Month: December 2022

“No matter what difficulties people face, they will always have the strength to overcome them. It just takes heart.”

If a reader is looking for deep character study, unforgiving portrayal of loss, and complete emotional destruction, Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi fits the bill.  Set in Tokyo, this book follows the many faces who pass through Funiculi Funicula, a café at the center of a Japanese urban legend. The café is known for one seat, which is said to transport its occupant through time. Anyone who attempts to travel back in time is met with a strict, and often deterring, set of rules: 

The only people you can visit in the past are those who have visited the café, and you can only meet them when they are in the café. You cannot leave the seat while in the past, otherwise you will be brought back to the present. Nothing you do in the past will change the present. Drink your coffee before it gets cold, or you will be stuck in the past. 

Split into four sections, Before the Coffee Gets Cold details the lives of four people who find themselves needing to go back to the past. Along the way, the café staff receive meaningful exploration from Kawaguchi. Kazu, the waitress responsible for pouring the time travelers coffee, is a consistent character who is shown to have more meaning to the narrative as new people pass through.  

Each story features themes of grief, heartbreak, maladies, regret, and love. I’ve never finished a book of its length faster. Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a tear jerker that makes you fall in love with its characters before ruining their lives, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. I recommend this book to anyone and everyone, especially those who dwell on the past. By reading Before the Coffee Gets Cold, I have thought more than ever before about what other people mean to me, and that is the mark of a great book. 

Gone by Michael Grant is one of my all-time favorite books (and series). It focuses on a small town on the southern coast of California called Perdido Beach, but doesn’t stick with one singular point of view. Each chapter is written through the eyes of a different character. The “main” character, though, so-to-speak, is Sam Temple. The book opens with Sam sitting in his history class when, all of a sudden, the teacher disappears. Along with the rest of the adults in the town.

Everyone over the age of fourteen is gone. There’s a round barrier circling the town; impenetrable and painful to touch. Kids are mutating and gaining unexplainable, dangerous powers. Sam is forced into a role of leadership when the kids from the private school up the hill come into town and make themselves known. There’s two sides; The Coates Kids and the Perdido Beach kids. And within the sides, things get divided. Half of the Coates kids hate Caine, their leader. The kids down in Perdido beach are splitting up amongst themselves. The “Normal” kids hate the “Freaks”, due to what seems to be a mix of jealousy and fear for their powers.

I first read this book in a reading group in fifth grade and immediately became obsessed with the series. It definitely appeals to different ages because I still love it and I’m about to turn eighteen soon. Everybody who I know has read this book (and/or the whole series), has told me that they liked it.

I love the way that the point of view changes with each chapter; some characters know more than others, some characters are keeping secrets from each other, some are completely clueless about half of what’s really going on. The books are longer, but they’re definitely worth the read.

The Whispering Dark by Kelly Andrew is suspense packed novel full of loss and loneliness based in the modern world. College student Delaney Meyers-Petrov is deaf with very little experience in the real world. She enrolls in college hoping for a fresh start. She finds not only that but many other things ranging from romance to new friends to unlocking a part of herself she never knew existed. Colton Price is a assistant for Delaney’s professors with many dark secrets and a past that haunts him. He has friends in high places and a force to be reckoned with.

This book is written very well with strong characters that are interesting. You want to follow them throughout the book so you know what happens next in their own personal storybooks. There is plenty of suspense and cliffhangers throughout the book that also lead the reader on and draw them in to the story. All of the important main characters have something in their past that haunts them and keeps them going, they all have end goals. There are many twists and turns in the plot that add to the intensity of the story. Right when something that appears to be predictable is about to happen the author makes a complete 180° turn in the other direction with the story.

This book, while good is also very stereotypical at times. Two people who are forbidden from speaking to one another speak. Two people who are forbidden to love one another fall in love. The good guy isn’t always as good as he appears to be. And sometimes things are best left the way they are.

The book is a fantasy novel loaded with magical realism. The people who would enjoy this book are the people who like books filled with suspense and action. People who are ok with an ending that maybe they didn’t believe possible. The Whispering Dark is not a lighthearted book and can be very intense. It is not a book for someone who is looking for a happy story about two people who fall in love and ride off into the sunset together.

Medema’s young adult mystery, Message Not Found, portrays the emotional toll of a death that needed a ton of pop rocks and Bob Ross to heal.

I loved this book. Medema explores grief so accurately and writes so beautifully that the idiocy of teen romance never falls flat even when Bailey got too close to Cade and I really wanted her to have been the one thrown off the mountain. The book is relatively slow going, but I think that suits the healing one does after a death. However, Message Not Found is never bland. The slowness is only ever truly slow if the mystery aspects are of little interest.

In the middle of an Alaskan winter, Vanessa, the perfect book girl, swerves off a mountain pass road and falls to her death, leaving behind her best friend, Bailey, and her boyfriend, Mason. Late in the night, after the Champagne wore off, Vanessa leaves Bailey’s house to go partying with Mason. A mysterious text has Vanessa panicking, and Bailey is left with a thousand questions unanswered when Vanessa dies far from her house, a place where she had no business being. As everyone around her jumps on the bandwagon of grief, Bailey wonders what could have been so important it cost her best friend’s life? Jackie-mom has a software AI that Bailey steals and then steals phones, anything that might hold a piece of Vanessa, and uploads all of Vanessa’s digital footprint to the AI. As the bot, called V, is given more information, it paints a startling picture that leaves Bailey wondering. As she heals, reconnects with her ex-boyfriend, Cade, and grows closer and closer with Mason, she discovers the untold truths of Vanessa’s life, while navigating college applications.

I would recommend this book to everyone who likes Y/A mystery or needs grief counseling.

“I wanted to know what it would be like to be myself, fully, right from the jump. No secrets, no hiding.”

A captivating and fast-paced story, This Poison Heart is sure to grab the attention of any reader who enjoys moderate action and fantasy. While this book perfectly appeals to a younger audience, specifically 12-15 year olds, it may come off as a bit too juvenile to a more mature audience. The story begins with a seemingly ordinary teenage girl who, to the surprise of absolutely no one, is hiding a mysterious magical ability from the world. Briseis has just completed her junior year of high school, and is bombarded with the stress of her approaching graduation and college programs. Getting in the way of her normal future is her ability to manipulate plants and make them grow; a skill useful to her adoptive parents’ botanical shop in Brooklyn, but disastrous to her social life and normalcy in school. When money gets tight at home and her power grows out of control, she receives the convenient news that she has inherited an upstate mansion from her biological aunt and is thrown into an adventure of mystery, self-discovery, danger, and isolation.

Painfully predictable, this retelling of Greek mythology, The Secret Garden, and Little Shop of Horrors might leave mature readers bored. To give credit where credit is due, This Poison Heart has incredible and diverse representation, and shares the story of found family in a beautiful way despite its formulaic and juvenile nature. Two of the main characters, Briseis’ moms, make for refreshing queer representation, as well as black representation.

Bayron confronts the experiences of birth family versus chosen family, and highlights the differences between the two. I would recommend This Poison Heart to young readers interested in action and fantasy, but I personally wish I hadn’t taken the time to read it myself. The writing style aligned poorly with the age of the protagonist, a detail hardly above detection to a seasoned reader. I applaud Bayron for her incredible ideas and concepts presented in this book, but I wish the execution had done the story more justice.

Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is officially labeled as a mystery novel but in reality, it is much more. Owens combined a mystery crime story, with romance and historical fiction to create a beautifully shocking coming-of-age novel. Beginning in small-town North Carolina in 1953, Kya lives in an old run-down shack with her parents and older siblings. Eventually one by one all of her siblings just disappear into the marsh until she is left only with her alcoholic father with a history of abuse. She is essentially forced to learn how to live on her own, having never gone to school, with little money and food. Once her father abandons her as well, she becomes known as “The Marsh Girl” because she is rarely seen in town. The novel then flips to 1969 where a murder is being investigated involving The Marsh Girl’s secret wealthy lover. From then on each chapter flips between her childhood years and 1969. Throughout all of this, we get to see Kya grow from a naive, abandoned young girl, to a striking young woman trying to escape all of the preconceived rumors and assumptions behind The Marsh Girl.

I couldn’t put this book down and finished it in two days. It was just that good. Each chapter in the present left me wondering what was going to happen next, but in order to learn more I had to gain details of the past through flashbacks first. I loved reading Kya’s story and seeing her character develop through abandment issues and really make something of herself despite her less than ideal childhood.

The only recommendation I have is to make sure to read the book first before you watch the movie. I made the mistake of watching the movie first before I read the book. It completely spoiled the shocking ending and left me regretting my decisions.

If you enjoy coming of age stories mixed with vivid descriptions of the beautiful North Carolina marshland and all of the creatures with in it, this book is definitely for you.

“In Shaker Heights there was a plan for everything.” – Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere is a page-turning novel following two families in the seemingly perfect town of Shaker Heights, Ohio. The book follows the families as they navigate newfound hardships and their morals are tested.

Little Fires Everywhere shows readers that there is no such thing as perfectly planned in life. Mia Warren and Elena Richardson are both women who reside in Shaker Heights with their families, but that is about all they have in common. Shaker Heights is a community built to withstand change, but with Mia Warren’s arrival, change might be exactly what comes.

Elena Richardson is a stereotypical white suburban mom who was raised and is raising her children in Shaker Heights. Everything Elena stands for is represented in the community in which she resides. Life was perfect for the Richardson family. Elena has her job as a journalist for the local newspaper. Lexi, a senior, is in the midst of her application to Yale. Tripp is playing varsity sports and is one of the most popular guys in high school, Moody, though not as popular as his older brother, is brilliant and an honors kid, and then there is Izzy. Izzy is a little different, but who cares? The Richardsons are perfect, and they know it. In comes Mia Warren, a single mother and an artist who has never stayed in one place longer than a year. Mia and her daughter Pearl are accustomed to the simple life of thrift stores and yard sales. Though Mia is the opposite of what Elena stands for, she rents her an apartment in hopes of helping Mia, though Mia does not want any help. Despite their differences, they develop a strange friendship until a baby comes into the mix. Depending on the person, the baby May Ling or Mirabelle causes chaos in the town of Shaker Heights and a town divided. The chaos in Shaker Heights reaches the Richardson home causing a rift to form between them and the Warrens.

This Woven Kingdom by Tahereh Mafi is a fantasy romance about an 18 year old girl named Alizeh. Alizeh is a servant, working in the house of a Duchess. She’s a snoda, the lowest class in the city. But she’s also a Jinn. But not only is she a Jinn, she is secretly the lost queen of the Jinn. In a city where peace between humans and Jinn is tumultuous, she must hide who she is. If she doesn’t, she could be killed. One day she makes a mistake. She makes her presence known to the prince of the kingdom, Kamran. He isn’t aware of her true identity yet, but some of her actions made him suspicious of who she was. He brought his suspicions to the king, his grandfather. Soon it becomes known to them who Alizeh truly is and that she needs to die for their peace to continue. Now Kamran has to decide whether he wants to side with his kingdom or the young lady that he has somehow become infatuated with. Alizeh is also now fighting for her life and to just skate by unnoticed by anyone else.

I really enjoyed this book. I think that the story that Tahereh Mafi created was really well written. The backstory and world building was complex and it all was connected. There were no plot holes that had loose ends that didn’t make sense. Her writing was very elegant and flowed very well. The two main characters each had their own complex thoughts and story lines. Their story lines crossed but they also weren’t entirely about romance and the relationship between the two of them. The story focused on much more than what the two thought of each other. I really liked the pacing of the book. It didn’t feel too slow nor did it feel rushed. The story had time to properly progress while also still being interesting.

I definitely think that this book is probably better for highschool students. Eighth graders might enjoy it, but I don’t know if their maturity level is at a good point for this book. I think this book is really good for anyone interested in fantasy with a bit of romance. The romance isn’t shoved into your face so anyone who likes romance but not a whole lot of it would really enjoy this book.

“A Court of Mist and Fury” by Sarah J. Maas is fantasy book, and the second book in its series, which follows the main character Feyre and her life after being under the mountain in the first book. Following where the events in the first book left off, Feyre struggles severely with PTSD and anxiety. This book starts off a bit after where the first book left off, and the characters relationships seem to have shifted since the first book. Feyre goes to the night court because of the deal she made in the first book, and she is warned that it appears there will be war coming soon. She begins balancing her life between her two homes along with finding who she is now that her life is different.

I liked this book more than the first book because the characters had more depth and there was more world building. Along with that, there are so many new friendships, which is something I always look for in a book. I couldn’t put this book down because there was never a dull moment in the whole story. The only thing I didn’t like in the book was how the author repeated phrases a lot, which got very redundant. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys books that have a romance sub-plot, and people who like books with a lot of world building.