Completely Full Bookshelf

I'm excited to be here with an actual prose MG novel, which tend to be pretty rare in my reading schedule these days. Today we're looking at Mulan: Before the Sword  by Grace Lin. There are some SPOILERS  in the review below that I have marked with tags so you can avoid them if need be (although some of them are honestly worth looking at). Grace Lin is just as talented an illustrator as she is an author, and she did a beautiful job with the art for this cover!         So here's a bit of background. Back in 1998, Disney made an animated movie called Mulan  that is quite beloved—it was either the first or one of the first Disney animated movies with an Asian protagonist, and it's also just considered one of the super-fun early Disney animated films that people love. (And I didn't know this, but Mulan herself is an actual character from Chinese legends, and from what I know, the movie roughly followed the legends' plot.) Then, last year, Disney ...

Before we get to today's post, I'd like to mention that I shared another original poem this last Thursday, "On summer" —check it out if you're interested! Also, I have the winners of the Summer 2021 Book Giveaway to announce! The winner of Everywhere Blue  by Joanne Rossmassler Fritz is... Danielle! The winner of Fighting Words  by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley is... Rosi (a fellow MMGM blogger)! The winner of the signed copy of Invisible Emmie  by Terri Libenson is... Shaye (a fellow #IMWAYR blogger at The Miller Memo) ! And the winner of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe  by Benjamin Alire Sáenz and Are You Listening?  by Tillie Walden is... CarloShmarlo! Congratulations to all the winners, and thanks so much to everyone who entered! Moving to the review, I'm excited to have a review today of a ridiculously fantastic YA graphic novel, On a Sunbeam  by Tillie Walden! This book has somewhat mature content as well as complex themes ...

***Blog news!***  It's the summer now, which means I have way more time to devote to reading books and to blogging! As such, I am starting a new feature on my blog called Thursday Thoughts ! On at least some Thursdays, I'll be discussing book-related topics that I have opinions about and inviting you all to share your thoughts in the comment section! Note that these are not book reviews (I will continue to only post those on Mondays), but I hope these can be a new way for me to connect with my readers! (Also, if you want to see these posts in your Blogger reading list, I finally added a Follow button  on my blog sidebar!) ***Public service announcement***  I heard some weird things online about people's Blogger posts getting deleted recently. I have no idea if any of that was true, but it seems like a good time to remind you all to download a backup of your blog on Blogger periodically—to do so, go to your Blogger dashboard > Settings > Manage blog > Back up cont...

***Important notice for email subscribers*** Blogger continues to get more and more aggravating for me (and I'm sure for everyone else as well). This time, it's because most people on Blogger use a system from Blogger's owner, Google, called FeedBurner to run email subscriptions. Unfortunately, Google has decided to make a gigantic mess for basically everyone on Blogger by discontinuing FeedBurner's email subscription system in July of this year. Because I had some spare time this week, I have migrated my email subscription system from FeedBurner to a new system called Mailchimp.  So what does this mean for you? Well, first off, you do NOT need to resubscribe to keep receiving my  emails —I exported all of my subscribers from FeedBurner and imported them into Mailchimp, so if you have been receiving emails in the past, you will continue receiving them now. By Monday evening, you should have received two copies of this post, one from FeedBurner and one from Mailchimp ...

Update (4/2/2022): I typically participate in blogging groups that review kids’ books, but sometimes, I do end up reading adult books like this one. In the past, I have typically labeled those books as MG or YA when I review them, primarily because I still want my typically blogging audiences to see them! However, this has become confusing, so I have decided to re-label these books as adult books, while leaving the reviews in their original format. Thank you for your consideration! Before we get to today's post, I have the winners of the 2021 Books by Asian-American Voices Giveaway to announce! We had 15 entrants and 5 winners, which means you all had a 1-in-3 chance of winning (not bad!). The winner of Displacement  by Kiku Hughes is... Aaron! The winner of Where the Mountain Meets the Moon  by Grace Lin is... Danielle! The winner of Measuring Up  by Lily LaMotte and Ann Xu is... Maria! The winner of Parachutes  by Kelly Yang is... Shaye! And the winner of The Magi...

Do you ever sit down to write something, try to phrase it five different ways, and then give up and start complaining about it to the readers of your blog? No? Just me? Okay. I believe I'll start this post off with a lengthy series of random, disjointed, and irrelevant spiels: All I want for Christmas...is two different shots so that I can leave my house without worrying about horrible disease and death for the first time in nine months! I was trying to help my parents buy one of the new Xboxes online, and the fact that we actually got one for the MSRP and a shipping date in mid-January is nothing short of a Christmas miracle! Best Buy's website makes you wait again and again and again  for 45 minutes as new batches of stock appear, failing to mention that they won't ship it and those batches are not within 250 miles of you. Amazon's website gave me a true constellation of error messages—I got error messages in the cart saying that the item was not available, I got the ...

OK, before we get to today's review, I have to vent. Today, in our house, we kept hearing a smoke alarm chirping as if the battery was low. Normally, smoke alarms chirp every few seconds, but this one was really irregular. Sometimes it would chirp, and then it would go silent. So my family and I ran around the house, trying to find this alarm every time we heard it. But it was absolutely bizarre: every time we ran toward the sound, it sounded like it was coming from a different place. We went upstairs, but then it was downstairs. We went downstairs, and then it was on the other side of the house. We went to the other side of the house, and then it was upstairs again. We. Could. Not. Find. It. We spent hours  running around, pulling batteries out of five smoke alarms, putting them back in, testing them, wondering if our whole interconnected system was broken, Googling articles about how to find a chirping smoke alarm, and generally agonizing. And then—this is what really kills me—my...