New Books Roundup

If you follow us on Instagram, you know that we try to review a new (or newish!) book every week, but since not everyone is on Instagram, we try to do an occasional roundup of those reviews here, too. Here’s what we’ve been reading this summer:

The Mysterious Messenger ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

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The Mysterious Messenger reminds me of books like Book Scavenger and Winterhouse — which is a good thing! Maria has always lived with her fake-psychic mom, picking up and leaving town after town as the police get wind of their schemes. Maria’s only friend is a ghost named Edward, who she’s been sensing since she was a little girl — but even then, she knew better than to tell her mother about her secret friend. Now Maria’s in New York — a new city, a new apartment, but the same old lonely life. Except, it turns out, not: First Maria makes a connection with a librarian, then her upstairs neighbor Sebastian insists on being her friend, and Edward gives her a mission: to follow a lonely older woman into a the history of Greenwich Village. The more Maria explores life outside of her mom’s closets, the more she dreams of getting out of the endless loop of her life — but is there any hope for a different kind of life? (Spoiler: Yes, yes there is.) I love puzzle books that turn out to be as much about solving the mystery of who you want to be as much as about putting together a set of clues in pursuit of a hidden reward, and I love books that focus on finding and making the kind of family we want to have. #bookreview #hslmag #booknerd #hslreads #bookstagram #themysteriousmessenger

A post shared by home/school/life Magazine (@hsl_mag) on Jul 17, 2020 at 5:49am PDT

The Vanderbeekers to the Rescue ★ ★ ★ ★ ½

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I am always up for a visit to the Vanderbeekers and The Vanderbeekers to the Rescue is no exception. This time, the big Harlem family is on a mission: Their mom’s bakery is supposed to be featured in a big-deal magazine — but only if she can get all her permits in order and clean up the house for the photo shoot. This is no easy task when you have a house full of five kids and lots of pets — and more pets keep showing up on your doorstep every couple of days in need of a home. (Where are they all coming from?) But Isa, Jess, Oliver, Laney, and Hyacinth are always up for a challenge, and they are determined to pull together to get everything ship-shape before their mom’s big day. I know I always say this, but the Vanderbeekers are the more diverse, modern-day Melendys I spent so many years looking for — a big, happy, messy family who are happy to be home together at the end of each adventure. Their stories are genuinely heartwarming, which sounds silly when you say it out loud but which really is the only way to describe what it feels like to be part of their story. I’m always so excited when one of these books comes out, and then I put off reading it because I want to save it for when I really need a book that I know will make me feel better about the world. If you haven’t read them, you are in for a treat. #bookreview #hslmag #booknerd #hslreads #bookstagram #thevanderbeekerstotherescue

A post shared by home/school/life Magazine (@hsl_mag) on Jul 20, 2020 at 6:16am PDT

The Mall ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

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OK, you know what sounds fun: A 90s YA novel set — where else? — in the mall? I spent my fair share of time flipping through CDs and baby doll dresses at the mall in the 1990s, so I was ready to dig into this book — especially since it is by Megan McCafferty, who is delightful. Honestly, though, there was nothing to dig — because The Mall was all surface. There was lots of action, but nothing happened. There were lots of people, but no characters. There were lots of in-jokes and 90s references, but they just kind of hung there like 90s-scented air freshener designed to hide the less-than-fresh scent of the rest of the book. So I say instead of reading The Mall, go back and read the Jessica Darling series again — which is funny and smart and charming and all the things that Megan McCafferty is and The Mall is not. #bookreview #hslmag #booknerd #hslreads #bookstagram #themall

A post shared by home/school/life Magazine (@hsl_mag) on Jul 23, 2020 at 5:47am PDT

The Time of Green Magic ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

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I stan Hilary McKay, y’all, and I was so glad to get my greedy little hands on the advance copy of her new book. What I love about Hilary McKay (I think) is the way her big, messy, complicated families are big, messy, and complicated — there's no attempt to simple them up. Some people change and some people don’t, some people get better, some get worse, but everyone is ultimately accepted for who they actually are. I love that. So in The Time of Green Magic, a new family is forming: When Theo and Polly fall in love, they move their two families together into a rambling old house covered with ivy (and at the very top of their budget). Theo’s daughter Abi is used to being an only child and having her Granny around — but now Granny’s gone back to live with her sister in Jamaica, and Abi’s stuck with two annoying brothers instead: Polly’s sons, grumpy teen Max, who is in the middle of a stupid fight with his best friend (that he knows is stupid but that he can’t bring himself to end), and little Louis, who wants to spend every minute with Abi and Max and can’t understand why they don’t want him around. Voracious reader Abi is the first to discover that there’s something strange happening in their new house — when she drifts deep into a book set on the ocean, she returns to reality with a salt-water-wet book in her hands — but lonely Louis is the one who nurtures the magic, when a mysterious and dangerous creature creeps through his window at night. In some ways, this reminds me of Edgar Eager and Eva Ibbotsen — there’s magic here, but it’s matter-of-fact, everyday magic that believably flies under the radar of busy parents. Underneath the everyday, though, there’s this wonderful sense of eerie mystery, a reminder that the world is more magical than we assume. But it’s also pure McKay in the way that Abi, Max, and Louis become a family — a big, messy, complicated family, which is a kind of magic all its own. Oh, I loved it. If you are in the mood for something warm and whimsical, give this one a go. #bookreview #hslmag #booknerd #hslreads #bookstagram #thetimeofgreenmagic

A post shared by home/school/life Magazine (@hsl_mag) on Jul 27, 2020 at 5:26am PDT

The Gilded Cage ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

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The Gilded Cage follows teenage American Katherine Randolph, who’s been summoned with her brother back to England to inherit Walthingham Hall from a long-distant family member. It’s 1820 and Katherine has grown up on a scrappy homestead, so the proscribed manners and rules about what is ladylike make her feel like an outsider even before her brother’s tragic death. But after, Katherine can’t ignore the rumors about a family curse, a beast that stalks the great estate, and the fact that as the current owner of the estate, she’s in grave danger. You can tell there are a lot of cool ideas at work here: the conflict between being a “lady” and actually surviving in the world, differences in American and English ideas, a fish-out-of-water girl-turned-duchess story, mysterious forces that might be supernatural or all-too-human. There’s a lot of potential. Alas, it mostly goes unrealized. The book isn’t bad, but it falls flat — and at times, it’s so ridiculous that I couldn’t suspend my disbelief (and you guys, this is coming from someone who is willing to believe that vampire Spike can hang out in the shade of Buffy’s backyard sometimes) — if you read it, see if you don’t agree with me when you get to the asylum part. (That’s kind of a spoiler, but come on, what else are you going to do with a girl who doesn’t follow the rules in the 19th century?) I don’t know — I kept reading it because I thought the potential would pay off at some point and I actually found Katherine kind of likable, but for me, it was a miss. Which is a shame because I really think it could have been a lot of fun. #bookreview #hslmag #booknerd #hslreads #bookstagram #thegildedcage

A post shared by home/school/life Magazine (@hsl_mag) on Jul 31, 2020 at 6:16am PDT

Paola Santiago and the River of Tears ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

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Stay away from the river. That’s the rule. And Paola and her best friends Emma and Dante have enjoyed breaking it when the Texas summer gets a little too hot, even though they know at least one kid who drowned there and even though Paola’s mom has warned her about the wailing ghost spirit who haunts the river looking for victims. Then one night Emma doesn’t show up for their secret star-gazing trip, and Pao finds herself plunged into a world of Mexican folklore and myth. You know the drill with Rick Riordan’s imprint, but Paola Santiago and the River of Tears is a nice departure from the formula in a few notable ways. For one thing, Paola’s a scientist, and she sees the world through a lens of observation and analysis. For another, the book deals with very real issues of racism and immigration — the scene where Pao and Dante try to report their (white) friend missing at the police station is harrowing because it rings so true. There’s also a strong sense that adults can't confront the evils of the world — children are the ones who have to do that, and they are stronger, smarter, and better equipped to do that than the adults in their lives — something that some recent protests might seem to support (and frankly one of the things that keeps me hopeful about the future). Most notably, though, I think this book stands out because it doesn’t play out in simple terms of good and evil — the Big Bad in this book doesn’t turn out to be Chaos or Plague but a much more human kind of evil, and the “right thing” isn’t a clear and simple path. I liked this one a lot. #bookreview #hslmag #booknerd #hslreads #bookstagram #paolasantiagoandtheriveroftears

A post shared by home/school/life Magazine (@hsl_mag) on Aug 3, 2020 at 5:59am PDT

The Devouring Gray ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

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In The Devouring Gray, Violet comes back to the town her family helped found only to discover that being a founding family comes with a dark secret. It turns out the town of Four Corners is protected because their ancestors channeled special powers to protect them against the Beast, but each generation must face a potentially deadly ritual challenge to activate those special powers. But somehow, the Beast has gotten loose, and mangled bodies are turning up all over town. Can the teen descendants of the four founding families channel their superpowers to stop the carnage and save the town? So first, am I the only person who thinks about The Vampire Diaries every time someone says “founding families?” In fact, this book gets compared to all kinds of other texts: Stranger Things, Riverdale, even the Raven cycle. And that comparison works if you mean that it’s a story about teenagers dealing with something mysterious in a small-ish community. BUT The Devouring Gray is missing something those other texts have, which is a bigger picture: What’s the deal with the Beast anyway? How does all this work? (This is apparently the first book in a series, so it’s possible some of those questions will get answered later.) There’s a lack of depth that becomes apparent whenever the surface isn’t flashing with action — and I feel like that’s true for the characters, too, who are superficially full of cool characteristics but missing the thing underneath that makes them fully realized people. It’s not that this is a bad book — there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening. It’s just kind of unsatisfying when you stop and think about it. In fact, when I started to write this, I thought I’d be recommending it as a reasonably exciting YA thriller, but as I write it, I realize that it’s all surface and no depth — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in a thriller but which makes it harder for me to recommend enthusiastically, if you know what I mean. #bookreview #hslmag #booknerd #hslreads #bookstagram #thedevouringgray

A post shared by home/school/life Magazine (@hsl_mag) on Aug 6, 2020 at 6:35am PDT

Ever Cursed ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

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I’m on the fence about Ever Cursed. The titular curse affects Ever’s five princesses and their mom, the Queen: The Queen is frozen in a glass box, and each princess is cursed to live — starting on her 13th birthday — without one essential thing. Jane, the oldest, can’t eat; Alice can’t sleep; Nora can’t love; Grace can’t remember; and Eden can’t hope. The twist is that they’re cursed to punish their father, who seems to be dealing with his punishment remarkably well. Meanwhile, it turns out that being impossibly fragile is irresistible, and the king revels in his newfound importance while marriage proposals for his cursed daughters pour in. Reagan, the witch who cast the misguided spell to get vengeance for her mother, is determined to break the curse, but she’ll need the princesses’ help to do it — and their father has no real motivation to end the curse that’s made him popular and well-loved by his kingdom and his daughters. This is very much a #metoo novel focused on the ways that women often end up paying for men’s criminal behavior, and I liked the way it played with some of the conventions of fairy tales. But the characters felt thin — the witches and princesses were interchangeable, so much so that I’d sometimes have to flip back to see who was narrating a chapter. (It’s cool that they turned out to have a lot in common, but I wanted their individual voices to be more distinct.) I think it’s an enjoyable, interesting read if you’re in the mood for a lightweight fairy tale story with some heavy themes and a satisfying ending, but if you’re looking for something more substantial, there are better takes on the fairy tale genre. (Basically we should all just read Kissing the Witch over and over again.) #bookreview #hslmag #booknerd #hslreads #bookstagram #evercursed

A post shared by home/school/life Magazine (@hsl_mag) on Aug 10, 2020 at 6:07am PDT

The Glare ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

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The Glare is all the warnings about screen time rolled into one otherworldly drama: Hedda has been living off the grid with her mom for a decade, ever since a childhood incident convinced her parents that computers made her “off-kilter.” Hedda can’t remember anything about what happened, but she’s grown up protected from “the glare” of computer screens. Now, though, Hedda’s headed back to the real world to live with her computer game designer dad and his new family, and technology is everywhere. Practically her first night in the real world, she ends up playing an oddly familiar first-person shooter game on the dark web, and memories of the past slowly start to return. The game, it turns out, is part of an urban legend: Die 13 times on level 13, and you’ll die in the real world. It seems ridiculous — until gamers start dying around her, and Hedda’s cell phone starts receiving threatening messages. Is her mom right that technology is making her a little crazy? Or is something even more sinister going on? It’s a cool idea, and I found the first half of the book, setting all of this up, fairly interesting, but then it seems to skid off the rails a bit. It starts out all Black Mirror-ish, critiquing technology even as it embraces its possibilities, but that’s not where it ends up — which is fine, but the transition feels clumsy and unfinished. And while the idea that the darkness inside us is the real villain is always interesting, it’s kind of undermined by the fact that there is an actual villain, lurking in the shadows, doing villain-y stuff for ill-explained reasons. Still, some of the early scenes with the game bleeding into the real world are deliciously creepy, so if that’s your thing, you should totally pick this one up. #bookreview #hslmag #booknerd #hslreads #bookstagram #theglare

A post shared by home/school/life Magazine (@hsl_mag) on Aug 14, 2020 at 12:01pm PDT

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