Back in March, I shared half the books I read in February and then neglected to circle back around to share the rest (even after I shared my March reads). I’d like to get caught up on book reviews now that we’re into the second half of the year, so let’s get going:

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, by Becky Albertalli
If you’ve heard anything about this award-winning book, you’ve heard it described as adorable, charming, and life-affirming. It is all of those things.

Simon is 16. He’s been having an anonymous and covert online correspondence with a boy known to him only as “Blue,” on whom he has a crush. But he forgot to log out of a school computer and now a classmate knows he’s gay and has threatened to out him to the school if he doesn’t help the guy get a date with Simon’s pal Abby.

As Simon struggles with Martin’s demand and the other day-to-day hardships of being a high school junior, he takes solace in continuing to email with Blue, opening up in ways that he doesn’t feel he can with the people he knows in real life. And Blue replies, charmingly and grammatically, but seemingly without interest in meeting up in real life. For a while that’s enough, but Simon is starting to wonder if things need to change.

There’s high school drama (literally! they’re putting on a show!). There are questions of self-identity and bullying. There’s social media fun and abuse. (There are Wesleyan mentions!) And there are Oreos. Lots and lots of Oreos. Buy yourself a bag, procure a copy of the book, and start reading now. You won’t regret it!

Pages: 303. Library copy.

Murder Most Unladylike, by Robin Stevens

Historical fiction for the middle-grade mystery series fan. It’s 1934 and Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong are classmates at a British boarding school, where, to pass the time, they’ve set up their own detective agency. Daisy, one of the most popular girls in the school, sets herself up as Sherlock, and tasks Hazel, her best friend and a recent transfer student from Hong Kong, with taking on the Watson role. Now they just need something to investigate.

When Hazel discovers their science teacher lying dead in the gym but the body is gone minutes later, the girls know they have their first real case. Who would have wanted to kill a teacher? It was someone savvy enough to hide the body and then author a fake, but convincing resignation letter to their headmistress. Was it another teacher? A student? The ghost of the girl who’d died in the same spot last year? We don’t know yet, but as long as Wells and Wong can put their power struggles aside long enough to work on the case together, we know they’ll figure it out.

Recommended for those who enjoyed the Enola Holmes series by Nancy Springer or The Mysterious Benedict Society or who want something Nancy Drew’ish, but with younger protagonists.

Pages: 324. Owned.

Trombone Shorty, by Troy Andrews
An autobiography by a phenomenal young jazz artist out of New Orleans, this picture book was named a Caldecott Honor book. It also won a Coretta Scott King Award for its illustrations by renowned artist Bryan Collier who combines collage and watercolors. The book focuses on Andrews’ youngest years growing up in the impoverished Tremé neighborhood, where he and his pals would make instruments out of whatever they could find lying around and how he took up the trombone at the age of four. By the age of six, he had his own band, by twelve, he was touring, and at 19, he joined Lenny Kravitz’s band. He’s all of 30 this year. The book is joyful to read and to look at, with its photograph-like artwork and a balloon theme running throughout. I do think this is the sort of book that would have benefited from an accompanying album, but maybe in an era of digital media that just doesn’t happen anymore. Anyway, if you read this book (with or without small people), I’d suggest playing some of his music as an accompaniment.

Pages: 40. Library copy.

Love Letters, by Katie Fforde

I really enjoyed one of Katie Fforde’s light romances last year as a Valentine’s Day read, so I decided to pick another one up this year. Love Letters focuses on Laura, who works in a bookshop that’s closing when its owner retires. Having handled author events for the store, she is asked to join a committee of people putting together a new music and literature festival. When a potential patron of the festival offers to foot the cost if they’re able to get his favorite reclusive author to be a part of it, Laura must head to Ireland to see if she can convince him to attend. Dermot Flynn is a crank, but a gorgeous and talented one (and one of Laura’s literary heroes), who hasn’t published a word in years and who hates to leave his hometown. But when Laura asks him to appear at the festival, he agrees to if she’ll sleep with him. When she wakes up early the next morning in his bed, she has no recollection of the night before. Fully horrified at her drunken behavior, she does a runner before he awakes, leaving only questions in her wake. What, exactly, happened that night? Will Dermot show up at the festival as promised? And what will Laura do after the festival is over?

Fforde’s books are fluffy and formulaic, but sometimes you just need a cute romance to get you through a dark day. Pick the occupation of the protagonist you like best and off you go!

Pages: 400. Library copy.

Mr. Lemoncello’s Library Olympics by Chris Grabenstein

Kyle, Miguel, Sierra, and Akimi are heading back to the stacks in the sequel to Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library. After their team wins board game creator Mr. Lemoncello’s challenge at the opening of their town’s new (and fabulous) library, complaints rain in from all quarters: essentially, they claim, this group of kids wouldn’t have won if WE’d been allowed to participate! So, Mr. Lemoncello decides to hold a rematch of sorts. The hometown team would face off against regional teams comprised of the best seventh-graders those areas had to offer, as winnowed down by local librarians, in a weeklong library dodecathlon. It is no surprise that the teams include some of those vocal critics.

While Kyle is fending off challenges from the likes of Marjory Muldauer, who has memorized the Dewey Decimal System to at least four places and who likes libraries qua libraries, Mr. Lemoncello is fighting off a league of concerned citizens who want to take over the running of the library and eliminate all the fun, wonderful features and remove any book they deem unsuitable. At the head of the league? None other than the mother of the sore loser from Book 1.

Will Kyle and his friends get lucky again, or will they be outmatched by their new opponents? And will Mr. Lemoncello hold on to the control of his library long enough to hand out the final medals (and full college scholarships)?

If you enjoyed the first book, The Greenglass House, The Book Scavenger, or The Westing Game, I recommend you pick this up at your earliest convenience. A must-read for fans of middle-grade books about books. (As an aside, or maybe not, if you have an upper-elementary school bookworm you need to buy gifts for, I’d totally suggest that group of books. They’re the sort of book I would have (and still will, even as an adult) read a bunch of times.)

Pages: 288. Library copy.

August is traditionally a finishing month for me, so I’ve got several WiPs (works in progress) out and in circulation. The vanilla socks from the spring have a second heel flap coming along, and I’ve nearly reached the halfway point of my yarn on my Hitchhiker. Both remain easy knits, and I’m optimistic I’ll be crossing the finish line with them during the Olympics (and their accompanying knitting event, the Ravellenic Games).

Bookwise, I’ve been averaging a couple books a week this summer. The two I’m actively reading right now are The Game of Love and Death, which maybe I’d categorize as magical historical realism? It’s definitely historical fiction, set in Seattle 1937, and featuring two humans, Henry and Flora, who are unwitting contestants in the title competition between immortals. I’m enjoying it so far, but Death is a cunning foe, and I fear we’re going to see more of her as the pages turn.

The other book is my newest acquisition, the latest project from Jo Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. It’s the working script of the play currently being staged in London’s West End, so while it’s good, it’s not as good as a novel. (I’m totally biased here.) I’ve heard that reading it aloud makes it pop, so I may give that a go after I’ve read it once. (Or maybe I’ll see if there’s an audiobook version at the library. It was nice to see one thing revealed I’d always thought should happen, so that’s rewarding. Jo has asked audiences (and readers) to #KeeptheSecrets, so that’s as much as I’ll give away.

Yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.

I know this looks a lot like the photo I posted two weeks ago, and you’d be right. I’ve made slow progress in Modern Lovers, in part because the border of the shawl required too much attention to work from a print book as I went, so I’ve been listening to audiobooks instead. I finished Louise Penny’s Still Life, which I enjoyed well enough, and have moved on to The Heist, a romantic caper by Stephanie Evanovich and Lee Goldberg. Modern Lovers is about a third done and nearly a week overdue, so hopefully I’ll get it finished up this weekend in time for a trip to the library.

The expanded border is completely done, as is the first ball of yarn, nearly. The stripy section begins next, as do mindless knitting, the final two balls of yarn, and regular decreases. I’m looking forward to all of it (although carrying three balls worth of yarn in my courier bag is definitely going to be a little more tricky than just toting around the one. The Tour de France ends on Sunday, and while it’s possible that I might finish in time, it’s not looking overly optimistic unless I find the stripes far faster than I expect to. That said, I’d guess that it’ll be done before the end of the month, which will let me get back to my purse-friendly Hitchhiker as I figure out my knitting project for the Ravellenic Games to be knit during the Olympics. Will it be the traditional August finishing of the socks? Or will finishing new projects be so addictive I need to start something else? Things to consider…

Yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.

Every year the Tour de France comes along and the knitalong I do pops up and I’m torn between finishing something previously started and starting something new. I’ve competed in the former category the past few years, and so this year decided to give something new a shot. (Yes, I do recognize my Hitchhiker was going really well and that this may not have been the smartest plan. The heart wants what the heart wants.)

A yellow jersey project requires a certain amount of fortitude (and stitches), and while I yearned to cast on something gorgeous and delicate, like Rock Island, I decided to listen to Rudi’s advice of not making it so complicated I had to become a hermit. While flipping through the stash on the hunt for a different yarn, I turned up three skeins I’d bought years ago to make Andrea’s Shawl. Since that pattern was also already paid for and in my possession, I decided to do a little stash-busting.

This shawl is knit from its widest point to its narrower end after you knit the entire border. It’s an easily memorized four-row repeat, so I’ve been working on it while watching racing coverage and also while listening to an audiobook, Trouble Is a Friend of Mine by Stephanie Tromly. The story and the characters are fun (Girl moves to new town, where an abduction has recently taken place; a boy loops her into an investigation of the case, which resembles a similar abduction from eight years earlier. He’s quirky; she’s angry. Hijinks ensue.), but listening to it highlights that it needed additional editing that may not as been as obvious when reading it on the page. There are whole sections of dialogue that run like this:

“Simple sentence,” she said.
“A different simple sentence,” he said.
“More simple, more said,” she said.
“Getting the picture?” he said.

An editor should have pared down all of those extraneous “he/she saids,” particularly when it’s just two characters in the scene. As underscored when reading Mansfield Park earlier this year, not having enough attribution in dialogue can be confusing, but it doesn’t need to be every single line. If I weren’t enjoying it otherwise, I’d throw in the towel just for that reason (or switch to print, where, as I said, I might not have noticed it as much), because it keeps making me grit my teeth. But I am, so I’ll finish it off this week.

I’m only a few more pages into Modern Lovers than I was last week (having finished and started two different books in the meantime).

Look! Color changes! Thirteen more teeth than last week! This continues to be mindless knitting easily worked on during tv, meetings, and baseball games.

I realized late last week that I really wasn’t enjoying Big Magic. I may skim a few sections later in the book to see if she ever gets around to something that resonates with me, but otherwise I may give it up. (Giving up a book during the library’s summer reading program is painful, but that really ought not to be a reason to keep reading a book that sprains my eye-rolling muscles.)

Instead, I’ve turned to two books relevant to my summer holidays. Summer of the Gypsy Moths is written by a woman from and takes place in the Cape Cod town where we vacationed earlier this month. We’ve started out the book with a dead (of natural causes) body (which two pre-teen girls are going to bury in the garden), so it definitely catches you.

Modern Lovers has appeared on every summer reading list I’ve seen this year and focuses on a group of college friends in their forties. How could I, in the year of my 20th reunion from college not at least give it a shot? I’m looking forward to getting started on it tomorrow.

(Apologies for the glare-filled shot. I dozed off on the couch after volleyball tonight and am too tired to retake it.)

What are you reading these days?

Yarning along with Ginny at Small Things.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from The Broke and the Bookish was DIY, so I thought I’d use this opportunity to finally jot down the top ten books I read in 2015.

I read 68 books last year. Seven of those were audiobooks (listened to via Overdrive) and of the seven, four were re-reads. I re-read only one book in print.

Fiction: 57
Non-fiction: 9 (5 memoirs (2 of which were graphic in format), 1 picture book biography, 2 sports’ish books, 1 history)
Poetry: 2

Here are the best of the bunch:

1. Uprooted by Naomi Novik: In this retelling of a Polish fairy tale, Agnieszka and the other girls in her village have been brought up knowing one of them will be taken by their local wizard, the Dragon, to live with him for ten years when they became a teenager. And everyone knows that he will choose Kasia, Agnieszka’s best friend. But then he chooses Agnieszka instead, and neither girl’s life is ever the same. Great girl power themes and celebration of female friendship. Published as adult fantasy (and probably a decent example of the new adult sub-genre of fantasy), it’s fair game for mature teens.
2. Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer by Kelly Link: A middle-grade novel that explores what happens when 12-year-old Sophie and her parents move from their Los Angeles home to her great-uncle’s rural farm after he dies. Sophie’s dad is unemployed, leaving Sophie’s freelancer mom to write enough articles to pay the bills. Written as a series of letters to her beloved abuela, who also recently died, and, later, to her great-uncle and a local farm, Sophie shares her loneliness, her frustration with the changes in her life, and, eventually, her surprise at some rather unusual livestock she finds on the farm.
3. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr: A dual tale about two children, one a blind French girl, the other an orphaned German boy, living through World War II. Marie-Laure escapes Paris with her father, who works at the Museum of Natural History and who’s been charged with carrying a replica of one of the artifacts to safety. Werner, who is an expert at fixing radios, is sent away from his mining community to an officer training school and ultimately the French town where Marie-Laure now lives. Short, alternating chapters speed you through the narrative, but also ramp up the stress level, because, let’s face it, no one ever wrote a happy story about World War II where everyone survives. Harrowing, but excellent and well-deserving of its Pulitzer Prize.
4. The Book Scavenger by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman: Emily’s parents have a blog challenge of living in all 50 states. Emily’s a little tired of it, to be honest, but she’s happy to find herself in San Francisco, home to her hero, Garrison Griswold, the inventor of the Book Scavenger website/game. Just as they’re arriving in town, and hours short of a large planned announcement, though, he’s attacked and left in a coma. Emily, with the help of her new friend James, try to figure out what the game he was going to announce would have been, as well as who would have wanted to harm him. If you liked the Mr. Lemoncello series, The Westing Game, Roald Dahl, Greenglass House, or literary games, I recommend you pick this middle-grade contemporary up.
5. Dietland by Sarai Walker: Plum is an overweight and friendless ghost writer answering teens’ letters to the most popular fashion magazine in America. She’s nearly reached her goal of putting away enough money for weight-loss surgery (at which point she plans to start living her life) when she notices a strange woman observing her. Concurrent to her unraveling why she’s being observed, a guerrilla group known as Jennifer is attacking powerful misogynists. Could her boss be next? Feminist revenge fantasy meets Cat Grant meets social commentary. Destined to be read in women’s studies classes and feminist book clubs everywhere for decades to come.
6. The Eye of Zoltar by Jasper Fforde: In the penultimate book of his middle-grade quartet about Jennifer Strange, the indentured orphan manager of Kazam, a house of wizards available to hire for magical jobs, and the long-awaited last dragonslayer. In this book, Jen must travel to the neighboring Cambrian Empire to find a rare jewel and pay the ransom for one of their wizards. She’s accompanied in her task by the wizard she likes, the princess of the realm (enchanted by her mother into the body of a maidservant as a life lesson), and a 10-year-old guide. If you like Fforde’s other series (and who doesn’t) and have a young person not quite old enough for them, this charming and humorous fantasy series may be their speed.
7. The Thing about Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin: A heartbreaking middle-grade story about Suzy, whose best friend recently drowned. Seeking to prove that her friend was attacked by a particularly rare and debilitating species of jellyfish in an effort to make sense of the event, Suzy stops talking, but starts planning how to make her case, starting with a rogue trip to the world’s leading expert on the species and looking back on her final months with her friend.
8. The Crossover by Kwame Alexander: A hip hop verse novel focusing on basketball phenom Josh and his equally talented twin Jordan, growing up and apart, their father’s health, and more, all told with the cadence of playing ball. A verse novel for those who don’t like verse novels, a sports book for those who don’t like sports books, and a well-crafted example of how stories are universal.
9. Ms. Marvel: Vol. 1: No Normal by G. Willow Wilson: A Muslim Pakistani-American fangirl growing up in Jersey City sneaks out to a party one night only to experience a weird mist that leaves her able to shape shift. Kamala Khan has become a superhero straight out of her favorite comics, but, with the exception of her best guy pal, no one knows she’s no longer just the slightly rebellious high school student she’d always been, but now someone who’s got to balance homework, curfews, religious education with fighting criminals, including one threatening the teens of her community. With a film version planned for later this decade, if you like The Avengers movies, Supergirl, or Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and haven’t already read this, pick up this graphic novel/comic collection now!
10. Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead: Bridge and her two best friends, Tabitha and Emily, are navigating seventh grade and all the changes it brings. Their stories, as filtered through Bridge, who’s not quite ready to grow up yet and abandon her cat-ear headband, is interspersed with those of a high school girl, skipping school and feeling desperate on Valentine’s Day. As the stories approach each other in time, we’ll find out how they connect — and how they all navigate the trials of friendship.