INTO THE BLUE by Emma Brodie

 

This was my book club books and I think some of my church lady friends are going to clutch their pearls when they read how spicy this gets! Or maybe not, several of them had babies back when we read the Outlander books back in the aughts and you and I both know that was no coincidence!

I loved this book. It has family drama, video stores, improv and love, true love. AJ works in a video store in high school and she meets co-worker Noah who is the tortured son of an acting dynasty. His Aunt Eudora who was in the famous space improv show Astronomicals. She offers AJ and Drew improv lessons and they are amazing at it. They have ridiculous chemistry, but life gets in the way and Noah disappears just as AJ realizes she loves him like crazy.

Flash forward seven years and they are brought back into each other's orbits on a prequel show of Astronomicals called Into the Blue. Sparks fly, but there are a LOT of issues and miscommunication and it takes a long time for them to get where the reader NEEDS them to end up. But after a lot of really interesting acting, coms and family tragedies, they learn to lean on each other. And there is a dog. 

This was damn near perfect and even the spice - which is done well, but not overdone - didn't make me feel icky. I had to laugh in the acknowledgements because Brodie talks about the awkwardness of writing it. Which makes me like her even more. Yes, I will be reading Songs in Ursa Major after a 25 week wait. I love you, Libby, but you really make me consider doing some Kindle purchases. Good thing I'm so cheap!

VALLEY OF THE MOMS by Hannah Selinger

 

Well, I hate Hamilton, and even I found this book to be a little heavy-handed. I enjoyed it and read it in 2 days, but man, it was humorless. Of course, it is the story of a young mother who may or may not have been murdered by the president of the PTA and her bereaved husband's quest to clear his name, but I like my murders with a few yucks. I'm not proud of it.

So Anna is kind of a self-righteous judgy bitch, but she is also a pretty good mom and a good wife. She lives in a town that is way too full of itself (just like the real Hamilton!) and the thing that made me buy this on the recommendation of Thalia from Paper and String (in Hamilton!!) is that there is a pivotal scene that takes place in the very health club that I call my beloved home away from home! Just to get this out of the way, they kind of nailed the vibe at Life Time. At first I was irritated that Selinger didn't smush the space from between those words. I have always typed it LifeTime  - show some freaking respect, Hannah! - but I just looked it up and I have been wrong all along! Anyhow, she has clearly been on the pool deck and has seen the horror show when the whistle blows for adult swim. 

The mystery was good. Her husband Denny has to deal with all kinds of complications after her death and when it turns out that it was foul play, he was - as everyone knows from Dateline - the prime suspect. So he goes about trying to find out what happened. And he is not overly stupid or careless about it, which is refreshing. 

The book starts with Emily being pissed that she can't sign her daughter up for "Ziti with your Sweetie" an embarrassingly named PTO fundraiser, and she finds out that there is a prestige level of PTO membership that you have to pay for and those folks got to register first. Well, her indignation turns to action and she decides to run for president of the PTO. If this were played for laughs, written by someone with Selinger's chops, it would be one of my reads of the year. Sadly, no. It just gets murdery. I read the occasional mystery and I don't mind them, but I like a little sauce. This was very well written, it just wasn't quirky enough. That being said, I thought the structure of alternating viewpoints between Anna and Denny to be well done. I loved that the ending was solid and while I was left with questions, they weren't the questions I thought I would be left with. And the cover is to DIE for!

This would be a GREAT book club book. Maybe not in Hamilton, though.

THE INTROVERT'S GUIDE TO KISSING IN EUROPE by Brenda Janowitz comes out August 18

So I have been trying to review every new book I read this year and I have a bit of a backlog, but I just finished this little delight and I want to write what I loved about it before I forget. 

I love the title. It's cute, even though Emily seems more nervous than introverted. At first. This girl, doing a gap year across Europe after high school, sheds her inhibitions pretty quick when she smacks one on the lips of a cute boy in a train station in Spain. He is Chekov's cute boy and you can bet he comes back around. Meanwhile, she befriends Penny, aka @PennyForYourThoughs, an instagram travel influencer. And she meets all the expats that Penny is traveling with. So she spends the whole book almost never alone and doesn't seem to have an issue with it. Hence, not an introvert.

In other news, her grandma was in an early rock duo with her sister back in the 60s and Emily wants to go to all the places her grandma played. Oh, and she had a sister who died. And part of the book is written in her grandma's journal entries. And she is Jewish. She doesn't talk much about the belief system, but she is observant of the holidays and you can tell her Judaism is an important part of her identity. 

Okay, I didn't read any of the Goodreads reviews yet, but I did notice that mine will be the first 5 star one. Not only because I give out 5 stars like tee-ball coaches give out trophies, but because I just LOVED the opportunity to see a bunch of expats wandering around Europe. I spent the fall and early winter of 1990 in Brussels, which is a bit of the kissing-your-cousin of expat experiences, but I did make very close friends with a bunch of other expats who I never spoke to again after those months. I found it fascinating to see it in fiction. I just thought I was great at making friends and bad at keeping them. 

Yes, WAY too much happens in this book. There are so many issues, some of them quite serious, but they are handled in such a blase way that they didn't hurt my feelings. The cover makes this look like absolute fluff and even though I got it from my best friend NetGalley and didn't see the cover that prominently, it must have influenced my reading. This seemed like a light fun read that occasionally went deep. And I found that kind of refreshing. Did it matter that I read this on the last day of school and first day of vacation, my own personal high holy days? Perhaps. But I still closed it with a feeling of utter satisfaction!

SEASON OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS by Jillian Cantor comes out August 4

 

The Handmaid's Tale was one of the first adult books I read as an adult and it has really stuck with me. I feel like there wasn't a lot of dystopian YA when I was growing up and the bleakness of the world really hit me hard. Well, there is a LOT of dystopian YA now and yet, it is still a kick in the teeth when I see so many parallels to the world we are living in and hopefully not becoming.

You would have to be living under a rock to not recognize patterns between the start of this book and the current American experience. Substitute greed for pride in the overblown buffoon in office, substitute racism and fear for, I don't know, scientific understanding and gender roles, and we're nearly there!

But because this is YA, the lines are drawn pretty simply and the story boils down to a resistance adventure. In a good way! 

I try not to wallow in the doom that many folks gobble up and I don't judge those that live in fear now, but I appreciated the stark black and white of the fictional world. There is an elected "dictator." People are given "reeducation" (involving what sounds like some pretty good drugs) to make them more amenable to the new world order. Everyone is painted in black and white so that it is easy to see if they are a goodie or a baddie. It's kind of refreshing to know exactly who to hate. 

And the story kicks butt! It appears to be about Ellie, a girl who was frozen with her family to wait out an administration who hates science with the passionate intensity of a thousand burning suns. Which half the country would not ever be able to calculate because girls don't get to go to school anymore. But it is half the story of Scott, her little brother who ran away before he could be frozen and now lives in the wilderness with the partisans. Stir in an unstoppable grandma and sweet plot twist involving food allergies and you have a nonstop adventure in how to resist fascism. 

There are some great details in here. My favorite is that all women, who are expected to be married by 18 at the latest, are required to dye their hair blonde. The hatred of science is the main thrust of the police state, and it is explained by the end of the book, but it doesn't hit as hard as a more realistic idealist lynchpin. But no matter, this book isn't about defining the paradigm of the overlords so much as the freedom intrinsic to resistance. Wow, those last two sentences might be the word-salad-iest sentences I have ever written, but they are accurate. 

TLDR - I loved this book and will 100% be nominating it for the Mass. Teen Choice book award list. And I can't wait for the inevitable sequel, even though I will have to reread this one before reading it unless Jillian Cantor already wrote it and is going to release it before I forget all the salient details. Unlikely, but I live in hope!

Thanks to Netgalley for the digital ARC.

MOONSINGERS by Robin J. Pritzker comes out June 14, 2026

 

Well this was a cozy one! I am not the sort of reader who constantly seeks out the cozy, but I can appreciate the appeal. I think I am guilty of assuming a cozy read will be a simple story and yet there is a lot going on here.

Ismay has come to Glenmaidens Village to work as a teacher for three wild girls in hopes that she can put in minimal time and get out of there with a reference that will allow her to find more a more conventional teaching job going forward after an accident with one of her former students derailed her previous job. 

Needless to say, she falls in love with her new charges and gets embroiled in the life of the village, which is, complicated. Since the jacket copy informs us up front that the family she is working for is fairies, I can share that it really complicates things. 

Ismay has a bad train experience getting to the village and, as any good educator will do, she writes a strongly worded letter suggesting that the line be extended into the village. But there is a magic tree that is the portal to the fairy world and as cool as a fairy world sounds, it's a weirf place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. 

By the time she has realized that this is a problem, the train company - society? I don't know what they are called - sends a guy to figure out how to do this. He is Hamish Breck (awesome name!) who is fascinated by both train efficiency and Ismay. There is a slow-burn romance and a race against the clock as Ismay learns the error of her ways and tries to stop the extension to help her employers. 

The magic aspects of the book are far less interesting to me than the minutiae of rail planning (Hamish, too) and the way that the girls get into the whole process shows a wonderful aspect of teaching - often the best thing you can do is get kids fascinated by something and then let them take on ownership themselves. 

The story was delightful, the setting was comfy and the whole thing gave me a sweet feeling of x=coziness right down to my soul. And that cover is delicious!

ONCE UPON A K-PROM by Kat Cho

 

Now this was a high school book I can get behind. It has a lot going on. A teenage girl who doesn't like to be the center of attention, a much cooler sibling, a friend from way back who gets famous and love, sweet love. However it is rife with the kind of miscommunication that I find so annoying, but is kind of necessary to propel the plot. 

Elena is just trying to get through high school and maybe save her beloved community center when Robbie Choi, her childhood bestie and first crush, comes back to town and asks her to prom. Several times. Publicly. He is now a huge K-pop star and her refusals are broadcast to all his followers, complicating her life immeasurably. She has been volunteering at the local community center and comes up with the great idea that her classmates could take all the money they would overspend to go to prom and donate it to try to keep the center going while they wait to hear if it will be funded going forward. Shockingly, her classmates find this annoying and her social stock, already embarrassingly low, falls further. 

The publicity inherent in having Robbie seem somewhat obsessed with her adds to the equation and if you have even read a book before, you are going to figure out what happens. But it is a delightful ride.

What I loved about this is the inside look at the life of an idol. It is a very narrow range of acceptable behaviors and you are constantly under scrutiny. This is horrible for Elena who likes to stay under the radar, but it is also stifling for the other characters who live in this world full time and are chafed by all the monitoring. It plays out sweetly and made the book a little more of an educational process for me rather than just a puff read. I put this down with a satisfied feeling of connections made and a desire that these crazy kids just might make it work. 

YESTERYEAR by Caro Claire Burke

 

As much as I didn't enjoy much about Yesteryear, I did enjoy the experience of reading it. I am not usually a fan of an unlikeable narrator and I usually just don't even bother with books that have them. Olive Kittridge is about as unlikeable as I get and there is a core of decency in her that made me love her. I don't think there is really a core of anything in Natalie. I mean, she has a core of steel and she appears to be a woman of faith, but mostly she seems single mindedly obsessed with herself and her own success. Maybe the joy of this book was supposed to be in seeing her brought low, but I didn't. 

I found the whole thing fascinating, but I wish the book had continued to focus on Natalie and her real life BEFORE the throwback times began. It was interesting to see her try to make a go of it in the actual homestead experience, but I didn't get off on her suffering the way I think I was supposed to. I just felt bad for her. You are allowed to feel bad for people who also are kind of insufferable and I feel like the book didn't want me to. 

It was very well written and a fascinating commentary on, well, a lot of things. I kind of want to read it again, knowing how it ends, but I also don't really want to spend more time with these people. I can see why it has been kind of polarizing and kudos to Burke for making that conversation happen. But it wasn't for me. 

The Thrashers by Julie Soto - Mass. Teen Choice Book Award Nominee

 

I did not expect to enjoy The Thrashers. It seemed scandalous and set in a high school which is usually problematic for me. Unless it is a romcom or written by someone who has spent a lot of time in an actual high school exactly like the one I work in. I just hate it when "realistic" high school books don't feel real to me. Like I loved Fake Skating, but there is no way in hell that they wouldn't let a new kid join any freaking club they wanted to! 

Back to The Thrashers. There is a popular clique that is actually NAMED The Thrashers (strike one), there is a younger kid who thinks that they will let her join because she is in love with the main thrasher (strike two), she kills herself the night of prom (strike three), the Thrashers are all called in to the police station about it (can you have more than three strikes?). I mean, I was suspending so much disbelief that my arms were shaking. 

And yet it kind of worked. I needed to know what actually happened and Soto pretty much told me by the end. It got way weirder than I anticipated, but I didn't mind the ride. Sure, Zach is a douche from day one, but high school girls are notoriously attracted to those. Lucy and Paige were essentially interchangeable to me. And I found it really hard to believe that with all the Logan Echols vibes Julian was throwing off that he and Jodi never connected at all before the shit-storm. But the whole thing was better than the sum of its parts. 

I have been booktalking the MTCBA titles and this one always puts a gleam in the eye of several kids who want to read about really horrible high school experiences, maybe as a way of making the actual horrors of high school seem more benign. And more power to them!

ATMOSPHERE by Taylor Jenkins Reid

 

It feels so strange to read a book just, you know, to read it. This middle-aged-lady book isn't for the Mass. Teen Choice Book Award or Netgally and I just picked it up for no reason (other than I really loved Daisy Jones and the Six, Malibu Rising and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - although Reid's earlier books can kiss my butt) but then I put it down because it begins with a horrible accident in space and then proceeds to make me fall in love with all the people who are likely going to die in the carnage. No THANK you!

But then my book club chose it and I was back on board. So I guess I broke my rule about not reading anything that I don't fall in love with, but for me and Atmosphere, it was a slow burn. I did end up loving it. 

Maybe it is the fact that I read before bed and often fall asleep with my book on my lap, but I had a really hard time lining up the secondary characters in my head (my fault, not Taylor's) but once I did, this beauty really came together for me. 

It deals with women in the space program in the 80s who fall in love and it ticks all the ideological boxes pretty deftly. I didn't feel preached to, but I did feel I was given a little lesson. No harm, no foul - it's important stuff. It is also about family and expectations and love and drive - alittle something for everyone. 

My book club liked it overall and I had an interesting conversation with my goddaughter - a grown-up now and a voracious reader - and she said that while she loves pretty much the same TJR books that I do (she also loathes the early ones) she didn't care for Carrie Soto is Back. I haven't read that one, and I may yet give it a try, but I theorized without having read it, as I so often do, that one of Reid's strengths is creating a sense of unexpected community and maybe that was what was missing. Frankly, I can't remember if she said that was the case or if we just became distracted by the cheese board. But I digress...

This was an engaging and heartfelt work of historical fiction (from the 80s, for the love of God...) that made me interested in the space program for the first time since the moon landing in 1968. And I am not even sure I was interested then, but there is a picture of toddler me sitting enraptured in front of the TV as Neil Armstrong made his famous leap for mankind. Maybe I was just thrilled to be able to watch TV in the daytime. Who can say?

Bridget and Gabe are Not Okay by Lex Croucher comes out August 11, 2026

 

It has been a long time since I stayed up after midnight to finish a book, but that is just what happened last night! I loved the previous book in the Camelot Disasters (ha!) series Gwen and Art are Not in Love in which Croucher visits Camelot a few hundred years after Arther Pendragon did his thing and made pretty much everybody a gay new adult. This followup looks at the aftermath of the violent events of the last third of G&A (mild spoiler) and I am here for it. 

The first book focused on Gwen, the king's daughter, and Arther, a descendent of the original recipe Arthur who has been destined to wed Gwen since babyhood. The plot focuses on the funny feelings Gwen gets when she sees Bridget (Sir of Lady depending on who you ask) who is a kick-ass knight in the tournament circuit. She knows she will never marry Art. He is annoying and an attention whore, although quite funny and charming. He is also looking with interest at Gabe, Gwen's brother and the heir to the throne. I'll leave you to read that delightful (until the last bit with the huge fight scene that was necessary but irritating) romp.

So everything is back to normal. Bridget and Gwen are growing organic vegetables and run a farm to table restaurant and Gabe and Art are fixing up a B&B on the seaside. Just kidding! Everyone is trying to deal with the aftermath of the rebellion and is miserable and, except for Arthur and to a degree, Gwen, think that the best course of action is to turn their backs on the one person who makes them happy.

Bridget has PTSD that is causing her to be hypervigilant to any danger. Gabe is having panic attacks and hates kinging, even as he begins reforms to education and "friends of Lancelot" legislation trying to normalize queer love. Gwen is just sad but is doing a great job of helping her brother rule. 

Then Lady Odessa (or something like that), the king's PR person and Gwen's new role model, suggest a reboot of the round table where Gabe, Gwen, and a bunch of knights travel around England trying to explain his new normal to the populace - adventures, hilarity, and renewal ensue. 

Croucher does a lovely job of updating the adventures of the original round table - the Green Knight, the Lady of the Lake, the freaking GRAIL - with our heroes revisiting them to different results, The secondary characters are the BEST! Sidney and his beloved Agnes are back, there are a couple of hot-daddy knights, a stick in the mud head of security knight and the son of one of the attempted usurpers who is writing their adventures and "comforting" Arthur, much to Gabe's dismay. 

This is one of my favorite kinds of adventures, a scrappy band of misfits going on a quest, and the parallels to Arthurian legend are delightful. The dialogue is often laugh out loud funny despite the grief and mental illness, and everything turns out okay. I loved seeing these kids try to change the world for the better and sometimes succeeding. The parallels to the current divisiveness in the US are hard to miss, but they are portrayed as hopeful.

I would love to nominate this for the MTCBA, but I am really not sure if it would work as a standalone, I don't remember the details of the first book, but the main story arc did give me a shortcut to the characters motivations. I may give it a shot and see what the rest of the committee thinks. I think it may not qualify as it is being touted as a sequel, but I loved it so much and want everyone to read it, so we shall see...

Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced digital copy!

TIME TRAVEL FOR BEGINNERS by Jaclyn Moriarty comes out August 4, 2026

Wow, this was a sheer delight from beginning to end! I have read Jaclyn Moriarty's YA novels and appreciated their humor and the exotic Australian setting, but this took me by surprise with its depth and sheer magical storytelling. 

The blurb mentions 3 main characters - Anna, Teddy and Jade - but as I read it, I was mostly fixated on Anna. She was my gateway character and I adore her. She is a mother first and foremost, of a nerdy little wonderful middle schooler and is nervous about her parenting. She shouldn't worry, she is making all the right mistakes. 

Teddy is a cutie pie, a good friend, a solid listener and an appealing possible love interest for Anna. 

Jade didn't do much for me. I found her kind of an annoying, self-centered person who seems to put herself first in most situations. I read the sections from her point of view with some interest, but also a little bit of disdain. Until her world and Anna's shift closer and their daughters become embroiled in one another's lives - then I liked her even less, until she realizes she is dropping the ball and - Dare I say? - she becomes a wee bit self-aware. 

But I haven't even mentioned the time travel!! In this version, any trip a visitor makes to the past through the agency starts a new shoot into the multiverse. Travelers can choose to just be an observer or to have corporeal form. They can interact with people in the past, knowing that it won't change their future. Of course most people think it is a clever immersive kind of special effects matrix at best or a bunch of hooey at worst. It is beautifully rendered and I loved the shout out to Frances Hodgson Burnett. 

So Anna works there (with some great secondary characters), Teddy uses the service to try to deconstruct why his marriage fell apart and Jade goes to a creativity workshop upstairs from the offices.  To tell you anymore would give too much away. Suffice to say there is humor, grief, regret, renewal and some vicious tween girl drama. 

This is in my top 5 of the year so far - and that is saying something!

Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced readers' copy.

ABBY OFFSIDES by Anna McCallie comes out June 23, 2026

 

As someone who has binged Ted Lasso 11 times, I came to this book with some expectations. And I am thrilled to inform you that they were all met, nay EXCEEDED! 

This delightful rom-com is about Abby who, in the wake of a bad break-up, leaves her job with the Boston Red Sox to take on a marketing role for a Liverpool football team. 

Maybe it's World Cup fever, or just my own shock that I have developed a love for an actual sport (although, frankly, just fictional versions) but this book hit hard! 

First off, the banter is DELICIOUS! These characters are so quippy and funny that my family nearly lost their vision rolling their eyes at my braying laughter. 

Abby is a delight. She is complex and suffering, but also mustering her wits and standing in her own defense. And Lachlan is a freaking dreamboat. Jamie Tartt's looks,  Roy Kent's conflicted backstory, and just a touch of Coach Beard's compelling weirdness. 

Of course there is the annoying bit where a simple honest conversation could have headed off the last third of the book. But if it didn't exist, there wouldn't be a last third of the book and that would make me sad, so I'll allow it. 

Of course I am a little disappointed that this is McCallie's first book so there is no back catalog for me to devour, but she is a strong writer with a gift for dialogue and I will read whatever she deigns to put out!

RETRO by Jessica M. Goldstein comes out June 23, 2026

 

In the words of the great Fred Kwan - That was a hell of a thing! Jessica Goldstein's debut novel is a wild ride through time and I know it is not my place, but I DEMAND a sequel! 

The premise could have gone many ways - an out of work actress with a lot of regrets gets a job at a time travel company and it spins her life completely out of control. She begins to notice changes in her everyday life, even as her colleagues and boss assure her that her constant visits to other points in time will not affect the timeline in which she lives. I don't want to go into too much plot detail because one of the main charms of the book is the change/no change conundrum. The other thing that got me hooked was the details in the time travel events. Goldstein has a flair for setting you in the, well, the setting, with a confident level of detail. 

In my research to make sure that she is a young person who will be writing novels I am going to love for ages, I discovered her celebrity interviews and humor colums and DANG she is amazing! 

Great cover design too!

Thanks to NetGalley for the digital ARC and for introducing me to this compelling and entertaining voice.