Burn It Down: Rigsby WI Volume 2 by S. E. Case
A year ago (March 2025) Rigsby WI by S. E. Case came out and March 2026 Burn It Down: Rigsby WI Volume 2 came out. Flux: Rigsby WI Volume 3 will be out in 2027 and I’m hoping that means volume four is in 2028. Of course, I want all the stories for each character now, as I’m not happy that I have to wait a year for book three, let alone until 2028! You see, I became invested in the four main teens/friends of […]
Insectopolis: A Natural History by Peter Kuper
Insectopolis: A Natural History by Peter Kuper is a crazy, wild, odd, neat, and informative read. I have read books on insects (mostly picture books and graphic novels for children to teens), but I think this might be my favorite read yet. Kuper mixes fiction, fantasy, speculative and non-fiction as the impact of these creatures unfolds. We start with a brother and sister off in New York City, going to an exhibit at “some library.” The sister is a scientist, her brother a “dude” but […]
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
Dominic Salt and his three children (teenagers Raff and Fen, and their nine-year-old brother Orly) are the last living people on Shearwater Island. Dominic is the caretaker for a research lab and a seed bank housing emergency reserves of seeds for every plant species on Earth, in case of apocalypse. It’s not an idle threat in the world of Charlotte McConaghy’s novel. The waters, always rough, have lately been rising, and are threatening to swallow the island entirely. The lab has been shuttered and the […]
The Love Feud by Janine Amesta
I’ve been looking forward to The Love Feud for months, and it lived up to my expectations. Hailey and Ry are sweet and messy. Their fake feud to draw attention to the hot air balloon festival is a delightfully flimsy excuse to spend time together. Robert Moreno’s death upended the lives of each of his three daughters. If you haven’t read Love at First Flight and The Wedding Con yet, now is a good time. In the immediate aftermath, David Selene, the owner of a […]
Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian
And I thought the sailing jargon of the Swallows and Amazons series was mysterious. But that was just messing around in boats, to quote Ratty, and this rises to a whole other level of importance, as well as impenetrableness. Fortunately, one of the two main characters, Stephen Maturin, ship’s sturgeon, is absolutely a noobie. That helps us some as much needs to be explained to him, but at least he is there on board to get the visual version. This period, about 1800, is that […]
L. A. Women (2025) by Ella Berman
I picked this book up because I liked the font, and the colours, and I’m fascinated by Los Angeles (where, of course, I’ve never been), and its foggy shadows and neon gleam: the films, the music, the messy myths and sprawling stories. The story here is a little Natalie Beach/Caroline Calloway if they lived in the 1960s-1970s, haunting Laurel Canyon instead of Cambridge and New York. Berman’s story centres on Gala and Lane, the friend with the glitter, the friend in the shadows, and the […]
