In episode 48, we review we review the classic children’s novel Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery.
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Book Review Podcast Episode 48
Book Review: Winter
Winter
The Lunar Chronicles #4
by Marissa Meyer
read by Rebecca Soler
My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: YA sci-fi
Spoiler notice: The following review will contain some spoilers for the previous books in the series, starting with Cinder.
Winter may be a princess, but she is still very much under the thumb of her stepmother, Queen Levana of Luna. Cinder and her friends from Earth are on a mission to stop Levana from marrying Emperor Kaito of the Eastern Commonwealth and gaining a foothold on Earth. Winter may be able to be of help to them, if only she can keep a handle on her hallucinations.
This book is both Winter’s fairy-tale retelling of Snow White and the conclusion to the story that started all the way back with Cinder. That makes it a sort of culmination of the Cinderella retelling in the first book as well. And because each book introduces a female protagonist and a male romantic counterpart, everything coming together in this book felt a little too repetitive to me. Their overall stories were different, but 4 romances resolving not too far apart was a bit much for me. Though to be fair, a couple of these romances were at least partially resolved before the end of this book, so it could have been worse. And I don’t mean to say that I didn’t enjoy the book. I really liked the way the main plots played out, the threads from previous books that Meyer weaved together in this final installment. After several books talking about the moon colony, getting to go there in this book added a new, exciting dimension. I like that Meyer explored so many different facets of that world.
At times, it seemed as though so many characters/pairs of characters got to be a bit too much for the author, too difficult to make sure they all had their own distinct personalities. For example, when Thorne (my favorite character since book 2) had cause to be concerned for Cress, I wish he had reacted more Thorne-like, as opposed to doing this best impression of Wolf’s broodiness. Thankfully, Thorne was more himself by the end of the book. Most of the time, though, I could see distinct differences in how Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter acted, thought, and talked. Part of that last one might have been due to the audiobook narrator putting on a slightly different voice for some of the characters, but since that’s how I consumed this series, the narration was definitely a plus for me in that area.
Overall, this was a solid YA sci-fi series for me, and I am sure I’ll revisit it again in the future. Fans of futuristic sci-fi and/or fairy tale retellings, maybe around age 15 and up, should definitely consider checking out this series, starting with the first book (you really don’t want to dive in here on the final book).
Find out more about Winter
If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!
Book Review: The Darkest Minds
The Darkest Minds
Book #1
by Alexandra Bracken
My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: YA dystopian
When the small percentage of survivors of a plague that affects children and teens begin to exhibit special powers, they are feared, hunted, and locked up. But some avoid capture or manage to escape the camps. Ruby spent six years in a camp, and when she manages to leave, she has to figure out who on the outside can be trusted. Both adults and other children present unknown risks she might not be prepared to deal with.
The set-up for this book is scary, but it’s all too believable that adults would lock up kids if they turned out to be dangerous. Ruby’s time in the camp is summed up at the beginning and is a sad and poignant backdrop to the rest of the story going forward, exploring the emotional and psychological toll of such treatment on young individuals. I like the dynamic of Liam, Chubs, and Zu and the way they incorporate Ruby into their group, fostering a sense of camaraderie and mutual understanding amid their shared struggles. The romance didn’t really stand out to me, but at least it didn’t make me cringe, serving as a subtle undercurrent rather than the main focus of the narrative. To be honest, I felt like Ruby connected with and had more chemistry with Chubs than Liam. The plot overall is engaging; yes, a lot of the middle involves these four kids driving toward an unlikely dream, but I really don’t remember being bored, as their journey is filled with moments of tension, growth, and unexpected turns.
My biggest issue with the book is that Ruby mostly doesn’t act like someone who was locked up from age 10 to age 16. Her emotional development, her knowledge of the world, social skills, etc. should basically be at a 10-year-old level. This crops up in very minor ways, but not nearly what I think would be realistic. There are times when she answers questions about life or, even more narrowly, her home state of Virginia that would just make me shake my head and think, “There’s no way I would have known that at 10 years old.” I also wish there could have been some adults that weren’t just bad. A kind guard at the camp, a legend about a group that actually is trying to help kids, etc. That part of the set up maybe wasn’t so realistic, but maybe that will be explored more in a future book. Overall, I enjoyed this story a lot, even with those issues. I’ve already recommended it to my 16-year-old daughter and think other fans of YA sci-fi, especially dystopian worlds, should give it a try.
Find out more about The Darkest Minds
If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!
Book Review: Mandie and the Trunk’s Secret
Mandie and the Trunk’s Secret
Mandie #5
by Lois Gladys Leppard
My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Children’s Christian historical fiction
I read a lot of this series when I was a kid/pre-teen, and I read some of them to my now-teen daughter when she was younger. Nostalgia definitely affects my reviews for this series, and I’m okay with that. It’s good to at least see some consequences from Mandie’s disobedience in the previous book, though of course the consequence ends up being fun for her and Celia and leads them into another mystery. I appreciate that they are trying to behave better here as well, though she questions whether she should really be meeting with Uncle Ned at night while still doing it anyway. Uncle Ned himself clearly thinks it’s important to adhere to the rules but still visits in secret. Overall, though, this book was better than the previous. While I think these books can still be good for younger people to read, especially if you’re looking for something with Christian content, I strongly recommend discussing what’s good and bad in them with your kid(s) after they read it.
Find out more about Mandie and the Trunk’s Secret
If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!
Book Review: Lily Tripp: Diary of an Accidental Time Traveler
Lily Tripp: Diary of an Accidental Time Traveler
by Amelia Tait
My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Middle grade fantasy
Lily Tripp is approaching her birthday, which is January 1. But when the clock strikes midnight, the new year (and her birthday) finds Lily hundreds of years in the past. This isn’t the first time this has happened—she’s lived in Roman times, Victorian times, and 1922, for a year each. But she’s spent the last year back in 2025, so she was sure it wouldn’t happen again. It did. Everyone she knows, including her cat, time travels with her, except they don’t know they’re time traveling. Lily has to figure out the world around her, while everyone else believes they’ve always been from that year.
Told through a series of diary entries, this is an intriguing and unique read. Lily has to navigate rocky friendships and persistent bullies, not to mention the perils of growing up (which sometimes includes middle school and sometimes doesn’t). The details about everyday life in past time periods, especially as seen through the eyes of someone for whom they are foreign, are a large part of what I enjoyed about this book. Even those eras that Lily “visited” before the start of the book are shared with us a bit as she recounts some of what happened to her before she started writing in the diary. The time travel is only part of the plot, though, providing interesting, changing settings for the story, which involves a lot around fitting in, growing up, and friendships. The story is charming and fun.
The diary format never really landed for me, though. For one thing, there are pages sprinkled throughout where the font is a handwriting kind of font and the background is lined paper. But the bulk of the book is diary entries presented with regular computer font and a blank background. It seems like it should have been all one or the other. Plus, both kinds of font had italics for emphasis (and quite a bit of it), but it’s really hard to write in italics; to me, at least, underlining for emphasis would have been a lot more on theme. Plus, Lily’s tendency to be writing things as they are happening just didn’t feel realistic to me. Then there’s the romance, which is taken a bit too seriously for my preference in a book where the main character is 12/13. But it kind of turned out in a way that I didn’t mind. There’s actually a smallish side character in the story that ended up intriguing me a lot by the end. I see that this is the beginning of a series, and I am really hoping to learn more about him as the series progresses. I’m also kind of hoping that the author decides to bring in some kind of explanation for the time travel; maybe that isn’t really the point of this book/series, but that doesn’t mean I’m not curious! I do tend to think that boys would like this book less than girls, considering the amount of time spent on discussing Lily’s first bra (not in a graphic way, but enough to possibly make boys uncomfortable or at least bored). But overall, readers around 11-15 that are interested in history, or even those that aren’t, would probably enjoy this book a lot.
Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group for providing me a copy of this book to review.
Find out more about Lily Tripp: Diary of an Accidental Time Traveler
If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!
Book Review: Santa’s Little Yelpers
Santa’s Little Yelpers
Andy Carpenter #26
by David Rosenfelt
read by Grover Gardner
My rating: 5 / 5
Genre: Mystery
When a volunteer at Andy Carpenter’s dog-rescue foundation is accused of murder, the semi-retired defense attorney steps in to help.
Another thoroughly enjoyable installment in my favorite mystery series! I particularly liked that Sam, who is usually tasked with digging up information on the computer, gets to get out into the field and have a bit of an adventure. The mystery is an intriguing one too. It started to remind me of one of the earlier books in the series, Dead Center, with a town that seems to be run by some kind of weird cult, but it goes a completely different direction. And Andy himself is his normal snarky, witty self that I enjoy so much, brought to life expertly by Grover Gardner. If it’s not clear, I recommend this book (especially the audio) for fans of mystery, crime fiction, and courtroom dramas, as well as the books that precede it in the series.
Find out more about Santa’s Little Yelpers
If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!
Book Review: The First Measure
The First Measure
by Keith Gregor
My rating: 2 / 5
Genre: Fantasy
I normally start my reviews with a synopsis of the book, but I’m not even really sure how to do that. A mysterious event in the past caused the world to begin to unravel, have cracks, shift in ways that most people don’t really notice, along with other vague, difficult to define consequences. One group of people have tried to fix things one way and another group try to fix things another way. Enter Eldric, our main character, whose mentor just vanished (or was “unmade”) in a way that causes everyone else to forget the older man even existed. Eldric goes on a journey, in which he meets up with other people who are on their own, equally vague journeys. If my synopsis leaves you wondering what on earth I’m talking about, you might have a vague idea of how most of this book made me feel.
I don’t mean to be harsh, and I dislike writing reviews like this, but I really do not know how so many others seem to see this as a brilliant work of fiction. It felt like complete nonsense to me. I’m not a philosopher or super smart or anything, but this book made me feel like I was wading through the textbook for some kind of advanced subject I have no business reading. I suppose I should have anticipated having trouble with it based on the official synopsis, which was fairly vague and mind-bendy itself, but I still expected a story that I could follow and make some sense of. But there are words and phrases that are never explained (the Sundering, the Name, the Script, the First Measure itself) and many descriptions of psychedelic landscapes and events that I just couldn’t follow.
For the first half of the book or so, I was hanging in there, waiting for things to come together and give some semblance of understanding. My rating of 2 stars, instead of the lowest possible rating of 1, is for that first half, as well as for some of the characters that I felt were well drawn. But even aside from the issues I’ve already stated, the author’s writing style is incredibly repetitive, especially in conversations and descriptions. And often, words were used in ways I’ve never seen/heard them used before; maybe this is intentional, considering the nature of the story, but when I’m reading a fictional story, I like to be able to understand what I’m reading (call me crazy). Because of the difficulty I had with the text, I didn’t know if it was my misunderstanding or a fault in the text when the characters walked away from a landmark on their journey, a couple of days passed, and then they were leaving the same landmark again, as if they’d been snapped back to it. I’d like to say that I get what the author was going for here, but I’m not sure I do. Maybe this means I’m just 100% the wrong audience for it, and that’s probably true, but I don’t know who the right audience might be. All I can say is that if this sounds interesting to you, don’t let me stop you from giving it a try. (I have to say, though, that I really like the image on the cover, and it is really well suited for the story.)
Find out more about The First Measure
If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!
Book Review: Second Time Around
Second Time Around
Time Lottery #2
by Nancy Moser
My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Christian speculative fiction
Three people win a prize that will allow them to travel back in time, within their own minds, to a moment of their choosing, to try to change something in their past. After they’ve lived out the change, they can decide whether they want to stay in the new alternate universe they’ve created or return to their original lives.
The premise for this book is literally the same as the previous book, since here we have a second Time Lottery with 3 more people chosen to go back into their past to change a pivotal moment. It’s not just a rinse and repeat of the previous book, though, because these are heavily character-driven stories and the characters are very different this time. There’s quite a focus on abusive relationships in this book—not physical abuse but heavy mental/emotional abuse. One storyline in particular I really enjoyed, and there were some interesting surprises in the book. Though something that happened in the previous book and carried over into this one I couldn’t have cared less about.
Overall, I liked this one a little more than the previous, and I don’t really think you need to read the first one before this one. Though it would give a fuller experience, and, as I said, there is definitely some reference back to the previous, I think the overall idea behind the time travel is explained well enough in this book to start here. I think that many fans of Christian fiction would enjoy this book, especially those interested in the exploration of past decisions and the ability to change some of those decisions.
Find out more about Second Time Around
If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!
Book Review: Toofer & The Giblet
Toofer & The Giblet
by Paulette LeBlanc
My rating: 4.5 / 5
Genre: Children’s fiction
Toofer and The Giblet are mice that live in a tree in Nimblewood. The Giblet is adventurous and doesn’t always think things through, while Toofer is more serious and thoughtful. This book is a collection of vignettes of their lives—often trouble The Giblet gets into that Toofer helps him out of and lessons learned along the way. The end of the very first story brought a heart-warming “awww” moment for me and set the stage for the rest of the book. Each story includes an illustration, and the pictures are beautiful additions to the stories.
Not all of the stories are quite as sweet as that first one, and some have little lessons while others just seem like silly fun (like a monkey taking The Giblet on a ride and only being stopped by the offer of peanut butter). Though the chapters are individual stories, they do build on each other in a way that makes the reading all the more enjoyable. I can easily imagine reading 1 chapter at a time at bedtime to/with young children (depending on their reading level) and being able to point back to references to past stories. The overall tale told is one of friendship and adventure that is well-suited to early readers, or even kids younger than that if the book is read to them. There’s also a map of Nimblewood, which I think would add another layer of enjoyment for younger readers.
(Some parents might appreciate knowing that there is a reference to a frog being “hopped up on pond juice,” in case that’s something that would bother them.)
Find out more about Toofer & The Giblet
If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!
Book Review Podcast Episode 47
In episode 47, we review The Runaway King, book 2 in the Ascendance series by Jennifer A. Nielsen and Al Capone Shines My Shoes, book 2 in the Tales from Alcatraz series by Gennifer Choldenko.
Also available on Spotify:
A Journey of Words 