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One of Us Is Next Review

One of Us Is Next by Karen M. McManus
Overview: Bayview was rocked by Simon's death and his gossip app, but everyone thinks that things might be going back to normal until Truth or Dare gets texted to everyone's phones. The game offers players two choices- pick truth and have a secret of yours texted to the entire school or pick dare and be told what prank you have to pull. Pick dare because none of them are worse than the truths the anonymous texter possesses. He also seems to be targeting specific people at Bayview, Phoebe who is kind of a golden girl and is hooking up with the star football player on the down low, Brandon, that football player, Jules, Phoebe's best friend, Sean, Brandon's best friend, and Maeve, Bronwyn's younger sister who was involved in cracking the Simon case. When the game starts to move from extremely annoying to actually threatening, everyone involved is locked in a stand-still about how to confront the issue. And when Phoebe ends up with …
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Serving The Servant Review

Serving the Servant by Danny Goldberg
Overall: 5
This is a biography about Kurt Cobain written by his former manager Danny Goldberg. I decided I'd give it a shot because I really enjoyed Me Elton John which I'd read last year, and I'd recently seen clips of Nirvana's MTV unplugged in a music documentary and was intrigued. Like with Elton John, I knew the basic details about Kurt Cobain before I started the book, but, beyond that, I had no clue what to expect. I'm actually listening to Nevermind for the fist time as I write this (though the more I listen the more I feel like I've heard a lot of it before without realizing it).
Anyway, I was immediately sucked into the book. It captured my attention in a way that nothing had been able to for almost a solid month. I really like Danny Goldberg's writing style. It's extremely conversational and makes the reader feel like part of the story or the discussion. He's telling Kurt and Nirvana's story, but h…
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Every Other Weekend Review

Every Other Weekend by Abigail Johnson
Overview: Adam and Jolene are both stuck at their dad's apartments every other weekend and neither of them are happy about it. That is, until they meet one another. They learn to get through the worst times of their lives together, and, soon, they don't dread the mandatory visits. While they fall for each other fast, it takes a long time for them to admit it. Overall: 3

Characters: 3 The book is split POVs between Adam and Jolene. Adam is very passive. He cares too much about how everyone else is feeling so he doesn't process his own feelings very well. He fades into the background, and that's okay. Jolene is loud and brash and sometimes flat out mean. She appeals to Adam because she feels fresh and different. Jolene walks a fine line between a character with a singular personality trait and being a manic pixie dream girl. I think I land more on the one note side, though, because that's the problem with most of this book. Adam, …
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Into YA with Emma Lord (Tweet Cute Blog Tour)

I'm so excited to have Emma on the blog today to answer a couple of questions I have about her new book, Tweet Cute, out January 21st. I posted my review a while ago, so if you haven't read it or need a reminder, here's my review. It's so much fun, and I'll be posting a short except below the questions so that you can get a taste of the story. 1. Social media is obviously a huge part of this story. Were you ever hesitant or concerned about trying to capture internet culture in a book? Did you do any kind of research to prepare? Oh boy, I did almost zero research. I was working as an editor who wrote and assigned daily content based on things going viral both in the social media and food space, so I was already aggressively online. I think my primary concern was mostly trying to keep the book from feeling too hyper specific to the time I was writing it, but also keeping it fresh — I was careful to try and choose the more “lasting” memes than the memes of the week.  2…
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New Year, New Blog Goals: Welcome to 2020

Happy late 2020! I meant to make this post a long time ago, but it's taken me a minute to decide exactly what I want to say with this. For most of the blog's history, I've kept a pretty consistent formatting, generally posting Wednesdays and Sundays and sometimes Fridays with YA reviews, discussion posts, and interviews. As I head into the third year of having the blog, I want to adjust this system a bit to better suit where I'm at with my blogging and reading and where your interests are now. Because, most of all, I maintain the blog for you, and I want to make content that you find most exciting.
As I headed into restricting my posting for the blog, I wanted to make sure everyone was involved in the changes so I created tons of polls and questions on both Twitter and Instagram. Those survey results have helped shape my decisions about the blog going forward.
The first change that you may or may not notice is that I'm no longer going to stick to a defined posting…
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I Got Rid of (Almost) All My Books

On Twitter, everyone loves to joke about their TBR piles that are heading to swallow them whole. We talk about buying way too many books. They're like personality traits for book bloggers and book community members, but we don't really talk about the reality of that. Running the blog for close to three years, it was starting to stare me in the face in the form of heaps and heaps of books. Books everywhere. Shoved onto my tiny bookshelf, stacked on top of it, piled on my nightstand, piled on the floor, and lining my long windowsill. I woke up one morning and decided it felt like the books were slowly creeping in and stealing all the oxygen. So I decided to do something about it. I gathered together all the boxes floating around in the garage from Christmas, threw myself on the floor, and started to make piles of my books.
It was honestly overwhelming to start deciding what I was giving away and what I was keeping. I was both feeling like "EVERYTHING MUST GO" and &quo…
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Reflecting on 2019 and the Decade

"It was the end of a decade, but the start of an age"- "Long Live"

I can't believe it's finally here. We're all getting ready to step into 2020 tomorrow. It always seemed so far away. We've all been talking about it so long that it's managed to creep up on me. I guess we're all getting a little extra sentimental because we're ending a decade (in terms of the popular view of decades). We're moving into the 20s. Seeing everyone's decade later comparisons has been weird because the 2010s were the first full decade I've ever lived. I started the decade as a six year old in first grade, so, even though I feel like I've accomplished far less than some people on Twitter, I have, in fact, managed to graduate elementary, middle, and high school and get into college in the last 10 years. I've also become a person.
Most of what's shaped me has happened in the last ten years. I've learned an incredible amount about mysel…
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Top 10 of 2019: All the YA Love

We're winding down 2019, so it's time to get reflective on the past year. It feels like multiple lifetimes have happened in this single year. It was one of the best years for the blog that I've ever had. Even though I might have read less this year, I expanded my interviews and guests posts, got to work closely with some wonderful writers, and fell further in love with the YA community. A huge thank you to everyone in the Novel19s for working with me, being so kind, and putting out some of the best books I've ever read. In the next few weeks, I'll be posting more about the future I see for the blog going into 2020 and it's third year, but, for now, let's celebrate all the amazing stories 2020 has brought to us! I did my Reading, Writing, and Me book awards recently which honored over 20 books in tons of different categories so if you need last minute holiday shopping inspiration, check out this list and the earlier one!

1. Permanent Record
I have not stoppe…
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She Said Review

She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey 
I don't normally talk about books that aren't YA on here. Actually, I'm not sure if I've ever reviewed a book that wasn't fiction. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, I've started to read more widely across categories. A lot of that has been nonfiction books. I'm not sure how many of these kinds of books I'm going to talk about on here because I know most of you read this blog to hear me talk about YA books, but this book is super important, and I realized I had a lot to say.
She Said is the story of MeToo told by Jodi and Megan, two journalist from the New York Times that lead and first broke the Weinstein sexual harassment story. While we all know how that unfolded and have watched the subsequent news stories that have come out of it, you can't really understand its impact, the intricacies of producing it, and the internal obstacles until you read the complete story. The chronicles of private investigat…
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