For this week’s weekend pick, I’m excited to share a debut fantasy duology perfect for fans of sweeping magic and competitions-–Judy I. Lin’s A Magic Steeped in Poison and A Venom Dark and Sweet. 

First, in A Magic Steeped in Poison, readers meet Ning, a tea maker who finds herself wracked with guilt knowing that she brewed the poison tea that killed her mother and threatens to kill her sister, too. However, when Ning hears about a competition to find the kingdom's greatest shennong-shi - masters of the ancient and magical art of tea-making–she decides to take the risk and travel to the city to compete herself and potentially earn a favor from the Princess that could save her sister’s life. Full of cunning competitors, politics, and a perplexing, handsome boy–the competition brings Ning to the realization that she may be in mortal danger. ​

The companion, A Venom Dark and Sweet continues Ning and the Princess’s story through journeys in and outside of the kingdom with threats of poisonings, warring politicians, and internal visions of war, danger, and bloodshed. Ning must face again the unexpected twists and turns her life continues to take while practicing her art of ancient magical tea making. Without saying too much that would spoil these two mysterious, propelling stories of political intrigue and swirling magic, I would recommend cozying up with your own mug of tea and diving into Judy I. Lin’s world this weekend. The pairing of winter cold and warming tea mixes perfectly with this duology!
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Until next week, keep reading!
​Cammie ​

​Are you looking for something to read? 
​Check out our weekly suggestions!
Are your students looking for book recommendations?
Send them to browse through the picks for this or past years.
 
For the picks from 2022 click here
For the picks from 2021 click here
For the picks from 2020 click here.
For older picks click from 2019 click here.
For the even older picks click here.

For this week’s weekend pick, I would like to celebrate #disabilitydecember by recommending one of my favorite recent reads Claire Forrest’s Where You See Yourself. This novel has so much truth, humor, and beauty to make you never want to put it down! 

The story begins with our determined and delightful protagonist, Effie Galanos. As senior year begins, Effie already knows exactly what she wants–to pursue her dream of becoming a digital media professional who raises awareness and representation of the disabled community in mass media. As a wheelchair user with Cerebral Palsy, Effie has always wanted to see herself and other disabled young people represented in the magazines, shows, and digital landscape. She even has secretly researched a college in NYC with a Mass Media and Society major, and pictured a whole new life for herself outside of her hometown of Minneapolis. When she finds out her long time crush Wilder is applying there too, everything seems to be pointing Effie in the right direction. But it turns out the universe has so many surprises for Effie.

Navigating the process of admissions visits, Effie learns that she must not only find the right major, but the school that makes accessibility a priority. Through all the ups and downs of her senior year, Effie confronts internal and external ableism, friendships growing and changing, and potentially pushing herself to believe growing up means possibilities can exist and even surpass our own expectations. As Wilder and Effie grow closer, there may even be an unexpected turning point from friendship to first love…to know what happens you will have to read and find out!

Claire Forrest writes in her acknowledgements to disabled readers, “...it is my sincerest hope that you found comfort, escape, and maybe even some joy in these pages. May you never forget that you, too, can be the hero of your own story, and that we deserve to be seen–and celebrated–just as we are, in all spaces, always.” I can truly say that reading Where You See Yourself made me feel all of those things–especially joy. I hope that you will grab a copy of Effie’s story because you will find a new friend to relate to and celebrate with as she takes you on her journey. Also, I highly recommend following Claire Forrest and her work as well as the #disabilitydecember celebration on Instagram for more disability reads to add to your TBR. 

​Until next week, keep reading!

Cammie

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I feel safe in saying that any avid reader can share the experience of having the “just right” book come along at just the right time.  This happened to me this past week when I was fortunate enough to be gifted an advanced copy of Fault Lines by Nora Shalaway Carpenter.  Carpenter is the author of the book The Edge of Anything and two marvelous anthologies (one of which I reviewed previously entitled Ab(solutely) Normal:  Short Stories that Smash Mental Health Stereotypes, a book she edited with the amazing author Rocky Callen. This young author is quickly becoming one of favorites!

As a university professor, I spend a lot of time on zoom with my students, and I also have a 19-year-old daughter whose friends spend a lot of time at our home:  I am literally surrounded by young people daily.  Since COVID, there has been a drastic change in the conversations I have with our youth.  Dialogue consists of their extensive laundry lists of concerns:  concerns that mirror what the CDC is reporting about our youth related to stress, anxiety, and depression (CDC, 2023).  Although I cannot speak for all adults, I think the vast majority of us have had the same concerns over the past three years. With issues with the economy, loss of our usual lifestyle and even loss of life due to COVID, obvious signs of global warming and environmental issues due to our lifestyle choices, and the surge of divisive political rhetoric on social media  (probably exacerbated by media of all kinds), there is a lot on our minds.  

Books are more important than ever, as they are powerful tools to help process, understand, and navigate the big feelings that have seemed to overwhelm the best of us since 2020. Nora Shalaway Carpenter has created a book that examines and offers guidance on so much of what is on the minds of our youth.  

The story starts with a female protagonist named Vivian Spry (Viv).  Carpenter’s strong creation of setting places readers in the beautiful forest near Viv’s  West Virginian home-–a place she spends a lot of time hunting for food and convening with nature.  The tree stand in this forest is the one spot Viv feels is her safe place–a mystical place that has helped her in dealing with the grief of the death of her mother and, most recently, experiencing the loss of her dear Aunt Elle. Viv and her father are left to endure the loss together, but even her father has become emotionally distant and her one remaining friend, Maeve, is spending more and more time with the theater clique at school.  The forest also provides a hideout for Viv from the rumors being told by her ex-boyfriend—rumors which have her schoolmates falsely judging her.   When her hiding place is suddenly being threatened by fracking and gas pipelines,  Viv will do anything she can to protect the land  she loves. The one thing she did not count on was for a new young man at her local high school to get in her way.

Senior Dex Mathews has just moved to Viv’s little town due to his mother’s job with the gas pipeline that may finally provide them a stable life.  After graduation,  Dex is determined to join the Army in order to be able to later attend college and become a lawyer. He knows this is the only way to ensure he and his mother will escape poverty.

As Twisted Pines is a small rural town, inevitably, the paths of Viv and Dex cross, and they are on the way to becoming friends. Viv’s pain from her ex-boyfriend’s lies have made her gun-shy in the love department, but something is different about Dex.  As they get to know one another, they realize they are on opposite sides of the pipeline debate, and each of them will fight with all of their strength as they struggle to stay true to themselves and protect their families.

In addition to painting a vivid picture of setting, Carpenter’s expertise at character development has the reader falling in love with both Dex and Viv and rooting for their love story to begin and thrive! I was especially impressed with this author’s knowledge of fracking and environment issues, while at the same time realistically portraying the two sides to a very complex issue.  Carpenter truly makes the reader consider both sides by writing a riveting and powerful story.  I loved Viv as a strong, female character who is not afraid to do what is right, and Dex is a young man who possesses the admirable traits of  loyalty, kindness, and maturity. In addition to authentic characters, Carpenter' choice in painting a rural community gives readers like myself who have never experienced life in living in a rural setting  a window into a different way of life.  I also found her writing enlightening regarding the debate over fracking and the health of the forests in West Virginia. The reader is left with considering the important topics  of socio- economic status, the ethics of nurturing our earth, and the power of one person to make change. 

​Recommended by: Dr. Susan Densmore- James
The Book Dealer

As we close out the Weekend Picks for the month of November, I would like to send a heartfelt thank you to Sonja our guest curator. I know she is busy teaching, attending doctoral school and being a new mom, but she took the time to suggest some great titles! I would also like to thank Dr. Bickmore for allowing me to take over his blog for the past few years to share some of my favorite books and post some wonderful people's picks. Leilya, you've been awesome guiding me through this process and I'm grateful for you as well. 

Happy Reading!
Nikki ❤

​​
​BIO-Sonja Howard is a passionate educator specializing in English Language Arts for 9th and 10th graders. She is obtaining a doctoral degree in literacy education with a focus on novel study and English curriculum from UNLV. With her expertise, Sonja aims to instill a love for literature in her students, making a positive impact on their educational journey.

​BIO-Sonja Howard is a passionate educator specializing in English Language Arts for 9th and 10th graders. She is obtaining a doctoral degree in literacy education with a focus on novel study and English curriculum from UNLV. With her expertise, Sonja aims to instill a love for literature in her students, making a positive impact on their educational journey.

Hi YA Book "Lovers" (yes, that was inspired by my obsession with TSwift),

I'm so happy to introduce my friend Sonja Howard as our Weekend Picks contributor for the month of November. She is an amazing teacher, new mother and still finds time to read the best YA titles. Can't wait to take a peek at all her amazing suggestions.

Happy Reading!
Nikki ❤

​BIO-Sonja Howard is a passionate educator specializing in English Language Arts for 9th and 10th graders. She is obtaining a doctoral degree in literacy education with a focus on novel study and English curriculum from UNLV. With her expertise, Sonja aims to instill a love for literature in her students, making a positive impact on their educational journey.

​

Are you looking for something to read? 
​Check out our weekly suggestions!
Are your students looking for book recommendations?
Send them to browse through the picks for this or past years.
 
For the picks from 2022 click here
For the picks from 2021 click here
For the picks from 2020 click here.
For older picks click from 2019 click here.
For the even older picks click here.

Barzak, author of the Shirley Jackson Award-winning Before and Afterlives and the Stonewall Award Honor Young Adult novel, Wonders of the Invisible World has crafted a most perceptive and inventive collection of stories in Monstrous Alterations. Barzak takes ten classic tales and, as he calls it in the introduction, creates the art of alteration. The retellings in these stories are not just to make them accessible today; they are reimagined, transformed, and remixed for readers in a world not focused on the straight, cis-white, male. ​

​All the stories resonated with me on a literary level. Through the representation lens, I gravitated to a number of the stories in the collection after re-reading the original texts. Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me is Barzak’s take on Chistina Rosetti’s Goblin Market, a staple in high school British Literature courses. In this creative retelling, the goblins at the market are treated with a freedom not offered in the original text. While the original sees the market, the goblins and their fruits as temptations of sinful desires, the goblins here offer something different to Laura. They offer her acceptance of her sexuality. After dancing and a kiss with a female goblin, Laura wonders aloud about love and is told by the female goblin, that “love comes in many shapes, my dear. Why approve of only one? Particularly when no one else would approve of the shape of your love anyway?” Indeed, for this Queer reader, I would have loved to have read those words in my teens to feel that acceptance and freedom regarding my love. The female goblin’s words in this story are the type of freedom young readers are seeking in their world today.

​Another story that truly tugs the heart with regard to characters who live in the margins but truly deserve their own story is The Trampling. It is a retelling of Stevenson’s Gothic novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In The Trampling, Barzak tells the story of the young girl who is trampled early on in the story. The girl, nameless here, lives in poverty with abuse. She has learned early on to keep her wits about her and her head down. Sent running for the doctor after one of her parents’ physical fights, she is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mowed down by a man running late at night, she hits her head against a stone, and breaks her arm. The arm is set and put in a sling, and the man pays the father a hundred pounds hush money. They move to better digs for a short period of time until the money runs out while her father drinks most of it away. Her life, however, is forever changed. Her arm was poorly set and healed improperly. She is limited in movement for the rest of her life thus preventing any reasonable source of income. With limited mobility her job prospects are bare, and she works sixteen-hour days in a matchstick factory dipping the sticks into phosphorus causing more serious health issues. The author though does not let the reader off with a nod to 19th century classism. He moves the needle further forcing us to confront the classism we participate in today. The story mentions the parts of our cell phones that are indeed manufactured in unsafe factories by children like this nameless girl forcing us here in the west to confront our participation in an unhealthy global class system.

​While it would be easy to say that the collection is a clever, writerly take on classic tales, what Barzak presents here in this collection is far more than that. Young readers today have concerns about socio-economic class structures as well as gender and sexuality equality. Many of the stories are strong discussion starters on both progress and stalls in our society past and present regarding these issues. The author has young readers confront injustices that existed in the past and are still alive today. He gives a front and center voice to the characters often pushed to the margins of society. Young readers will gravitate to the literary value of the writing, as it is exciting to read such stories from marginalized characters in classics. However, it is more than that. By inserting modern day issues young readers relate to, the collection is well suited to use as discussion points on social themes as well. It gives us reason to revisit classic texts, confront our societal issues today, and see the literary challenge of rewriting, remixing and reimagining. I’m excited to use this collection with my high school creative writing students over the summer as both a discussion starter to themes, as well as for the amazing craft offered in the idea of reimagining stories from those characters on the margins.