Her work is full of rich historical detail and fantastic secondary plots—whether it’s a murder mystery, the invention of the telegraph, or Regency bookselling. Queer family often plays a central role, and even the books that center men have feminist themes and secondary female characters with agency and real personality. You’ll be rooting for her characters from page one, even when they seem intent on getting their love lives hopelessly tangled up....
Karen Blumenthal, a journalist and author of nonfiction for young readers, died from a heart attack on Monday, May 18. For readers who love narrative nonfiction for middle grade and young adult readers, her name is intimately linked to that category. She was 61. Blumenthal, alongside author-illustrator Grace Lin, also founded the #KidLitWomen initiative in 2018. This initiative, still active, raises awareness of gender issues and intersectionality in the children’s literature world, from books to community....
I’ve faced similar challenges in my own writing. While my first two novels star female sleuths investigating the murders of male characters and generally remain pretty light in tone, women aren’t completely safe in those stories. And that’s because women aren’t safe in the real world, full of misogyny as it is. It can be a delicate balance writing about the very real violence women face, and crossing over to gratuitous territory....
In this mesmerizing sequel to the New York Times bestselling Girls of Paper and Fire, Lei and Wren have escaped their oppressive lives in the Hidden Palace, but soon learn that freedom comes with a terrible cost. Lei is known as the commoner who managed to do what no one else could. But slaying the cruel Demon King wasn’t the end of the plan—it’s just the beginning. Will Lei succeed in her quest to overthrow the monarchy and protect her love for Wren, or will she fall victim to the sinister magic that seeks to destroy her?...
Book Riot is teaming up with BookClubbish to giveaway a copy of Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian and a $100 gift card to Bookshop.org to one lucky winner. Simply fill out the form and subscribe to the BookClubbish newsletter for a chance to win! Want more 3 on a YA Theme? We’ve got you covered!
Shock & Denial via GIPHY What? We just did Halloween! How can it be time for best books of the year? I still have two months! That’s tons of time! Pain & guilt I only have two months. I am never going to get through all this year’s books before New Years. If I wasn’t such a trash human and didn’t spend so much time streaming TV shows and falling down the Facebook rabbit hole, I could have read at least four more books this year....
Zaria and Hailey created a Facebook page called Zaria X Hailey where every night, the sisters share a bedtime story with anyone who chooses to listen in. “Our mom has been reading to us since birth and that, in my opinion, has helped me develop a love for reading. My sister and I were lying in bed one night giggling about something when this idea came about. We presented the idea to my mom and she agreed it would be great....
We all know that Book Riot is the best bookish site around, but once you’ve read all of our awesome content, you might feel like seeing what else is out there on the bookish internet. Fortunately for you, we Rioters love the bookternet as much as you do (obviously!), and when we find something fabulous, we come here to share it. Have you seen Literary Starbucks yet? It’s rad, so rad that it reached 10,000 followers in just about a month....
Maybe you’ve just overdone it a little. Maybe you harbor a dream of getting to TBR-zero. Maybe you’re perfectly fine with the number of unread books in your house and that is totally great. Marie Kondo and I want you to keep anything that brings you joy. I just get tired of looking at something that I was very excited to buy six months ago that I somehow have not yet gotten to....
This is where your help comes in—what behaviors have we missed? What kinds of things to manic book-people do beyond, you know, reading? In the interest of partial disclosure, the I cop to having at one point or another done the following: kept a list of future publication dates, made a list of every novel read, organized my personal book collection by genre, collected bookmarks, won a book collecting contest (and came in second in another), and chosen not to buy a particular edition of a book because of its cover/spine design....
But how well do you know the teen detectives that have snooped, sneaked, and spied their way into our hearts? Here’s your chance to find out! I’ll describe a teen detective (or a sibling set of detectives—they often travel in pairs or groups), and you have to guess which one I’m talking about. So, how many teen detectives can you name? Break out the flashlights and magnifying glasses, and let’s find out!...
Just kidding! But seriously, I hope at least one or two book recommendations stick and you can add something to your ever-expanding to-read lists.
Other times, my library children—often the very same ones whose goodness brought me to tears 24 hours earlier—resist authoritarian definitions of what it means to be “good.” On those occasions, I still feel optimistic about the future of the world, but in a way that’s…grayer. Wearier. In a word? Tired. One day, I promise to tell you all about the ways my children break and mend my heart with their generosity, their compassion, their creativity, their radical acceptance....
This isn’t the only recent instance of teens coming together to fight censorship. There is also a banned book club that was started by a student to make sure she is still able to discuss “books that make you think” with her classmates. You can bid on the books here until May 21, 2022 at 11:45pm EDT. Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books....
Definitely one of the best (and most ubiquitous) ereaders on the market, the Kindle has a lot going for it. With a sleek, modern design, the capability of holding thousands of books, and a front light perfect for reading in the dark, your new device is sure to be a constant companion for you in all kinds of circumstances. One of the things I love the most about the Kindle is the way it integrates with my local library; I can check out a book, have it delivered instantly, and then it returns automatically so I don’t have to worry about late fees!...
Now, though, she’s almost 19 months old and she has opinions about reading material. She chooses the books she wants me to read to her, and she will walk away if I start reading a book that she doesn’t care for. And the best part is when I get to the end of a book and she demands ‘More!’. So I go back to the beginning and start all over again....
What Is a Book-Length Essay? It’s easy to say that a book-length essay is simply an essay that goes on for a long time, enough to fit the usual length requirements of a standalone book. What is more complicated is distinguishing the book-length essay from other forms of nonfiction. The question becomes how this form is different from, say, memoir, biography, criticism, history, political science, or sociology. The essay can incorporate some or all of these genres and more, but it is in itself fundamentally different....
My ex-husband and I had divided the furniture, the money, the books. We sold our house, packed seventeen years worth of a shared life into boxes labeled with either my name or his. When I unpacked into my new bedroom, many of the objects were the same – the purple comforter, all my clothing, my desk — but so much of my life felt unfamiliar. Though the house I was newly renting was just a few miles from the one we’d lived in together, it felt as though it existed in an alternate impassable continent....
“The compound tibiotarsal fracture was so obscene, a chaos of torn red muscle and splintered white bone, that I went straight into full-on emergency mode. I searched my pockets and pulled out a miniature penknife branded with the logo of a local photographic shop. I unfolded it, picked up a big rock, hit the ostrich over the head to render it unconscious, then knelt and cut its throat to put it out of its misery....
