4 Stars. Kwame’s passion for cooking and feeding hungry people shines through these pages. When he decides to walk away from his life on the streets, he has to work impossibly hard to put himself through culinary school but he does it. His motto seems to be “Go big or go home” and that mostly works for him. If you don’t aim [...]
4 Stars. I found this absolutely fascinating. It's written in a simple question and answer format with an index and extensive bibliography. It's easy to dip in and out of but I mostly read it straight through. He begins with my first question after reading the title, "What general terms are most appropriate for talking about [...]
4 Stars. I am not a sports fan. Oh, I have some idea how the Dolphins are doing in football because my husband is a loyal, if frustrated and heartbroken, fan, but I only know the biggest of the big names in sports. Unfortunately, those names are always male. Needless to say, I had never heard of Sugar Rodgers but she’s certainly a force [...]
4 Stars. I love retold fairy tales but don't often go back to the original sources. This was a nice refresher and even an introduction to some classic European tales. Some annotations and introductions were more helpful than others, as is always the case with these kinds of books. I would have been perfectly happy if any contributions [...]
4 Stars. I’m ashamed to admit that my knowledge of Rosa Parks was limited to her refusal to move to the back of a segregated bus in the Jim Crow south. To quote Julian Bond in this book, I more or less bought the narrative that “Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, then the white folks saw the light and saved the day.” Yes, that’s an [...]
4 Stars. In The Black Friend, Frederick Joseph shares his own experiences with racism, his response in the moment, how he wishes he’d actually responded, and demonstrates ways to be anti-racist. I can’t imagine these stories were easy to share. Some of them were so egregious that my jaw dropped and I was like, “What?!? Someone said [...]
4 Stars. Oh my goodness. I think I need to be friends with T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon). The book starts out pretty light and fluffy. I laughed quite a bit. Even when things start getting serious, Kara and Simon face their fears with snarky humor. They’re my kind of people. So much so that I suddenly added up a whole bunch of [...]
4 Stars. Let’s just take a minute to admire these two covers first, shall we? So spooky. So perfect! As I was getting ready to review Dead Voices, I realized that I’ve never reviewed Small Spaces. I decided to do a vague twofer. Ollie, Coco, and Brian are great characters. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses. They [...]
4 Stars. I generally like reading horror. I get spooked, I have fun, I move on. Demons and/or possession are too scary for me and I'm not happy with way over the top, incredibly gory violence, but otherwise I'm good. Hendrix delivers on the "spooking me" front. In the world of this book, six women survived their own real-life [...]
4 Stars. I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this book but I ultimately found it to be a surprisingly touching story of a boy on the cusp of manhood. Robert is fairly innocent in the ways of the world (he thinks that the tiny town of Rutledge, Vermont is almost as big as London). But he also has a practical knowledge of [...]