes place mostly in the 90s (Anna and Christoph) and partly in the 40s (their grandfathers). Christoph holds fast to the story that one of his grandfathers joined the resistance, while acknowledging that someday he'll have to find out—and face—what else that grandfather did in the war; Anna's grandfather has a more straightforward trajectory, but not one without its horrors. His scrapbook, the one the book is named after, is based on Clark's own grandfather's scrapbook, so there's an interesting based-on-a-true-story element to part of the plot.

It was kind of surprising to me how focused Anna and Christoph are on WWII—while I may be misremembering, it is not clear to me whether Anna has any real understanding of what happened in Germany between 1945 and 1990. To be fair, she is a product of the American education system (my own American history classes never made it past Reconstruction, and I never took a world history class), and even now WWII continues to get a lot more press than the DDR. It's so clear, early on in the book, that their intense conversations about war and trauma are not really sustainable; they know each other mostly in short, intense bursts, the sort of brief time frames where people can hold on to the image they want to project rather than letting the more...maybe not the more honest parts, but the more prevalent parts of themselves through. I guess by the end of the book I was still wondering a bit who Christoph is outside the limited parts Anna sees of him. Not the best fit for me, but I'm glad to have read this (I'm always interested in contemporary fiction about post-war and post-DDR Germany).

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy via NetGalley.

Review: "Island of the Blue Dolphins" by Scott O'Dell

Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell
Published 1960
★★★★

I fell deep into a childhood reread phase and this is where I landed. Island of the Blue Dolphins is a fictionalized attempt at the life of Juana Maria (real name unknown), who survived some 18 years alone on an island after her tribe evacuated and she was left behind.

So little is known about Juana Maria that this is really guesswork, but it feels like well-researched guesswork at least. O'Dell set himself a herculean task—not only is next to nothing known about Juana Maria's life, but this is a children's/middle grade book following a character who spends the bulk of her life alone, with nobody to talk to, and over the course of the book she ages from 12 to about 30, which is quite the age range to ask kids to stay invested in. But it works, and this stands the test of time.

Karana—as the woman is called in this story—is about as resiliant as you can get, because she has to be. She has the skills for a life largely outdoors (and when the skills she needs are traditionally men's skills, at least she's seen the work done), but she has to learn what it is to be entirely self-reliant, to have no community to fall back on. O'Dell keeps things at a bit of a distance (it's theoretically but not viscerally devastating, for example, when much of the tribe is slaughtered), but I love how he lets Karana be both practical and human. She knows what work she needs to do to carry on—to not just carry on but to thrive—and she gets on and does it, and she also does things likes explores parts of the island that she's never had cause to visit, and makes herself new jewellery, and sews herself a cormorant feather skirt because she thinks it's beautiful. She's a wonderfully strong character. (And! The book passes the Bechdel test!)

O'Dell's version ends with Karana on the cusp of starting over, again. What is striking to me is what he doesn't say in the author's note: he doesn't tell readers that by the time Juana Maria arrived in California, most of her Nicoleño tribe had died (largely due to diseases that they had no immunity to), and he doesn't tell readers that Juana Maria, too, died only weeks after arrival, struck down by dysentery. What records there are suggest that she was thrilled to be among people again, so I can't really argue that she would have been better off left on the island, but how tragic that her rescue also caused her early death, and that in that time not even her name could be communicated.

One other thing of note: in the book, when Karana sees the ship approaching, she puts on her cormorant skirt to greet her rescuers; the skirt (or dress) is true to historical record. O'Dell makes a gentle point about westerners imposing their cultural/dress/religious standards on her; one of the first things the white men from the ship do is have a dress made for her out of spare trousers—presumably, though O'Dell does not say this specifically, to cover her breasts. It's not lost on me that many of the book covers do the same (put a dress on her to cover her up though that's likely not historically accurate). Not that I'm expecting a children's book to...well...do otherwise...but with that context I'm finding that I prefer the covers that circumvent the issue by avoiding full-body depictions.

At the end of it, this stands up to time...but it's worth reading more about the story behind the story.

Review: "The Ripple Effect" by Maggie North

The Ripple Effect by Maggie North
Published June 2024 via St. Martin's Griffin
★★★★

Stellar needs a financial lifeline, and fast. Lyle, better known as McHuge, needs the optics having a doctor on board his boat—well, boats—will bring. Never mind that Stellar more or less ghosted Lyle last year, or that their chemistry is unresolved, or that "trip doctor" quickly becomes "trip fake fiancée". They'll make it work. And nobody will be the wiser...right?

I usually rail against TikTok tropes in romance novels, but I guess they're wearing me down. The Ripple Effect features #grumpyandsunshine, #onebed, #secondchance, #fakedating, #bigmansmallwoman (I don't know what hashtag that one should be, actually, but I understand that it's a thing) and probably a bunch of other tropes that I don't remember, and yet I didn't...mind? Not sure what has happened to me, but let's run with it.

Into the woods—as a genre (or subgenre? subsubgenre?), not the musical—is right up my reading alley, so when I saw that this was an into-the-woods type of book, I was sold. Points for some intersectionality; maybe minus some points for this not being a very outdoorsy kind of trip, all things considered (think tents big enough to stand up in with real furniture and chef-cooked meals, not sleeping bags and oatmeal cooked in the bag it came in); plus points for some red herrings that did their job; minus points for the whole 'he is so big and she is so little' thing (rubs me the wrong way for reasons that do not originate with this book); and I don't feel like doing math but we're still in the black by the end of the book. I'm not entirely sold on the conflict—it occasionally felt as though there was one too many thing going on—and I'm struggling to imagine that Stellar couldn't find another job that better used her skills, even under the circumstances—even if local practices and so on had their doors closed to her, the COVID era has opened up a world of remote work, including for doctors. That said, I enjoyed the dynamics between the members of the inaugural group, and of course between Lyle and Stellar. I wouldn't be sorry if Sloane featured in a future book, either.

This was a super quick read, ideal for a day when I wanted something that was heavy only on the tropes. A mood read, but I'd return to the author for other mood reads. Into the woods it's time to go...

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "How to Survive a Slasher" by Justine Pucella Winans

How to Survive a Slasher by Justine Pucella Winans
Published March 2025 via Bloomsbury YA
★★★

As a teenager, CJ's father survived a deadly camp rampage. As an adult, he wasn't so lucky—but that time, CJ survived. And now that CJ is a teenager, there's another wannabe serial killer in town...one who has sent CJ the playbook for what's to come.

I do love me a slasher book, especially if it can keep me up at night. But lord have mercy, I like my slasher hero/ines to come with a bit of brain. The big bad wolf literally—not a spoiler; this happens early—sends CJ a script of what is to come, and what does CJ do with this? Tell the police? Tell any adult at all? Send an anonymous tip in? No. CJ recruits a couple of teenagers (one of whom is absolutely thrilled to be living in a horror story and neither of whom seems bothered that they too might die) to help fail to prevent death after death. (Because this is YA, though, don't worry—they aren't deaths of characters you're asked to care about.)

Spoilers follow:

Eventually—late in the game—an adult notices that CJ knows something and isn't telling. You might think that this adult would, oh, call the police or at least another adult, but instead she decides that the appropriate recruits are 1) her teenage child, 2) her just-barely-teenage other child, and 3) her teenage child's friends, neither of whom she has ever met before. I guess she doesn't mind the possibility of telling their parents that they were brutally murdered because she let them stake out a probable murder scene.

End of spoilers

Anyway. I do enjoy the campiness, and I like CJ's family...most of the time. (See above.) But the big bad wolf is predictable, and this just hit up pretty quickly against the edges of my limited ability to suspend disbelief. (Even without all of the above, how is a there not a single police officer who finds it suspicious that CJ is the one finding body after body?)

Two and a half stars? A fast read, but I did not lose sleep over this book.

Review: "Flipping Forward Twisting Backward" by Alma Fullerton

Flipping Forward Twisting Backward by Alma Fullerton
Published July 2022 via Peachtree
★★★

In the gym, Claire is an A+ student: gymnastics is intuitive to her, and she's determined to be the best she can be. In the classroom, though, things are different: no matter how hard she tries, letters don't make sense to her. And with her mother unwilling to accept that Claire might have a learning disability, she's at risk of losing gymnastics if she can't get her grades up.

This is a thoughtful, quick read. It's quite sad to me that Claire's mother—who is a doctor and frankly should know better—is so unwilling to accept that Claire might learn differently than your average kid, but I wouldn't be surprised if this, well, weren't really surprising. (I do wish Claire's teachers had tried a bit harder to neutrally convince Claire's mother of the usefulness of testing? Pointing out that if she didn't have a learning disability, the testing would show that too, and if she did have a learning disability, they'd be able to get her the resources to get her on track. But to be fair, I don't know if that would have helped!)

The book is in verse, which is generally not my favourite (and is not my favourite here). I don't think the verse is adding that much to the story—I prefer stories in verse when they're using the structure to push the story, or to do something playful that you can't really do in prose; here, though the verse allows for more space on the page and shorter sentences, there's not a ton of innovation to the structure. That being said, I am not the target audience for this, and if the short verse structure makes this easier for kids who had dyslexia to read (not my area of expertise, so I can't speak to that), then I'm all for it.

Review: "Trade Me" by Courtney Milan

Trade Me by Courtney Milan
Published January 2015
★★★

Between her punishing course load and the jobs she works to keep the electricity on at her parents', Tina is barely squeaking by. Blake has no such worries—as the heir to the hottest tech company around, he's already worth a billion or so dollars and stands to inherit many more billions. And when Tina challenges Blake's assumptions in class and tells him to live a few days in her shoes, she never expects that he'll take her up on it.

What works for me: the characterization is great. This isn't a story in which Blake is an arrogant rich kid who learns the true meaning of life through artificial poverty. It takes him a moment to adjust, but then he gets on with it. This is clearly a very intentional choice—Tina and Blake have conversations about this (Tina does not want to hear any woe-is-me-my-temporarily-broke-by-choice-life-is-hard from Blake, and nor does she want any poor-you-you're-so-poor), and although Blake was clearly born with a platinum spoon in his mouth, he's pretty emotionally savvy. (How realistic this is, I don't know, but it's way better than a love interest who has to spend half the book learning to not be an asshole.) Perhaps for the same reason, although Tina has her moments of stress over driving Blake's expensive car, we don't see her reacting to living in sudden (temporary) wealth; we see her relaxing a tiny bit more but knowing it can't last, which honestly...I love that, because it feels realistic for someone who has had to be responsible for so long and still has to be responsible once this trade is over.

What doesn't work so well: the cover. It's generally fine (if dated), but it features a well-fed muscular dude, not a runner with an eating disorder. I don't need Blake's physique highlighted on the cover, but this is not it. (The German cover is a little better, if also dated.) And...more generally, the book was published a decade ago, and it shows. I suspect Milan would not have name-dropped a Tesla in the book if she'd written it today. The climax, too, hinges on money and privilege as get-out-of-jail-free cards, and in a way that's pretty uncritical of that. Again, I think the book would probably be different if written today.

On the whole, though I might pick up something more recent next time, I see why Milan is popular as an author—this was a quick and mostly satisfying read.

Review: "Amelia, if Only" by Becky Albertalli

Amelia, if Only by Becky Albertalli
Published June 2025 via HarperCollins
★★★★

Nothing says true love like a parasocial relationship with a semifamous YouTuber—or so Amelia figures. So they've never met in person and their only interaction was in the comments section...surely, if their lives overlapped, there'd be...well, not necessarily sparks. But maybe. There'd be a chance.

Oh, teenagers.*

You know going into an Albertalli book that it's going to be a fun romp, and this is no exception. The energy reminds me a little of Sophie Gonzales's The Perfect Guy Doesn't Exist—the way that, in Perfect Guy, Ivy writes this genuinely terrible fanfic and is perfectly okay with it (still my favourite thing about the book), while here, Amelia throws herself into appreciation of what sounds like a pretty (intentionally, as far as the book is concerned) mediocre YouTube channel and refuses to hear any criticism. It all feels very human, I guess; I love YA in which teenagers get to be average teenagers instead of award-winning prodigies or whatever.**

Anyway, cue a road trip with friends who are browbeaten into submission so that Amelia can finally, finally meet this guy in person. This is set in the same universe as Imogen, Obviously, so some of those characters pop up again, and it's nice to see how much of this is about friendship as much as it is about relationships. I think this is probably 3.5 stars for me—it's not likely to be one I'll return to—but I'm here for the chaotic energy and the lack of a true bad guy. (Do I think Amelia will last with her paramour? Not really. But it's YA, so it probably is eternal true love.) I wouldn't be sorry to see another book in this universe.

*I mean, I know adults who think this way too. So maybe it's more of an "oh, humanity"?

**I also love YA in which someone is a movie star or secretly a princess or goes to med school at sixteen (though in the latter case I usually end up shouting at the book). I'm like an onion, okay? Onions have layers.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Running Wild" by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Running Wild by Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Published September 2019 via Margaret Ferguson Books
★★★★

When Willa's mother died, her father uprooted the rest of the family—himself, Willa, and Willa's twin brothers—and moved them to Alaska. They've been living a survivalist life since then, and although it isn't always easy, it's been okay. Except Willa's father has gotten angrier and angrier, and she knows they don't have enough supplies for the coming winter. And finally she comes to a terrifying conclusion: She and her brothers will have to make their way down the river, and out of the wild.

This makes for something of a contemporary Hatchet. Reading about Willa and her brothers on their trip down the river is genuinely harrowing; Alaska is not a forgiving place. Willa is smart, as are Seth and Keith, and they have a lot of knowledge of the land that helps them out, but I love that at the same time, Sam and Keith especially are kids. They're not sure they want to go with Willa; they're not good at things like rationing limited food and choosing the most logical option. The physical survival part of the story is probably a minority of the story, which gives Willa a bit of a chance to experience some other types of survival—like getting used to a world she's no longer experienced in.

Running Wild is middle grade but enjoyable for curious older readers as well...and now I find myself wanting to reread Hatchet.

Review: "If I Told You, I'd Have to Kiss You" by Mae Marvel

If I Told You, I'd Have to Kiss You by Mae Marvel
Published June 2025 via St. Martin's Griffin
★★★★

Take Mr. and Mrs. Smith and queer it up, and what do you get? You get If I Told You, I'd Have to Kiss You.

It was love at first sight for Yardley and KC, and three years later they're living together and still madly in love—and they've just broken up, because they're each carrying secrets that are pulling the relationship down. What they don't know: Those secrets are the same. They've both been working for the CIA for years...and things are about to get interesting.

She was five feet of coiled muscle with the kind of mind shining behind her eyes that made people not want to be the first one to talk, just in case they weren't as smart as they thought. (loc. 811*)

I have to be honest: I don't think the CIA works even a little bit the way it's depicted here, and for the sake of fiction, that's exactly the way I like it. This is spy stuff with sparkles (or perhaps a unicorn onesie?) on, with lots of red lipstick and tight dresses and blasting away at bad guys without so much as ruffling one's hair. It reminds me a bit of The Blonde Identity, and, well...I was here for it then, and I'm here for it now. Presumably CIA operatives have quite a lot more oversight and quite a lot less space to make decisions about what to do and when and why (although, what do I know), but it's a lot more fun when...well, when they get to run kind of rampant, and spy culture is basically a bunch of overgrown teenagers putting on a different wig for each party and pretending not to recognize each other.

The only downside here really has nothing to do with the book itself: there was a moment when I saw this that I thought it was a new Mabel Maney book, and when I tell you that my heart skipped a beat... Well. It's been too long. But at least if Mabel Maney doesn't have any new books coming out soon, there are other authors willing to take up the task of writing playful, improbable, queer spy novels.

Just one question remains: Can this be a series?

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the authors and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "The Last Thing She Saw" by Nina Laurin

The Last Thing She Saw by Nina Laurin
Published July 2024 via Grand Central Publishing
★★★

A failed podcaster returns to her tired hometown when a flood unearths remains—remains that can only be the body of the girl whose disappearance said podcaster once tried to investigate.

Sometimes you just need a random murder mystery. I like stories about cold cases—both fiction and nonfiction—though I'm never quite sure why. This one gives us both the then and the now; as well as Stephanie poking around and trying to figure out what happened back in the day, we see her mother as a teenager in the same small town, before...well, before everything.

I was here for the premise but found the story itself to be quite slow. It doesn't help that the characters aren't particularly likeable, and neither do they try to be; Stephanie's mother, Laura, is in the Then sections maybe the most compelling character (trying to escape the fate of her own mother, among other things), but since we first see her Now, it's hard to root for her all that much for most of the book. That's okay—not all books have to be driven by likeable characters—but when the plot is slow and the mystery not as compelling as I'd hoped, this all added up to a pretty unmemorable read.