A Little Like Waking


A Little Like Waking by Adam Rex
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Special thanks to Raincoast Books for sending a copy for review.

Summary:
Zelda is stuck in a dream. A very strange dream, where people can fly, bears sneeze money, and her childhood cat, Patches, is somehow alive – despite being run over years ago. Things only get stranger when Zelda meets Langston, a sweet if overly timid guy who feels more real to her than anyone she’s ever met.

As Zelda and Langston explore the far reaches of the dreamscape together, they find themselves growing closer and closer. But what they uncover along the way pushes them towards a truth neither of them wants to face. Will it turn out that he’s the guy of her dreams, or is she the girl of his? (Goodreads).

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Let Us Descend


Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward
Publisher: Scribner
Special thanks to Simon & Schuster for sending a copy for review.

Summary:
Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation
(Goodreads).

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A Tiny Upward Shove Review


A Tiny Upward Shove by Melissa Chadburn
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Special thanks to Raincoast Books sending a copy for review.

Summary:
Marina Salles’s life does not end the day she wakes up dead.

Instead, in the course of a moment, she is transformed into the stuff of myth, the stuff of her grandmother’s old Filipino stories–an aswang. She spent her life on the margins, knowing very little about her own life, let alone the lives of others; she was shot like a pinball through a childhood of loss, a veteran of Child Protective Services and a survivor, but always reacting, watching from a distance. Death brings her into the hearts and minds of those she has known–even her killer–as she is able to access their memories and to see anew the meaning of her own. In the course of these pages she traces back through her life, finally able to see what led these lost souls to this crushingly inevitable conclusion (Goodreads).
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The Nightmare Thief Review


The Nightmare Thief by Nicole Lesperance, illustrated by Federica Fenna
Publisher: Sourcebooks Young Readers
Special thanks to Raincoast Books for sending a copy for review.

Summary:
Maren Partridge loves working in her family’s dream shop where she can hand-craft any dream imaginable. The shop has only one rule. Dreams cannot be given to a person without their consent. Maren has no problem with this—until her sister, Hallie, has an accident that leaves her in a coma. Maren’s certain she can cure Hallie with a few well-chosen dreams. And when no one is watching, she slips her a flying dream.

But a strange new customer from the shop has been following Maren and knows what she did. Now she’s laid the perfect trap to blackmail Maren into creating custom nightmares for a dark and terrible purpose. As Maren gets drawn further into the sinister scheme, she must make a choice: to protect her family or to protect the town from her family’s magic (Goodreads).
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