Kareila's Bookshelf

As established previously, Dorothy Gentleman is a detective on a spaceship whose occupants are repeatedly reincarnated over the centuries of their voyage. Measures have been taken to prevent the passengers from producing more children, and each reborn passenger wakes up as a young adult with their most recent backup of memories restored.

Which is why no one knows what to do when an infant is left on the doorstep of Dorothy's nephew and his husband. Nobody has even had to think about how to nurture a child in three hundred years.

This must be why you brought a new baby gifts, I realized. You wrapped them in blankets because you wished you could wrap them in knowledge; you showered them with clothes and soft things because you couldn't shower them with the learned experience of your years and decades. It's why people liked handmade things for infants, even when those makes had faults.

These are breezy and frivolous, but fun. I hope there will be more.

I connected with this graphic novel about a mental health journey in a way that I tried to but never did with Allie Brosh's work. Stevenson (who has undergone a gender transition since publishing this in 2020) is maybe more relatable to me personally, as a gifted and driven overachiever who pushes to the brink of burnout and beyond. That being said, it probably does help when reading this to already be familiar with the author's other works, especially Nimona (which I have only read in audiobook format - I should fix that).

This is an angsty but ultimately sweet story about a transgender man's quarter-life crisis. He returns to his midwestern hometown after 10 years in order to help his mother move, and finds himself torn between staying there and reconnecting with his best friend from high school, versus returning to his queer found family in NYC. Feeling stuck, he visits the indie bookstore where he worked as a teenager and finds himself face to face with his younger self. Can he change his past?

This was a fun, escapist story about two teens with unusual abilities. Genevieve is a scientist whose history of being constantly overlooked has resulted in her being able to literally turn invisible. Ash is a boy with a difficult past who can travel in time. When they cross paths at the 1934 Chicago World's Fair, an explosion seems to unravel time around them, and they find themselves thrown backwards into 1893. They have no idea how to return to their own time, or if their future even still exists. Thematically, the story reminded me of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, but written for young adults.

I looked up the author online, and she appears to have written two other books set in the same universe, although the three stories don't seem to be intertwined in any way. A Starlet’s Secret to a Sensational Afterlife is about Genevieve's twin sister Henny, and their older sister Ruby is the subject of Murder for the Modern Girl.

This 2005 book is technically a reread, but I was surprised to recently learn that it had received sequels in 2012 and 2015. The first time I read it was before I started keeping this journal, and I feel that it deserves a review.

This a juvenile fantasy book, but it's not really about a princess. It's about a girl who lives in a remote mining town in the mountains. The faraway king hears a prophecy that the prince will marry a girl from that town, so an academy is established to educate every girl of marriageable age who lives there, ensuring that whomever the prince eventually chooses to be his bride will be suitable for the role.

To complicate things further, it is gradually revealed that all of the miners can commune telepathically through shared memory, an ability that they call quarry-speech. The heroine, Miri, uses this ability along with her wits and courage to ensure the success of the academy's students and the safety of the town.

What I particularly appreciate about this story, in addition to the subtle feminism, is that there are very few villains despite the tension and character conflicts. Everyone is trying to do their best, and no one is beyond redemption.

Finally finished this, although the next book is scheduled to be published in May. The author has hinted that the tenth book should be the last, which implies a certain amount of ( spoiler? )

The plot points that I thought were going to be important in this book got resolved relatively quickly and painlessly, leaving lots of pages to spend on twists that no one saw coming. My loudest complaint (to my friend who encouraged me to read these) was getting bogged down at the very beginning just going through what was collected from the previous floor, plus multiple flashback scenes to include other backstories. Once things finally started happening again, it moved forward pretty quickly.

I've had this on my TBR pile since purchasing the graphic novel at Powell's ten years ago, but that copy is still gathering dust on my shelf. Instead I listened to the audiobook adaptation today while working through some ill-considered seasonal gift knitting. It's sweet and poignant, with more emotional depth than I expected from the premise.

Not as creepy as The Brides of High Hill, but still extremely grim, with themes of famine and cannibalism.

This is a juvenile chapter book that follows two teenage female cousins, one American and one French, on a mystery hunt across Paris. It's cute and predictable, but the riddles and puzzles are actually well-constructed challenges that would introduce young readers to several common encoding concepts. I would have bought this for my own kids when they were younger.

This book and its sequel, Secrets of the Purple Pearl, are best described as a frothy mashup of A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Mysterious Benedict Society, perhaps with a side of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. They're amusing and entertaining, but there's no real sense of compelling stakes involved in the action. I also feel obligated to point out that the "mad science" isn't actually science, just mystery and discovery. That being said, I definitely get the sense that the namesake Millicent Quibb intentionally invokes some of the author's best known roles: Jillian Holtzmann from the first Ghostbusters remake, Weird Barbie from the Barbie movie, and Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus Rides Again.