Little Thieves by Margaret Owen

Amy  

young adult, fantasy

In this fairy tale retelling of The Goose Girl, Vanja was given away by her mother to the gods Fortune and Death when she was a young child. Her adopted godmothers sent her to serve as a princess’ maid until she would be old enough to choose whether to become the servant of Fortune or Death. But while a maid, Vanja was met with cruelty. Deciding she didn’t want to become a servant to either of her godmothers and wanting to get even with the wealthy class for ruining her childhood, she hatched a plan to purchase her way to freedom. However, after accidentally crossing a lower god, she is cursed and only has two weeks to set things right before the curse kills her.

Even though this was a fairy tale retelling, it felt very much like an actual fairy tale with magical creatures, customs, curses, kings, and princesses, etc.  I had not been familiar with The Goose Girl. However, I found it in my copy of Grimms’ Fairy Tales and read it when I was near the end of this novel.

Little Thieves by Margaret Owen was not so much a retelling as an expansion of the original version of the tale. Personally, I prefer retellings where the author creates something of their own, disguising the original story in a different setting/time/place than the original.

The first quarter of Little Thieves was, frankly, lackluster. I was just about to abandon the book when it finally caught my interest. The last half was fun. The romance was predictable from the beginning (mostly due to their similar young ages) but the characters held my attention. The morals of the story are that people should love, be kind to themselves and each other, and not be selfish.

Saskia Maarleveld was the audiobook narrator. I've enjoyed her narration in the past. She always does a great job with eastern European-sounding words and names. She also has a nice catalog of different voices and accents. However, in this production, there were more than a handful of obvious overdubs where she went back and re-recorded a few sentences. They sounded completely different from the main narrative. I'll give her an A-.

   

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

Amy  

fiction

Macon has had a rough year.  His son was murdered. Then his wife left him. He is stuck in his monotonous, small life when he meets Muriel and things are never the same.

Macon is a travel writer but doesn’t like traveling. He has very definite opinions on everything; opinions which tend to be stuffy and unpopular, which is just as well since he doesn’t like people.  Trying to give him the benefit of the doubt since we, the readers, are only meeting him after his tragedies, I still found myself bored and disinterested in his pathetic existence in the first quarter of the novel. I switched to a different novel because I needed a break from Macon’s depressing life carousel.

I went back to The Accidental Tourist after completing my “palate cleanser” book and was able to complete the novel. Macon was his own worst enemy and couldn’t seem to summon the emotion and drive necessary to make any changes.  Then again, he failed to see anything wrong with himself.  Despite himself, Muriel affected his momentum. She was so completely different than anyone he’d previously encountered and so relentless in her optimism and energy that he couldn’t help but become folded into her world.  It took someone like her to snap Macon out of his tragic circumstances.

The ending of this Anne Tyler novel was odd, though. I guess it was in character for Macon to fall back into old habits but the way he finally realized how he wanted to proceed seemed anticlimactic. On the other hand, it was definitely time for the novel to end.

The audiobook narrator, Jefferson Mays, was good. He had a variety of voices and his voice acting was on point. He also actually sang! YAY!  I’ll give him an A.

   

The Q by Amy Tintera

Lynnie
Amy   

young adult, fantasy

Set in a world in which Austin, TX was once the site of a pandemic so deadly that the city was walled off and left to fend for itself. No longer part of the United States, The Q, as it's called, is governed by factions. When Lennon Pierce, the only son of an American presidential candidate, is kidnapped and dropped into The Q, his survival and possible escape is dependent upon Maisie Rojas, the daughter of one of the faction's most vicious members.

Lynnie's Review

Another fun action-adventure from Amy Tintera that held my attention from the first page. I've enjoyed several other books by Tintera over the years, including Rebel and Reboot, All These Monsters, and All These Warriors.

Tintera writes about characters in their late teens, young 20s better than most authors; she understands both their motivations (generally, each other), and their voice. I always appreciate that she doesn't write down to them, allows them to act like the mature-ish adults that they are, and generally lets them figure out their own issues. The Q was no exception.

As expected from a Tintera novel, there was plenty of witty banter, and page-turning action, along with characters to cheer for and against and some romantic tension just for fun. This is escapist YA the way it should be done and I enjoyed every moment.

Amy's Review

This is another extreme world created by Amy Tintera in which her characters are trying their best to survive despite dangerous situations.  It was a creatively imagined spin on how governments might deal with epidemics. I could actually envision the world of this novel being sadly plausible. The characters and their social environments felt authentic. And I found myself captured by the story of the boy from the outside and the girl who was trying to help him return despite their growing feelings for each other. I will say that I rolled my eyes a bit that Lennon happened to have just the specific skills which were needed a couple times but Tintera wrote it in such a way that I was able to keep enjoying the ride. As a young adult book, the message that the young generations can improve their own future hit home.

The two audiobook narrators were Kyla Garcia and Robbie Daymond.  They both did a fine job.  I’ve heard Garcia narrate 3 books before—two for which I gave her an A but one which I could not even listen to for 30 minutes because of her terrible trend of emphasizing the last word in every sentence.  In The Q, she was mostly great but she still put too much emphasis on the word “said” whenever she was reading “she said”/”he said” at the end of the sentence.  It reminded me so much of the annoying way she had read that third novel that I looked it up to verify she was *that* narrator. Garcia can be robotic when not acting as a character but, thankfully, her performance in this audiobook was mostly good. I’ll give her a B+.  Daymond was marvelous. He nailed his character and had a nice repertoire of voices. I give him an A. I only wish that the two of them could have agreed about the accents of a few characters (where he gave them Latino accents and she did not). I blame that on the producers.

House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1) by Sarah J. Maas

Amy  

fantasy

Bryce is half human, half fae, living in a world inhabited by many different types of creatures. Bryce works in a gallery owned by a witch and lives with her old college roommate, a wolf shifter.  As she navigates the various dangers around her, she is not afraid to live life to the fullest. When tragedy strikes, she is forced to help an archangel discover the identity of the criminal who has been summoning a murderous demon to their city.

The landscape of Bryce’s life was both gritty and flashy. It was fun to get to know this “bad girl” with a good heart. Sarah Maas is a great character inventor. However, it was sometimes difficult to fully grasp the politics and alliances and allegiances in Bryce’s world. There was just so much of it….so many different types of beings and so many layers to the rungs of power. I give Maas credit for not laying out all the descriptions up front like a dictionary but, rather, attempting to make them emerge more organically. Still, she left this reader in confusion through much of the early pages. This tampered my enjoyment at the beginning. Despite this, I persevered under the assumption that it would all make more sense as the story unspooled. And, for the most part, it did. It just wasn’t a flawless or comfortable process for me. Likewise, the ending had a lot of stuff going on that wasn’t entirely clear. But I just went with it.

I’ve had mixed feelings about the previous Maas novels I’ve read but she has been consistently great at building suspense. In House of Earth and Blood, her characters had swagger and were fun to get to know.  You knew where certain plot points were going to go but there was also a lot you weren’t expecting. Some aspects felt silly. For example, powerful beings still had to use mundane tools like coffee makers and a fae prince lived in a crappy house (by choice) with two roommates.  It seemed that everyone was a rebel for the sake of being contrary. And absolutely everyone was gorgeous. But I decided to set my annoyances aside so that I could enjoy the ride.

I loved the brewing romance. And around the 80% mark, the book became unputdownable! It was really hard to go to bed but my eyes stopped working so I had to put it down and was really upset about that! This crazy story actually also had a lot of heart and had me, surprisingly, tearing up a couple of times!  So I give kudos to Maas for making me feel things in the midst of Bryce’s unlikely, kooky, horrible world. And I look forward to reading the sequel!

   

All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir

Amy    
Lynnie  

young adult, contemporary fiction

Sal and Noor are high school seniors who have known each other their whole lives, their families being among the very small Pakistani population in their small town in California. Both are facing pretty serious difficulties—dealing with more than the average high school senior. The two had become distant but, when Sal’s mother dies of kidney disease, they find comfort from each other and begin to rebuild their friendship, perhaps becoming even closer than ever. But then things fall apart in spectacular fashion. All My Rage alternates between both of their points of view in addition to Sal’s mom’s point of view from her earlier days in Pakistan and the United States.

Amy's Review

Unlike Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes series, All My Rage was not a fantasy. The realities in Sal’s and Noor’s lives were very believable and my heart went out to them. Of course, there is some normal teenage drama and stupidity but the two of them each had significant personal troubles to deal with. I was rooting for them throughout and had to know how things would turn out for them, especially after everything really got out of control in the middle of the novel. In fact, this novel even brought out all of my rage at times.  It was very well written and I can understand why it won the 2022 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and the Michael L. Printz Award.  Well deserved!

Interestingly, as I read this novel, I recognized similarities to Tahir’s own childhood which she had shared during an author visit I attended right before her third Ember novel was released.  Sal’s family runs a motel in a small California town and, I believe, that is exactly the situation in which Tahir grew up. Also, Sal is a writer as is she. I wonder if there was more autobiography in this novel.

There were three narrators, one for each of the three points of view. The best one was Kausar Mohammad voicing Noor’s sections. She was a superb voice actor and had a nice variety of voices. The other two were Deepti Gupta voicing Misbah and Kamran R. Khan voicing Sal. It was difficult to follow dialogues in Sal’s sections and I really wished Khan tried a bit harder to differentiate character voices. But, overall, they were a good ensemble and really brought the characters to life. I’ll give them an A-.

Lynnie's Review

 

Rage. Rage is not the only emotion in this amazing novel by Sabaa Tahir, but rage courses through every page, infusing itself into every other emotion as it plays out. Rage at the racism that Noor and Salahudin experience in their small California town, whether overt or the kind of everyday microaggression experienced by brown people in mostly white communities. Rage at the hardships that immigrants face as they try to fight their way toward fulfilling their own American dream. Rage at the power of addiction to blow apart lives and families and how powerless it can make loved ones feel. Rage at how difficult it can be to escape an abusive home, how hard it is to get help. Rage at the loss of loved ones gone too soon. So. Much. Rage.

And yet, that rage is also paired with love and friendship and family. All My Rage was a gripping story from beginning to end and I found myself compelled to finish it and find out what would happen to Noor and Salahudin. Would they be able to channel their rage and succeed? Or would it tear them apart chapter by chapter? Sometimes, I was not sure, but I found myself rooting for them every step of the way.

I both read the book and listened to the audiobook depending on what I was doing at the time, and I found that the media changed my perspective on some characters. I found that I had much more sympathy for Ashlee, a friend of Salahudin's for example, when voiced by Kausar Mohammad during Noor's chapters, than when I read about her character. Conversely, I had less sympathy for Salahudin when listening- the clipped way in which Kamran R. Khan voiced most of his chapters made him sound emotionless at times and it made it difficult for me to empathize with him, unlike when I read his voice myself. I found Noor and Misbah to be delightful in any form. Deepti Gupta gave Misbah a voice that was absolutely enchanting- whenever her chapters ended I was sad to hear her leave for a while.

Music is a big part of the story- and I loved the songs Noor choose to express her emotions throughout the book. I have no doubt there are a bunch of playlists from this book out there on Spotify or other platforms- great music is always inspirational.

This is definitely one of the best books I've read this year and will leave me thinking about the characters long after I've put it down.

   

The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb

Amy   

fiction

Ray is about to compete at the International Tchaikovsky Competition when his prized Stradivarius violin is stolen and offered for ransom. As the authorities are doing their investigation, Ray thinks through his past to figure out who committed this crime and how.

In Brendan Slocumb’s debut novel, The Violin Conspiracy, he began with the violin’s disappearance and initial investigation details before going back into Ray’s history and filling in the full picture. This grabbed me and kept me interested. This is the story of a kid who loves playing the violin coming from an underprivileged, unsupportive family, overcoming obstacles and racism to emerge as a top musician, only to have his prized instrument stolen out from under him.  The novel was well crafted but tough to read sometimes when I became so infuriated by what Ray had to experience at multiple points in his life. I actually had to turn off the audiobook and take a break twice because I was so enraged on Ray’s behalf at the injustices. Also, I always get upset reading about bad parents. Thankfully, Ray did have a couple supportive, loving people in his life or things would’ve turned out differently for him.

This is a terrific novel. Ray felt believable as a young man making stupid choices at times. The tale is very relatable yet still original and creative.  Ray was his Grandmother’s pride and joy and was guided through life by her wise instructions and loving guidance. He was a likeable protagonist and I rooted for him the whole way. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, in the author’s note at the end, Slocumb revealed that some of the more upsetting experiences of discrimination were autobiographical.

The audiobook is narrated by J.D. Jackson and he did a good job. He had some variety in his vocal repertoire and was a good voice actor.  But I wasn’t crazy about his narrator voice. I’m giving him a B+.

The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish

Amy  

historical fiction

Helen’s former university student contacts her to investigate some old Hebrew texts found in his wife’s seventeenth century family home near London. Helen quickly realizes these documents hold great historical significance and she embarks on a journey of discovery along with the graduate student assigned to assist her. The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish switches between the contemporary study of these discovered texts and the lives of the document writers in the 1660s, particularly Ester Valasquez. Ester was an Amsterdam-born Jewish girl who was taken into a learned rabbi’s household in London after her parents’ deaths and who, under the rabbi’s education, became a gifted writer and philosopher—something extremely unusual for a woman of her time.

This book is pretty slow-paced and extremely long. There were mysteries to ponder throughout the tale to keep me going, though. There were also several characters who were facing different sorts of trials and who, during the course of the story, matured or became enlightened. I learned some things about Jewish history in Europe, life in the 1660s, the processes for studying rare documents, British architecture, and how London handled The Plague. But, for me, the best parts of the novel were the ones where we got to know the characters better—their back stories and their future concerns.  There were some really slow sections but the characters pulled me through to the satisfying conclusion.

The audiobook was narrated by Corrie James. She did have a variety of voices and accents, although I wouldn’t say her accents were stellar.  Her best quality was her vocal acting. Sadly, there was some saliva which is an automatic demerit. I’ll give her an A-.