Anna's Picks
Anna is our effervescent and bubbly future teacher and her smile and energy always enlivens us all at the store. She loves nothing more than a great young adult book or contemporary romance and she runs the YA for All Book Club with Marielle.
This is the second manga series I have started, and I adored this. This is an adorable story that follows Coco, a seemingly normal girl who accidentally perfroms a dark spell. She is whisked away by a charming teacher to learn about being a witch, all while something sinister seems to be watching. The characters and plot are well-written, and the illustrations are gorgeous. This is a good start for anyone looking to try reading a manga for the first time.
This book is a prequel to The Hate U Give, and follows the main character's dad. You do not have to read that to read this, however. This book was excellent, and really incapsulates what it means to be a real man as the main character finds out that he has a son within the first few pages. Mav changes his whole life around to become the best father he can be, and I loved reading from his perspective so much.
As a new Maas fan and having just finished another series of hers, I needed to pick this up immediately. This book has a creative world where all mythical creatures live together in semi-harmony. This is an urban fantasy, and definitely a departure from her previous works, but still has the tropes that Maas is the best at doing. There is a swoony love interest, and a strong female lead. I am devouring this book given its massive size.
I am back to reading romance, as seems to be my thing each winter! This book has been loved by many and I wanted to jump on the hype train, and I am so glad I did! I adore Chloe and Red so much, and their banter was spectacular. Red is one of my favorite love interests of all time, he was just soft and lovely. I cannot wait to read the books featuring the other sisters, because they were hilarious to read about in this book!
Everything about this book makes me happy, from the new characters, to my favorite old characters from The Infernal Devices. You do not need to have read the previous books to understand this one, which is great for new fans. This book is making me feel nostalgic in all of the best ways. The world is fantastic, the demons are back and scarier than ever, I'm in love!!! Clare's world building keeps getting better with each series.
I have been anticipating this book for such a long time, and I am so glad to say that it did not disappoint! It's so surprising that Gong is a debut author, because she expertly crafted a fun and creative world. I loved getting to learn about the gangs, and the characters in each of them. I enjoyed the retelling parts of this the most, and I found myself enthralled throughout the story.
This book is one that I would recommend going into knowing nothing about it. Just know that it involves an immortal girl who gave up her mortal life to avoid a forced marriage and therefore is forgotten by everyone she's ever met, the darkness that made her immortal, and the first person to remember her in her 300 years of life.
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This book is a total love letter to any independent bookstore. I loved when the characters talked about the daily customers that they become used to seeing every day, and I have so many at my own store that I think fondly of. I would totally recommend this for anyone who has their own little independent bookstore that owns a piece of their heart.
This book is a seriously underrated one that more people should read! It is set in a gritty world where there are a lot of shady things occurring. I liked that the setting is like a world of different dark and magical casinos. A person's talent is based off of their last names, which is incredibly interesting. This book took a lot of wild turns, which I was not expecting, and added to my overall enjoyment.
Machado has an ability to write in a way that transports you into her story as if you were in her footsteps. She takes you on the journey with her through one of the worst experiences of her life, and it is unflinchingly raw and real. She writes unlike anyone else I have read from. Her memoir is heartwrenching and will bring you to tears, but it is also filled with the hope and promise of a happier future.
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I don't normally read YA contemporaries, but I ventured into this one during quarantine when I needed a quick read. This book was fun, but had a few dark moments centered around the entertainment industry. The author spent most of her adolescent years in the K-Pop group, Girl's Generation, so this book will have readers wondering what is true and what is fictionalized. There is also a great family aspect to this story, as well as a cute romance!
This book was simultaneously distressing yet impossible to put down. I was very upset while reading it, but I feel like that is what the author intended. She needed to get this story out to an audience who needs to hear it the most. Enchanted reacted the way most young people would have if they had the chance to work with their celebrity idol, and she really didn't know better and didn't comprehend that she was putting her life into the hands of a predator. This book has a very important message for people of all ages.
This book is a throwback read for me, but one that is much deserving of a spot on my staff picks shelf. This was the book that made me fall in love with historical fiction, and also with the Sepetys' writing. She manages to craft a masterful story about the hardships of WWII in a way that I had never seen before. She tells stories about parts of history that we don't tend to hear about often, and this novel followed that. It takes place in Siberia, where a family from Lithuania is taken to a prison camp in the middle of a harsh winter, and are forced to find ways to survive. Our narrator is determined to get her story told and writes and draws about her experiences and buries them in hopes that one day they will be found. This story is also based on the author's family, which adds an incredibly personal touch to it.
I have been waiting for Heartstopper's US release for months now after hearing about it's success in the UK, so I picked this up the second that I saw it in the store, and it was truly the greatest. This book is the definition of wholesome! It follows two boys who become unlikely friends and start to realize that there might be more there than just friendship. I loved Nick and Charlie so much, they made me smile and laugh the whole time I was reading. If you love this book and need to know more about the characters, but don't want to wait for Volumes 2 and 3, the author updates regularly online
This book will make you feel every emotion out there. You will feel powerless, angry, sad, frustrated, happy, etc... and all for good reason. This book is important to read and should be read by everyone. Even though it is fiction, the events that happen in this book occur everyday to Black kids and adults alike. I wanted to reach into the novel and hug Justyce and tell him that everything will hopefully be better one day. I learned so much reading this book, even though it was only around 200 pages long. I again cannot stress enough how important this book is, and I am very much anticipating the comapnion novel when it gets released later this year.
Reader disrection is advised for this story. The Poppy War is one of the first adult fantasy books that I have ever read. It is a gritty fantasy set during a war, where almost everyone is morally grey. This first book starts at an academy where our main character, Rin, is studying to become a military official for her country. She is one of three girls in her year at the school and she has to overcome a lot of obstacles in order to earn her place for the rest of her time there. I like this book because it is a super easy adult fantasy to get into, and is currently helping me overcome a huge reading slump. The actions scenes are very well-written, the characters are so intriguing, and the world is already incredibly well-developed.
Madeline Miller continues to blow me away with her writing. I read "The Song of Achilles" a while back, and that made Miller an automatic buy author for me. "Circe" is truly an experience to read, and I mean that in the best possible way. The character building of Circe as a character was exquisitely done and she has become one of my favorite mythological figures ever. I learned more about Greek mythology's side characters than I have from anywhere else. I loved watching Circe really become her own strong and independent person after being so dependent on everyone else for a long time, and I loved seeing her become stronger with her magic. This was just an absolutely phenomenal book, and I would recommend this to anyone who has a yearning to learn more about mythology that doesn't include the Greek gods and goddesses
I am so surprised with how much I like this book! It reads just like a Korean drama, with all of the antics and craziness that go into them, and I totally ate it up. It follows two main characters, one being Miyoung, who is a gumiho, or a nine-tailed fox. The other character is Jihoon, who is a mortal human who gets saved by Miyoung during a goblin attack. Then he helps to save Miyoung when her gumiho bead goes missing from her body, and she learns that without it, she will die. This has the light fantasy elements needed to pull me out of a bad reading slump, and I loved the sections of pure mythology that tells the tale of the first gumiho and other ones that follow!
This books was truly so unique in its setting and concept and I am so grateful that I got to read it! While I found the beginning to be slow, the more I read it, the more I truly fell in love with Seol and Inspector Han and wanted the best for them to happen. The setting of 1800 Joseon dynasty in Korea is something that I knew little about before reading this, besides having been to Seoul and having watched a few historical Korean dramas, and I loved getting to learn more about it. The setting and the story were pretty bleak and occasionally very dark but I found myself really enjoying it because of how well-written it was. It was hard to believe that this was a debut book. The mystery was really interesting and I had no idea who the bad guy was going to be, and I was shocked to find out who it was. The ending of the book had me in tears and I rarely cry during books. I wanted a happy ending for most of the characters and while I’m glad it happened for some, I’m devastated it didn’t happen for others. I truly enjoyed this book and I will be looking forward to the author’s future books!
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This book is wonderful so far! I am enjoying learning about the wives of King Henry VIII, and the King himself, as he descends into what can only be defined as madness. I end up feeling for each of the wives, as they all end up falling in love and then they see their marriages crumble into divorce or their untimely demise. I love the writing of each of the authors so far, and I am so excited to see where the rest of the story will go.
I had such a great time reading this graphic novel, and the illustrations were quite lovely as well! This tells the true story of the author's own experience coming to a small town in America after spending her whole life in Korea. She talks about how difficult it was for her to make friends, and to adjust to the culture shock of America. She eventually comes into her own, and adjusts to life in America. She finds a writing group that she loves and feels comfortable with, and this propels her to fulfill her lifelong dream of becoming a writer.
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This book has been so much fun to read! It follows Ever as she is forced to go to a school in Taipei to learn Mandarin and other things to help her learn more about her culture. This is Ever's first time away from her extremely overbearing parents, and she is going to do anything and everything that she was not allowed to do at home. She does everything from sneaking out to go clubbing, to talking to boys, to skipping her classes. This is a fun novel for anyone who understands what it was like to have little freedom as a teenager, and what it feels like to have a taste of it for the first time. There are many life lessons that are brought up throughout the story, which I also loved. A truly good read!!
This book is absolutely blowing me away! I love how McNamara adds in personal touches from her own life to show how she got into true crime when she was a teenager. I am in total awe of how much research she did in order to complete as much of the book as she did before her untimely passing. I did not know before reading this that she was the one who coined the name "Golden State Killer." I wish I could read more from her, but her work has helped to catch the GSK, so we can at least thank her for that.
I love this book so much! It is so cute and so happy. I love that it isn't a crazy dramatic book, but instead a cute and fluffy romance. I love Alex and Henry as characters, and I love seeing the progression going from enemies to friends, and then eventually to lovers. This is one of the best romances that I have ever read, and I look forward to the author's other future novels!
Shadow and Bone brought me right back into one of my favorite worlds ever created. This Russian inspired fantasy follows Alina as she learns that she has a power that she didn't know about. My favorite part of this book is the villan. The Darkling is so evil, but so charming that you start to enjoy seeing what he might do next. This was such an entertaining book!
Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time).
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time