Completely Full Bookshelf

I hope you all are holding up well! I'm writing this review on Saturday afternoon , not Saturday night—that's how you know I'm relatively organized right now. (I used to have these done way earlier in the week, but this year, college has thrown a real wrench in that.) Also, as a judge for the Cybils Awards, I wanted to remind everyone that you have through Friday, October 15  to nominate your favorite kidlit books for the awards! You can  see the details here —I highly encourage you all to take a look and suggest some books for consideration! Now I just need to figure out what to nominate...   (Update on Sunday night: I submitted my first nomination, and you can expect to hear about it on the blog in the coming weeks!) Anyway, today I am recommending an absolutely fabulous YA graphic novel: The Girl From the Sea  by Molly Knox Ostertag. And I'll warn you, I just wrote a paragraph where I said I would "briefly" discuss something and then had to go back and del...

Well, it's happening—on Monday, I start in-person college classes for the first time in my life. Accordingly, I will be wildly busy and frantic for a while, but considering I posted a book review every single week of my first year of college last year (which was all-virtual), I don't think my blog will suffer too much. But you can expect that Thursday Thoughts posts will be on hiatus, and I probably won't have time to stop by people's blogs during the week (although I will still be diligent about commenting on your MMGM and #IMWAYR posts). Blogging is a nice respite from the chaos of college, so I will look forward to sharing oodles of book reviews as always in the months to come! In other news, I bought a bunch of new graphic novels using gift-card money! A few are already out, most of them come out in September and October, and one comes out in February and one in April. It'll be nice to have some cool books just magically showing up on my doorstep! Aggravatingly,...

I hope everyone is enjoying the middle of summer! I'm starting to feel a little frantic about how soon all my reading/relaxing time will come to an end—but we still have a few more good weeks ahead of us! Also, this past Thursday, I wrote about some of my frustrations with MG books as a genre— check it out here! Moving on to today's review for MMGM and #IMWAYR, I have one last review of a graphic novel about middle school experiences (after Truly Tyler  and Just Pretend ) before we shake things up next week. Today, I am recommending the graphic novel  Kyle's Little Sister  by BonHyung Jeong.         I decided to try out this graphic novel after seeing a review of it by Alex Baugh at Randomly Reading , and I'm glad to have tried it out! This story centers around Grace, a 6th grader who is frustrated at constantly being in the shadow of her popular older brother Kyle, an 8th grader. Whether at home, where she fights with him over the TV or feel...

I have a few quick notes before we move into today's review. First of all, I have finally set up a Goodreads account for my blog!  It is currently a bit of a mess, and I will be trying to get it finished up over the next few weeks. And if you're already reading my blog, I honestly wouldn't bother looking at my Goodreads—it's only going to have mini-reviews of the books I'm already reviewing on my blog anyway, along with links back to my blog. But I hope it will be a useful way for new readers to discover my blog so that my posts don't just disappear into the ether! You can visit my Goodreads profile here. Also, some quick self-promotion: I have started a photography blog, A Scrapbook of Stories , that I am using primarily to participate in the #2021picoftheweek challenge hosted by MMGM's own  Of Maria Antonia  (which is also now open to book bloggers)! Make sure to stop by if you're interested. I also revisited my reviews from July to December 2020 in a...

I hope everyone is doing well today! For Thursday Thoughts last week, I wrote about books and the passage of time —take a look if you're interested! Today I am excited to be recommending a book I've been looking forward to for a very  long time: Everywhere Blue  by Joanne Rossmassler Fritz! And I'm also holding the Summer 2021 Book Giveaway , with details at the bottom of this post! Review of Everywhere Blue : Seriously, is this not the best book cover EVER?! (And it matches my blog!) The art is by Elena Megalos.         Looking back through my blog's archives, I've been looking forward to Everywhere Blue  since March 2020, just before the pandemic ( here's proof )! And the reason is very simple: Joanne Rossmassler Fritz runs the book blog  My Brain on Books , and although she is currently taking a break from blogging (as most people would once they release an actual book ), she has been an active member of MMGM for years and has participated...

First of all, if you have a blog on Blogger and have no clue what to do about the FeedBurner email subscription mess, good news—I made a video tutorial on how to move your subscribers over to my service of choice, Mailchimp! Click here to watch it —I hope it is helpful! I hope everyone is doing all right today! Summer is coming in just a few weeks, so I will have way more time to read books and write reviews. I do have some frantic weeks to get through before that, but I have somehow managed to get two different non-graphic-novel books into my reading schedule! One will be the subject next week's review, and the other is what I'll be reviewing today: the novel in verse Starfish  by Lisa Fipps.           I celebrated my birthday a few weeks ago and got an AWESOME selection of books (shown at left), and Starfish  was one of them. This book has been super-popular lately, and after seeing recommendations of it by the awesome bloggers Cheriee Weichel at Li...

For MMGM and #IMWAYR, I am recommending The List of Things That Will Not Change  by Rebecca Stead.           Before I describe this book in particular, it seems like an appropriate time to mention that Rebecca Stead is one of my favorite authors ever . I loved her Newbery-winning book When You Reach Me  so much that it was the first book I ever reviewed (you can see the post here ), and I loved her last solo book Goodbye Stranger  so much that, since I thought my first review didn't do it justice, I reviewed it again . (Looking back at my first review, I apparently knew it didn't do the book justice since the moment I wrote it!) Rebecca Stead is such a truly amazing author that, when I heard The List of Things That Will Not Change  was coming out, I would have bought a copy without even reading what it's about. I suspect many of you feel the same way, since I've seen quite a few people who have read or are reading this book. Whether y...