This review is of what I believe is a pre-final-edited-version of this book provided to me by Simon and Schuster via Net Galley. The book is set to be released July 14, 2020. One Year of Ugly takes readers on a riotous ride of family and romantic drama. Twenty-four-year-old Yola Palacio and her family are middle-class Venezuelans living illegally in…
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Review-Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson
Sometimes when I stay up reading until 3 am, it’s because I can’t sleep, and sometimes it’s because a book is so captivating I cannot stand to go to sleep until I know what happens to the protagonist. Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson fell in the latter category. I needed to know the Tan Tan’s fate before I could sleep…
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Review-The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins
It has been a long time since I have had the time to review a book on this site, so please pardon my extended hiatus. I listened to the audio book version of Sara Collin’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton last week and have not been able to stop thinking about it since. If you are interested in historical fiction with…
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Interview on Caribbean Storytelling
Here’s my interview with author and podcaster, Yolanda T. Marshall.
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Why Audio Books Work
I don’t recall why, but several years ago, I borrowed the first Harry Potter book on tape and started playing it in the car. It was my second experience with audio books, and it was life-changing. The narrator Jim Dale brought the book to life. Our whole family listened, including my daughter who, at the time, was too young to…
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Reader Respect
In Roger Sale’s “Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E. B. White,” Sale discusses one difference between two groups of authors, namely pre-eighteenth-century writers of the fables we now read as fairy tales, and those authors who wrote after childhood became a firmly entrenched concept.
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YA Review-American Street
Sixteen-year-old Fabiola and her mother are separated at US Immigration when they enter the US traveling from Haiti to Detroit. Fabiola is an American citizen and her mother has a valid visa, however, Immigration agents refuse her mother entry and Fabiola, who has not been to the US since leaving as an infant, must travel from New Jersey to Detroit…
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YA Review-Rise from Dirt
In this, the third book in the science-fiction YA Dirt and Stars series, we find the continued adventures of Mara, Jael, and Beth along with a new and increasingly diverse cast of young people. Mara is a “spacer” born on a man-made space station, who came down to Earth in a previous book prepared to endure six weeks of exile on…
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Review-Stir It Up!
Thirteen-year-old Anjali is first-generation American. Her parents are from Trinidad and they live in the Indo-Caribbean neighborhood of Richmond Hill where her father owns a roti shop. Anjali’s grandmother also works and Anjali helps after school. Anjali has a strong passion for cooking and a dream to take part in a national kids’ cooking show.
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Review-Gone To Drift
Gone to Drift is the story of one boy’s unrelenting quest to find his grandfather, Maas Conrad, who has gone to drift in the waters off Jamaica. Lloyd has an unwavering faith in Maas Conrad’s strength of body and will and goes to tremendous lengths to locate his missing grandparent despite the insistence of adults that he give up the…