New Books Roundup

Written By Amy Sharony

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 as spring rolls into summer:

The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆

The Bone Garden ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Lenny’s Book of Everything ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

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I put off reading Lenny’s Book of Everything for so long because even though I really love Karen Foxlee, I knew it was going to be sad. This is a book about a girl whose beloved little brother has a chronic health condition, and so we know that he’s going to die at the end of it. There’s no spoiler there — we know this from the first page of the book. And I didn’t want to be sad right now, but finally I had to go ahead and read it, and I’m glad I did because even though I was right — it’s really sad — it’s also a really lovely book. Lenny’s father left home when she was just a kid, and her brother Davey won’t stop growing, which puts all the pressure for providing for the family on Lenny’s perpetually worried mom. The bright spots in Lenny’s life are the weekly encyclopedia installments she receives in the mail — the book is set in the 1970s, when encyclopedias were the ultimate in knowledge. Lenny and Davey pore over the entries together, dreaming of adventures and discoveries, even as it becomes increasingly clear that Davey’s adventuring time is limited. What this book does really well is to walk that line that we’re always walking between sadness and hope, between love and the loss of love, between dreams and reality. There’s a real, tangible sense of impending loss, but there’s also an echoing sense of love that builds right beside the loss, as neighbors and encyclopedia company secretaries and Lenny herself find ways to make Davey’s last days happy ones. It’s so sad. But so lovely, too. #bookreview #hslmag #booknerd #hslreads #bookstagram #lennysbookofeverything

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His Hideous Heart ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

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So at first I thought, yes, please, thank you, a bunch of cool YA authors reimagining Edgar Allan Poe stories — how could this be anything but great? The problem, though, is that nobody can out-Poe Poe -- stories like "The Tell-Tale Heart" or "Annabel Lee" (which is poem but totally a story in a poem) are kind of hard to live up to, and I think most of the time, the Poe connection makes these stories seem weaker than their inspiration. In fact, though, there are some great stories in here! If you can turn off the Poe connection and read them as stand-alones, I think you will enjoy this collection -- but not if you are thinking about Poe the whole time. (Do skip the "updated" version of "The Raven," which is legitimately awful.) For instance, "Happy Days, Sweetheart" is no "The Tell-Tale Heart" -- but it IS a pretty compelling indictment of toxic masculinity and white privilege at a snooty prep school. Tiffany D. Jackson (y'all know I love her!) writes a Carnival revenge story that's both smart and sassy — especially if you don't compare it to "The Cask of Amontillado." Even better, stick with stories based on lesser-known Poe so you can read Poe AFTERWARDS: I thought "She Rode a Horse of Fire" had a lingering spookiness and lack of clear resolution that made for a very Poe-like tone, and it had been so long since I read "Metzengerstein" that I wasn't making constant comparisons. I loved the diversity in this collection, which is definitely lacking in the original Poe, but it's hard to compete with the master of American Gothic. I'm totally slipping a few of these stories into future reading lists, but I won't be reading them alongside Poe — my readerly recommendation is that you do the same. #bookreview #hslmag #booknerd #hslreads #bookstagram #hishideousheart #nogothiclikepoegothic

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The Enigma Game ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆

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I think I’m the only person who wasn’t blown away Code Name Verity — I liked it fine, but the Big Twist ending did not feel surprising to me — so I am happy to report that I really liked The Enigma Game, which takes place not long before code name Verity and features some of the characters from that book. So we’re leaping back to World War II England, where Jamie is a flight leader for the Royal Air Force, Louisa is a Jamaican-English teenager charged with caring for an elderly German former opera singer, and Ellen is a Traveller who’s signed on as a volunteer driver for the Royal Air Force. Their paths converge one night when a German pilot lands on their Scottish airbase and plants a key to the German code that may hold the possibility of Allied victory. I love stories where adventurous older women befriend teenage girls, kind of passing on their woman wisdom to the next generation, so it’s no surprise that the relationship between Louisa and her charge was one of my favorite parts of this book. I think Wein’s real strength is her characters — they are likable people with complicated feelings, and that makes them both relatable and believable. I do feel like the Big Shocker Ending of Verity has created this need for a giant plot twist in every book in this series, and I’m not sure the one here is … necessary? Still, it’s great World War II historical fiction with plenty of action, great characters, and lots of gripping moments — I recommend it. #bookreview #hslmag #booknerd #hslreads #bookstagram #theenigmagame

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The House that Lou Built ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆

Never Contented Things ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

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Fairies have always seemed kind of shady to me, and I tend to enjoy books that play up that angle — I mean, here you are immortal, unseen, able to bring about any illusion you can imagine, so what do you do after a few millennia? If you’re the fairies in Never-Contented Things, you toy with humans, and there may never have been two people more full of human issues to toy with than foster siblings Josh and Ksenia. Life has not been easy for either of them, and finding each other after years of bouncing from foster home to foster home has bonded them so closely that they’ve become codependent. When Josh turns to the fairies to guarantee he and Ksenia can stay together forever, they’re both pulled into a dark and dangerous other reality. Josh would give everything he has to stay; Ksenia just wants out. That obviously makes this emotionally tough terrain: Josh and Ksenia need each other, but they also make it impossible for either of them to be free individuals. They trap each other as much as the fairies do, and it’s this realization in the face of their deep love and need that makes this story more complex than the typical fairy tale. This is a dark, ugly, messy story about people who have been hurt and made bad choices. There are a lot of adult things going on with sex, drugs, and mental health. I wouldn’t hand it off to just any teen reader — it’s a lot. And it’s inconsistent — sometimes it kind of gets sidetracked and wanders off for a while, losing the thread that pulls you forward. But for teens who are interested in dark fairy tales, how gender shapes our sense of self, the deep fear of being really known by another person, and the limits of love, I think this book has some interesting things to say. #bookreview #hslmag #booknerd #hslreads #bookstagram #nevercontentedthings

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Scavenge the Stars ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

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Scavenge the Stars is being hyped as a feminist Count of Monte Cristo, so you know I wanted in on that! And, indeed, Amaya is playing the long game to get her revenge on the man who ruined her life and destroyed her family. She returns to her home city with a shady ally, Boon, whose financial assistance allows Amaya to infiltrate high society by posing as a wealthy countess. In her cover identity, Amaya gets close to the son of the man she’s after, but in a city full of secrets and corruption, she may end up learning more than she wants to know. I really dug the first half of this book, but when the sharp-as-nails Amaya and the tender-at-the-bone son-of-evil came together, things kind of fell apart for me. It was just too convoluted, and I found myself way more interested in the descriptions of what Amaya was wearing than in what was actually happening. I also felt like the personal edge that makes the Count of Monte Cristo so compelling was missing here — yes, totally, Amaya has every right to be angry at the people who ruined her life, but those people are kind of limp bad guy constructs — there’s nothing really personal in her desire for revenge and nobody exhibits any of the growth that ultimately makes revenge stories complicated and interesting, so it takes on a let’s-just-punch-everybody action movie feeling sometimes. And since they’re cardboard cut-out bad guys, that doesn’t even feel unreasonable. This one was a miss for me. #bookreview #hslmag #booknerd #hslreads #bookstagram #scavengethestars

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The Invention of Sophie Carter ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆

The Do-Over ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

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Emilia wishes she could erase the past six months and make a different choice, and thanks to a carnival fortune teller, she gets to do just that: Six months ago, she chose popular boy Ben over her longtime bestie Alistair; now, she never started dating Ben but somehow she never got things going with Alistair either. Can she get a do-over on her do-over? I’m a fan of the premise of The Do-Over because I think we’d all like to see how making a different choice might have changed our lives, but that’s because making different choices should ultimately make us different, too, right? We’re making a different choice because we’ve realized that we could have been smarter/braver/happier/less lonely/whatever. Meanwhile, Emilia just wants a different boyfriend, which she could achieve by — wait for it — breaking things off with the guy she’s just not that into and telling her best friend who has a gigantic crush on her that she likes him, too. There’s no need for magic fortunes, you guys — this is just dealing with, you know, actual life. The problem isn’t Emilia’s choices; the problem is Emilia, who is so self-centered that she misses everything happening in the lives of the people around her and can’t be bothered to ask a direct question or give a direct answer. This is the last thing young women need — the idea that they can rely on a magic potion to make everything better while they passively go along for the ride in a cute outfit. NOPE. #bookreview #hslmag #booknerd #hslreads #bookstagram #thedoover

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Amy Sharony

Amy Sharony is the founder and editor-in-chief of home | school | life magazine. She's a pretty nice person until someone starts pluralizing things with apostrophes, but then all bets are off.

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