Reviews written by Paige Cee, Staff Reviewer

WHAT I LOVED: My first brush with the idea of art history was in college. A brilliant classmate of mine who went on to be inducted into the university’s Hall of Fame and was also the school’s first Fulbright scholar did an independent project on art of the...

WHAT I LOVED: I knew I was going to adore The Girls I’ve Been before I ever started it. How could I not love a robbery-thwarting thriller starring a bisexual con artist? It’s just good gay science! Even so, it still blew me out of the water. I’ve...

WHAT I LOVED: For teens who attend directly after high school, college is often a new beginning, especially if you’re living on campus or are attending a school far from home. That was certainly true for me on all the above counts. Molly’s journey to come out of...

WHAT I LOVED: All three narrators of the audiobook are very good at what they do, but the primary narrator is particularly excellent. I’ve heard good and bad narrators alike and some are really bad at different voices. This one? She’s VERY good at them. She’s so good I’m...

WHAT LEFT ME WANTING: Iliana fought her way into the Alabama Conservatory of the arts partially to advance her artistic aspirations and partially to stay with her best friend Sarah. The girl is competitive and territorial in equal measure, which causes more than a few problems, but she’s also...

WHAT I LOVED: Frankie Brooks is a fashionista with a very precise goal in mind and she’s determined to hit every single milestone along the way. School? Doesn’t matter, she needs to focus her energy on her fashion blog and get her foot in the door of the...

WHAT I LOVED: Maverick Carter is the son of the King Lords’ former leader, but that doesn’t mean much to the rest of the gang. To them, he’s Lil Don, not Mav. As he discovers in the first chapter, he’s also a new father thanks to that one time...

WHAT I LOVED: On one side of the United States, a group of queer girls with magical abilities who call themselves the Grays have lost one of their own. Though her body is present and still walking around, her spirit is gone. On the other side, a girl...

WHAT I LOVED: My expectation were low. It seems like it’s going to be an okay story about a fourteen-year-old girl who thinks she can turn into a bird and may have tried to kill herself. She swears she didn’t, but that’s sure what it looks like when...

WHAT I LOVED: Because I was a six-year-old white child at the time it occurred, 9/11 changed very little of my life. The day of it, my second grade teacher turned out all the lights, gathered all us kids into a circle, and gave us the gentlest overview...

WHAT I LOVED: Thanks to my brother being big into Dungeons & Dragons, I have some familiarity with tabletop gaming like the five characters at the heart of this story have been playing together for years. It’s not my thing, but I get why people love it. Nijkamp’s own...

WHAT I LOVED: Nathalie Baudin is an extraordinary girl even before she discovers her psychometric abilities. She’s just sixteen, but she’s a journalist ghostwriting a paper’s column of new arrivals to the public morgue. Those columns and the deceased’s public display may lead these unknowns to be identified,...

Everything I know about K-pop comes from thirsty Twitter fancams, what has made it into the American mainstream, and an expose or two. Basically, I’m a newbie and know very little about it. A K-pop-related, Hong Kong-set rom-com from Maurene Goo, though? Sign me up! ...

WHAT I LOVED: Tavia and Effie’s world is ours with just a little myth-made-real on top. The Hart family murder-suicide and the murder very suspicious death of Sandra Bland are brought up, as are multiple fictional Black women whose murderers got away with it by claiming the women...

WHAT I LOVED: Marlowe has spent much of her life living on the edge of death thanks to a congenital heart defect, but she’s got a new lease on life thanks to a heart suddenly becoming available. Not that it’s doing much to make life easier other than...