reneedecoskey's reviews
318 reviews

Kent State by Deborah Wiles is technically YA and serves a few purposes: to tell young adults today about what happened on May 4, 1970 and help them create context for it; to humanize the victims; and as a sort of call to action in these times we’re currently in.

What made it post powerful for me is that it’s got multiple unnamed narrators who serve as a kind of Greek chorus, providing different perspectives. White and black students are represented, as well as townies, and a National Guardsman. Though they’re never named, each voice is differentiated on the page with different fonts, styles, and placement, so it’s not difficult to keep track. Together they tell the the story not only of May 4, 1970, in Kent, Ohio, but the story of the days leading up to it and how this became the event that brought the Vietnam War home to American soil. 

Well-researched and well told. This book was very emotional and one that I believe I'll be re-reading again. It's not very long and because it's told in different narrators and in verse, the part that took a while to get through was really all the emotions it brought up for me. Such a wonderful book about a topic that many today may not even know occurred. Great for teens, adults, and anyone interested in history, activism, war protest, etc. 

When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole starts out as a bit of a slow burn, but once it picks up, it moves fast and becomes a page turner. That said, I didn't find myself slogging through the first half even though it wasn't moving quite as fast. It sets up a lot of important background info and sets the scene well for what's to come.

This book is a psychological thriller centered around systemic racism and what happens to people when gentrification pushes them out of the houses and neighborhoods that have been home for generations. It takes place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Gifford Place where longtime residents have started mysteriously disappearing just as a big pharma company wants to establish a presence there. The black neighborhood is whitewashed more and more each day as main characters Sydney and Theo work to uncover what's really happening. 

The one thing that I felt wasn't really wrapped up or answered was the question of what happened with Marcus and why Sydney had been in the hospital at some point. Also could be that maybe I just misunderstood that part or missed a detail somewhere.

Definitely socio-political, so if that's not your jam, you might not enjoy this as much. There are sources at the end that the author used to inform all the historical background for the neighborhood where the book takes place. It shows how practices like redlining and over-policing (and numerous others) still exist in present times, so it's based on very real and current issues. A good read from multiple angles. 

This book is a warm hug for book lovers. At the same time, it underscores the importance of a local bookstore and the role it plays in any community. 

Emilia Nightingale returns to her small town in England when her father, local bookshop owner Julius Nightingale, dies. As she processes her grief and deals with losing her father, she comes to understand more about him through the community, including existing relationships that are strengthened and new relationships that are forged as Emilia works to get the bookshop out of debt and save it from the clutches of Ian Mendip, a developer who wants to turn it into a parking lot for his condos. 

When the store sustains significant water damage, the bookshop community comes together to restore it and make it better than ever to save the store from Ian Mendip and keep it as a community resource, honoring Julius's memory, for years to come.

Along the way we meet other characters whose lives Julius touched in some way, and how that extends to the people THEY know. Some characters find love. Some characters find friendship. Some characters realize hard truths about the people they think they know. 

Start to finish, it's a charming book with a delightful cast of characters (mostly - but every story needs a foil!). If you read and loved The Storied Life of AJ Fikry, you will most likely love this book, as well. 

The Babysitter was part memoir, part true crime story about Liza Rodman's summers in Provincetown as a child. She and her sister, Louisa, were often watched after by other adults working at the local motels or other service industry jobs for the summer, and one of those adults was Tony Costa. Liza adored Tony and loved going on rides to the dump with him because he would frequently stop to buy them popsicles or ice cream, and sometimes he would take them out to his secret garden in the woods so that he could check on things. 

Years later, as an adult, Liza learns that Tony was a serial killer, and that the secret garden where he stopped to "check on things" was actually where he was stashing drugs and burying bodies. 

It was an engaging read and well-researched. One thing that I struggled with was that it felt like perhaps her fondness for Tony was played up a bit for the purposes of the novel. I could be wrong, but in the grand scheme of things, she wasn't with him that much. So while I believe that she enjoyed going for rides in the summer, I'm not sure if she really thought about the summer babysitters much during the school year, although I suppose it's possible. 

The end seemed to drag a bit. It wasn't terrible, but once things sort of wrapped up and the story kept going, it became a little more difficult to stay engaged because I wasn't sure where it was going so close to the end. That's minor and might just be a "me" thing. 

TW that there are a lot of graphic details about what Tony Costa did to the bodies and it might be disturbing for some readers. 

All in all, I would recommend this, especially if you are a fan of true crime. 

I listened to this on libro.fm and I think I started crying about four minutes in and then continued to cry off and on for the rest of the 3.5 hours it took to listen. This is a book I wish I'd had as a kid. I felt seen and understood and somehow the words Lisa Fipps wrote to help children today who experience the same bullying and fat-shaming that I experienced as a child were therapeutic to me even as a 38-year-old woman. 

When Ellie went through the Fat Girl Rules, I found myself nodding along, able to recall each incident that had me adding that exact rule to my own subconscious list. When Ellie's mom taped up articles about weight loss and tried to motivate her to diet, I recalled comments that adults in my life (not my mother, though) had made to me. I'm still sitting here with tears pouring out of my eyes just thinking about how beautiful this book is and how much I loved it. 

One aspect I thought was so wonderful that it was included was how Ellie realizes that her bullies have their own insecurities. That level of empathy is so important for children to see and understand.

The book doesn't make a point of being showy. And in the process, it normalizes several things I thought were important. First and foremost, it normalizes fatness. Not all bodies are meant to be thin. Not all people will be thin, no matter what they do. It normalizes therapy. Disordered eating can and often does stem from something psychological, and regardless of the reasons why a person goes to therapy, the stigma needs to be removed. There's nothing wrong with it. I loved how it incorporated diversity in a way that Ellie viewed as completely normal to her everyday life in that she embraced Catalina's family and their cultures and traditions, and it was also her custom to celebrate both her Christian and Jewish heritage, as well. She didn't question it. She celebrated it. An important lesson for kids who learn to see "the other" from the adults around them. I also love that it teaches kids (through Ellie's therapy sessions) how to respectfully and responsibly advocate and stand up for themselves in order to embrace who they are. 

It's written in verse but because I listened to the audio, I didn't get to experience that quite as much. It's likely that I will find a copy of the book and read again so that I can experience that aspect of it, as well. 

This was such a great book with good lessons for kids (and adults). It's getting a hug and someone telling you that you're a whole person and you deserve to be seen and to occupy space in the world. When you're a fat child, you don't realize how much you internalize the message that you're not worthy ... even into adulthood. That belief is still with me, and I realized that listening to this book. This is a 100% must-read. Don't let the middle grade label turn you off of it. It's for everyone. 

Invisible Girl weaves together the stories of Saffyre Maddox, a teen girl with a troubled past; Owen Pick, a socially awkward loner; and the Fours family. Roan Fours is a psychologist who has treated Saffyre in the past. Son Josh meets her in the neighborhood. Wife Cate thought he was having an affair with Saffyre a year ago. 

When Saffyre goes missing amidst a string of sexual attacks in the neighborhood, everyone looks at Owen Pick because he's the neighborhood creep. But Cate starts to think that it might be someone else. Someone much closer. 

I liked the book and found it engaging, but it did seem at times that it was trying a little too hard to touch on different hot social topics. There was the gender disparity (The Fourses were okay with letting their son walk around by himself even though he'd been mugged, but they were worried about their daughter walking around alone). There was women's work (Cate stays at home to do freelance work and take care of the house even though she had a career that she loved, but barely does it anymore while Roan works). There's a tie-in to incels because the neighbor is lonely and finds that community (that one seemed a bit forced, in my opinion, and it was blown up in the synopsis a lot more than it actually ended up being). There's a missing girl. A potential affair. A potential sexual predator. Sometimes it seemed like it was just ticking off a check list, but not to the point where I found it offputting or felt like I didn't want to keep reading. The end didn't feel that smooth to me, but that could just be my tastes and preferences. 

Overall, an engaging read if you're in the mood for a thriller. 

This book reminded me of a patchwork quilt with messy seams. The potential was there, but it just didn't pull together for me.

(SPOILERS BELOW)

The book is heavily billed using Obama's name, but I really felt like the mentions were totally unnecessary. Every so often, there would be a name drop, but there wasn't anything about it that was ultimately critical to the story. It only served to let the reader know where we were in time, and there were certainly other ways to go about that. There were also probably more ways to play that up, but the Obama angle fizzled for me.

I understand that maybe Ruth didn't owe Xavier any explanations about her reluctance to have kids and especially not the fact that she'd already had one, but that's kind of a big thing. I understand why he was upset.

What I didn't understand at all was how she went from really not caring about having kids and being focused on her career to getting into a fight with her husband and then ending up back in her hometown completely intent on finding the baby she'd given birth to when she was 17 because she suddenly felt entitled to him. I truly couldn't tell if the character hadn't considered everything that came along with that, or if the author didn't either. One minute we're hearing about how she whispered "I hate you" to the baby and the next minute it's HER son and she seems to think she's just going to waltz into town and claim him back because the adoption was probably not real. Huh? She also goes to see her former best friend Natasha whom she hasn't spoken to or seen in 12 years. And then all of a sudden they're just best friends again. Natasha is mad for a minute, but then she enables Ruth.

The time frame is also confusing. She's back in Ganton for a week, maybe just a little bit more, but in that time, she's managed to become best friends with Midnight, the white grandson of an old family friend. As if to remind us that she is a mother without her son, Midnight is a son without his mother, who died during childbirth. He feels neglected by his father who is struggling to get on his feet, and he takes a liking to Miss Ruth because she mothers him in a way that he's been missing since his own mother died. How does all this happen so fast? And there again, it seems so convenient that she just that quickly develops some kind of maternal instinct now that she's decided to embrace motherhood -- but only where HER son is concerned.

Further refusing to mind her own business, while she's on an extended trip away from and in a silent fight with her husband, Ruth decides it would be a good time to tell her brother's wife Cassie that he's struggling and needs her by his side. Magically this fixes everything in Eli and Cassie's relationship. Literally they're together always after that. It flattened that dynamic so much that it felt useless to even mention it.

The longer the book went on, the more annoyed I got with Ruth. She was so selfish and self-centered. Every once in awhile she would have some kind of lightbulb moment where she would realize how much was done to give her the clearest path forward to success, but then she'd just sort of say "well that was nice" and keep bulldozing her way into other people's lives and business.

Just by virtue of hanging out with Midnight, she learns about his best friend Corey, who happens to be black. Super conveniently, she discovers that Corey has a birthmark on his face for everyone to see, JUST LIKE HER BABY. It felt way too easy.

Midnight gets angry at Corey for having the kind of life that Midnight can never have because he doesn't have parents who love him or a nice house or money for nice things (in contrast to Ruth, he seems to be always grateful for whatever he can get from his family because he knows they struggle). He gets especially angry when he (also super conveniently) overhears his grandmother mention to his dad that Ruth is Corey's real mother. So naturally, he runs away and decides he's going to work with a gang selling candy bars at school (I have no idea what that gang was all about but those scenes with the gang members were hard to believe because while I believe they prey on young kids, they seemed more like two weirdos hanging out in alleys trying to recruit the kids to join their MLM or something). He convinces Corey to run away with him for a while and he does, but when he tries to convince Corey that he should sell the candy bars with L-Boogie too, but Corey is like "uh, no, I'm not joining a gang with you."

So after they've been missing and hiding for about 24 hours and Corey has refused to join L-Boogie's MLM scheme gang, Midnight takes him out to the Wabash River and lets him play with his air soft pellet gun. The one that the orange tab just happened to fall off of. And then he texts Ruth and tells her where they are. And then he calls 911 and reports a guy with a gun.

The police show up and find an 11 year old black boy waving a gun around. They pull their guns on him. Ruth shows up. She's so angry at Midnight but she's more worried about Corey because HER SON. Her son who has a family he loves and doesn't know he was adopted. Her son who has never met her before.

And so she goes to him and she just drops this bomb on him that she's his real mother. He does not respond well. Like WTF did she think was going to happen? At this point in the book I was so enraged at how selfish Ruth is that I almost threw the book across the room and didn't finish it. You don't just get to drop news like that on someone to unburden yourself just because your husband is mad at you and you decided a week ago that you're really interested in finding out what happened to the baby you had and told that you hated it 11 years ago.

But even the climax of the book just fell flat. And when it was over, the rest of it seemed to drag. We get to New Years and SURPRISE! Xavier, Ruth's husband, shows up on the doorstep at her grandmother's house. Because despite having only met her family I think one time, he somehow is able to get in touch with them and arrange a surprise visit.

And the conflict at the beginning of the book, which is whether Ruth and Xavier will start their own family, is not resolved.

By comparison, the dynamic between Corey and Midnight was actually a much more interesting and nuanced discussion of the intersectionality of race and class, in my opinion. I would have enjoyed the book a lot more, I think, if it had focused on that relationship dynamic. I don't know if Ruth was written to be so unlikable or not. I've read plenty of books with unlikable characters but I truly couldn't stand her by the time she tells Corey that she's his birth mother. Like she never thinks about anyone else but herself.

Like I said at the beginning of the review, all the pieces were there and this could have been a really wonderful story about race and class and even motherhood, but the seams were messy. You've got this piece here and that piece there but the transitions just weren't smooth enough to bring them together as well as they could.

It's a debut novel and writing is hard. I think the author had a big idea and it was a grand one. It was hard to achieve. I don't fault the author for it. If anything, the book could have benefited from a better editor to help smooth out those spots where it felt rough and disjointed.

(No overt spoilers in the review, but it may reference important plot points and twists)

Up until the summer she's fourteen years old, in 1975, Mary Jane has lived a prim, proper, and sheltered existence. An only child, she has two friends (twins) who are nearly as sheltered as she is, and she spends the rest of the time with her mother, learning how to keep house and cook. When the twins go off to summer camp, Mary Jane decides to stay home for the summer and get a job. She finds a job as a summer nanny for 5-year-old Izzy Cone whose father is a psychiatrist and mother is busy doing just about everything else. Mary Jane really takes a shine to Izzy and vice versa. They spend their days doing safe activities and learning to clean up (since the Cones' house frequently looks like a tornado has come through).

But Mary Jane's worldview really starts to change when the Cones tell her that they'll be having live-in guests for the summer, and that Mary Jane is not allowed to tell anyone about these guests because they're famous. Instantly she knows Sheba (I think Sheba is supposed to kind of be like Cher) because her variety show with her brothers was one of the only tv shows Mary Jane was allowed to watch. Sheba's husband, Jimmy, is a rockstar in a famous rock band that Mary Jane has never listened to, and he's there to get help from Dr. Cone for the summer as he gets sober.

Mary Jane soon finds herself feeling more a part of a family at the Cones' house -- a big family that includes Jimmy and Sheba, massive fights, but also lots of love and hugs and kisses -- but this comes at the cost of realizing that her family is somewhat cold and distant. She has very little relationship with her father even though she sees him every day. He's quiet and rarely speaks to her or takes an interest in what she does. Her mother is determined to decide what's appropriate for her and what's not. They never hug. Her parents never kiss her or tell her they love her. She begins to pull away from her own family in order to spend more time with Izzy and the Cones. Things come to a head when her mother realizes that Mary Jane has been lying to her and what she's been exposed to all summer.

There are some undertones of racism in the book, particularly when Mary Jane is discovered to have visited a record store in a part of Baltimore that her parents deem unsavory (she's seen in a photo in the paper with black people, which her parents believe means she was in danger). Even more than racism, there are undertones of antisemitism as Mary Jane's father's only real concern with her job is that her employer has a Jewish last name and so he wonders what country club they belong to because hardly anyone lets Jews join.

I'm a sucker for a good coming-of-age novel and this one had a good mix of nostalgia thrown in. It addressed societal issues without feeling like a soapbox -- they were just integrated well into the story. This book keeps being described as Daisy Jones & The Six meets Almost Famous. I didn't find it that much like Daisy Jones at all. I could see a little bit of Almost Famous, but mostly it was just a story about a teenager whose worldview expands over a summer when she's exposed to different belief systems, lifestyles, and music than what she's been allowed to experience before. It changes her, but for the better. At the end, I really felt like Mary Jane was going to grow up to be ok.

This was a fun psychological thriller, and definitely a bit creepy at times. When Emma Davis was 13 years old, she went to Camp Nightingale, and because she arrived so late, she was placed in a cabin with three other girls -- Vivian, Natalie, and Allison -- who are all older than her by a few years. Still, Vivian takes Emma under her wing and says she's going to be her "big sister." 

But two weeks later, Emma wakes up and the girls are gone. Vanished without a trace. The only thing that's ever found is one of Vivian's sweatshirts -- one that she wasn't even wearing when she left -- neatly folded on a rock. Camp closes and Emma finds herself in a psychiatric hospital not long after because she can't stop seeing the girls and she feels like it's her fault that they disappeared. 

Fifteen years later, Emma is an artist. The only way she can stop having visions of Vivian is to paint the girls and then paint over them. Hiding them in her paintings as she paints dense forest around them. At her gallery opening, a familiar face shows up: Franny Harris-White. Franny was the proprietor of Camp Nightingale and she's come to invite Emma to a lunch at her penthouse. When Emma goes, intrigued because she thinks wealthy Franny may be about to commission some work, she finds out instead that, after 15 years of dormancy, Franny is planning to reopen Camp Nightingale that summer, and she'd like Emma to come teach painting. 

Emma is confused, but ultimately agrees to go. She sees this as an opportunity to search for clues and try to find out what happened to the girls all those years ago. 

From there, things begin to mirror her original trip to camp very closely. There are faces that she recognizes (albeit older than before). There's even an issue with the staff lodging that means that she has to bunk in a cabin with three of the campers. She ends up in Dogwood -- her old cabin -- back in her old bed, even. She has the same hickory trunk with all the names carved into it. And her roommates -- campers Miranda, Sasha, and Krystal -- remind her a lot of Vivian, Allison, and Natalie, respectively. 

As she continues her search for clues, Emma begins to learn things about Camp Nightingale's past and about Franny herself. But it's not just her who is involved, and eventually things end up being a little bit TOO similar to her last trip there. But will she be able to unlock the mystery before it's too late? 

There were lots of twists and turns in this book that kept me guessing right until the end what happened. As soon as you think you know, you realize you don't know because you're only given the necessary information a little at a time. That's my favorite kind of thriller to read because it keeps me from figuring it out too early. 

Another total piece of art from Yaa Gyasi (if you haven’t read Homegoing, add it to your list). Transcendent Kingdom finds the main character, Gifty, reconciling science and religion (and the “kingdom” of each) as she struggles to cope with her father’s absence, her mother’s religion and mental illness, her own childhood as an evangelical, and, most of all, her brother’s death by heroin overdose after getting addicted to painkillers following a high school sports injury.

Yaa Gyasi's books are so smart and well-researched. I really loved this one.