This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.
Catching up on some missed weeks now!
My books
Full Speed to a Crash Landing – I read the second one first so I had some idea of how this ended but wow it was fun to see how they got there. Kind of… space heist crossed with enemies to lovers vibes, but no resolution since this is book 1 of at least 3. Absolutely fun and I’m on the list for book 3 already.
Not many books this week because i was working my way through a book I bought which I actually still haven’t finished — it’s got a lot of grief and I need to move through that slowly right now. And also because I’ve been writing rather than reading.
Picture books
Rosie goes to preschool – meh. I glanced through it but kiddo didn’t even want to read it.
Grandpa Green – a repeat. about life and memory loss and gardening. Beautiful but I don’t think it resonates too much with my kid since he hasn’t actually experienced a grandparent with memory loss yet. He still loves the gardening art, though.
Puppy Bus – kid gets on the wrong bus to school and ends up getting a dog’s education. Adorable and funny.
Good Rosie – not sure I read this one? I can’t remember it.
Pete the Cat’s got class – don’t think i read this one either.
Just Like Millie – sweet, beautiful art. Learning to cope with life via dog.
Lizzy and the Cloud – also didn’t read this one. Usually I try to get to each book at least once but kiddo was really into some other books instead!
Molly & May – a brief friendship on a train. I liked it but kiddo was kind of meh on it.
This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.
Library materials returned June 15, 2025. Lots of games & graphic novels this week!
Books returned June 15, 2025. Titles and reviews can be found in the associated post.
Board Games
Gravity Maze – a puzzle game where you drop a marble from a start point to an end point. Cards of different difficulties give you different setups. My kid really enjoyed the easy levels then got bored, which is about par for the course for him on these. We found it a bit finicky to use at first but once we got the hang of how the pieces went together it was pretty fun and didn’t require reading.
Nmbr9 – competitive puzzle game where you place down oddly shaped numbered tiles in order, gaining more points as you stack them such that they don’t have any gaps underneath. Pretty fun, didn’t require any reading.
Unlock – A set of 3 escape room games. We only actually finished the first one. I don’t like that they required an app to do some of the puzzles, but it did have hints in it for when the puzzles were decidedly non-obvious, so that was nice at least. Not bad but definitely the kind of game that I’m glad I can borrow from the library rather than own.
Books part 1
Hyrule Historia – I picked this up for the manga at the end but it’s the rest of it that turned out to be a huge hit with my kid: it’s full of beautiful concept art from the Zelda games up to Skyward Sword. He spent a lot of time pouring over the ideas and coming up with his own ideas about how unused enemies would work and stuff. Plus he generated a bunch of ideas for me to use in fanfic thanks in part to how much he enjoyed this book.
Slightly Exaggerated – kind of fantasy/Indiana Jones vibes. I liked it.
The Broken Elf King – romantasy in a “she’s got super special magic powers” way that absolutely echoes “the chosen one” type narratives in a fun way. Like, what if the author just leaned into the joy of a fantastic mary sue romance? It’s like someone took a teenage girl self-insert and turned it into a real book with better-than-teenage writing, and it just rejoices in it. I had a lot of fun and have already grabbed the next book.
Shifting Earth – A climate disaster/portal fiction book. Hit too close to home in a lot of ways so absolutely not escapism but it was good.
A Gentle Noble’s Vacation Recommendation – some kind of isekai thing. Beautiful art and character interactions but not enough plot to really keep me intrigued.
I got abducted by aliens and now I’m trapped in a rom com – funny but I didn’t finish it. Not really the fault of the book: I got excited about writing my own fiction which makes me read waaaay slow because I keep stopping to think about my writing. As a result, my library loan timed out and I decided to cut my losses since I didn’t think I was going to stop writing any time soon.
Bikes not Rockets: intersectional feminist bicycle science fiction stories – Who can resist a title like that? Some great stories in this collection, and I enjoyed the whole concept of having bicycles in everything.
Picture books returned June 15, 2025. Titles and reviews can be found in the associated post.
Picture Books
Bark, George – hilarious. A bit hit with my kid.
What do you do with a voice like that – didn’t read. Neither kid nor I am big into biographies of congresswomen (this was from one of the library’s mystery book bags).
Beloved repeats picture books
MVP: most valuable puppy, Say Hello to Zorro, and Cat Says, Dog Says. I’m actually surprised kiddo chose the last one since I didn’t think he was that into it the first time, but we’ve ready MVP and all the Zorro books a lot of times.
This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.
Trying something new: I haven’t been reviewing books because it takes a long time to write reviews on my phone, and I’d been working on reducing my phone screen time. But I’ve been using my computer more to write fanfic so I’m going to see if weekly book posts are more likely to happen now than they were last time I tried.
My books
(first one I own, other two from the library)
Kitemaster by Jim Hines. I accidentally pre-ordered this twice, which probably gives you some idea of how I felt about it. A young woman mourning her husband goes to release his spirit kite only to discover she has developed a rare magical gift, and she soon attracts the attention of some very powerful people… I loved the worldbuilding around kite magic (safety lines! The spirit kites!) and the sky serpents and the poetic legends about dragons and the evil queen and the sky pirates and the race of monkey-like people. Maybe it feels particularly good to me right now because I’ve been playing a game which includes a lot of gliding around in the sky, but I wanted to live in this world. There’s also a lot about grief and cultural traditions around mourning in there, in a way that I had to stop and let it sink in sometimes. In a good way.
Halfway There – A graphic novel about being half Japanese and half American, but mostly it was about finding yourself and depression. Her experience of people’s weird reactions to her being “hafu” resonated but the self-loathing not so much.
The Roommate by Rosie Danan – I’ve read a few from her and they’re all different. I find it kind of hilarious that I felt like this one was less believable than the werewolf one but honestly I love a kind of absurd premise as long as the characters are fun. And they are! Just… I’d recommend Fan Service (the werewolf book) over this one. It’s the most recent one and I think the characters are even better despite the premise being more absurd.
Kid books:
Catnapped is a repeat, so kiddo liked it enough to get it out again. Or he liked that it has a cat in it and he’s got this thing where he wants his allergic dad to fake sneeze for fake cats so my kid is extra motivated to get cat books out of the library.
Bob and Joss get lost – ok but no repeat requests on this one
Amazing Grace – never read it, kid wasn’t interested. (Recall: we get mystery bags from the library and not all of them are winners for him)
Storm Whale in Winter – spawned some good conversations about snow safety but no repeat requests
Little Blue Truck Makes a Friend – kid had fun with the animal noises but was mad I made him read some of this so it was slower going than it could have been.
Charlie Chooses – very cute, lots of dogs, we read this a few times.
Toby – another repeat. cute dog, kind of melancholy story so i was surprised he got it out again.
Board Game
Despite the giant box this is mostly a card/dice game where you build a little city and money based on dice roles hitting your numbers. None of the cards are secret held in your hand, so that was great for my kid’s reading level (he can read but it’s a lot of work and he gets tired of doing it), and the rounds are pretty fast and the rules not too complicated. We may buy a copy of this one.
This is book 2 in the series, following princess Poppy, one of the twelve sisters from the previous book. Somewhat sideways to Poppy's own story, there's a highly unusual and modern retelling of Cinderella in there that throws a completely different light on the tale. Fairy godmothers, it seems, don't have to be quite so one-dimensionally benevolent. I think even those who aren't drawn to reworked fairy tales would find something to love in this story, which is an adventure tale of saving friends and defeating evil. It's both funny and clever, and I highly recommend it!
This is a subtle retelling of Cinderella, where author Malinda Lo has taken the backstory and bones of the traditional tale and woven them into an entirely different cautionary tale about fairies, and about a girl who loses her mother and then her father entirely too soon and who wants to retreat into the forest forever, but by the time she finds a way to do that, she has finally moved beyond her loss and is starting to want to live again. That makes it sound dark, and in many ways it is, but it's also a tale of finding love and moving into the light.
Incidentally, I picked this up because I heard it was a finalist for some LGBT award (and many other young adult awards besides [1]), so I was expecting there to be some social strife regarding relationships in there as well, but actually relationships just were relationships, regardless of gender, and the strife came from other sources. I found it kind of refreshing.
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