Saeed, Aisha, Al-Marashi, Huda, Thompkins-Bigelow, Jamilah and Ali, S.K. “Grounded.” New York : Amulet Books, 2023.

This is a really great story for tweens, told by a bevy of Muslim authors!

The setting is an airport, where a storm has grounded all flights. The MONA (Muslims of North America) conference has just ended, so there are a lot of Muslims trying to get home. One girl, Hanna, is searching for a lost cat, Snickerdoodle, and convinces three other kids to help her search – Feek, Sami, and Nora. Feek’s little sister, Ruqi, is tagging along, when she’s not getting lost. Each kid has their own issues they are working through with their families and their selves.

Feek has a famous dad who is not around nearly enough, leaving him to help his mom take care of his little sister Ruqi and baby Hazma. All Feek wants to do is write lyrics great enough to make his dad pay attention to him.

Hanna loves animals, but her insistence on searching for Snickerdoodle might also be because she doesn’t want to spend any time with her father. He has raised her by himself, after her mother died when she was very young. But now he is carrying a secret – he was looking at the conference for a wife.

Sami has many nicknames he doesn’t like at all, such as Scarecrow Sami and Scaredy Sami. Why does everyone want him to be different than he is? Why can’t they see his strengths, like his excellent karate skills? Will he make it home in time to make it to the karate tournament tomorrow?

Nora is the daughter of a famous senator. She, too, is hoping her parent will notice her and appreciate her. Nora’s best friends aren’t Muslim; she actually has very few Muslim friends, because their family doesn’t really practice. Can she smooth over the hurt she caused when she didn’t invite her Muslim friend to her birthday party because she is so different from her other friends?

Each character tells the story in alternating chapters. This works really well, with the four authors. The fact that the kids are Muslim is part of the character’s makeup, but it wasn’t the entire focus of the story. Instead, Grounded shows tweens how friends can make you better, if you pick the right ones, and how age doesn’t matter when you’re looking to change the world (or your part of it).

Mary Beth Adams is the Community Engagement Librarian for Alamance County Public Libraries. You can reach her at madams@alamancelibraries.org or 336-570-6981.

A Deadly Education, Novik, Naomi. New York : Del Rey, [2020]

Content Warnings:  Death, Violence, Gore, Murder, Child death, Death of a parent

Being a good person can be really freaking annoying.  Galadriel “El” Higgins knows this all too well.  When she was a child, her great-great-great grandmother prophesied that she would become a great and terrible force for evil.  Now, training at the Scholomance, the self-powered, magically-run school for young magic users, her magic seems to agree.  It wants to destroy, to build super volcanos and douse the world in flames.  El just wants a spell to clean her dorm room.  She thinks she’s earned some teenage angst.

Living in a school that is liable to kill her is not easy in the first place.  Not having anyone to sit with at lunch can literally be your doom.  (Monsters sneaking in and looking for a magical snack prey on unpopular freshmen.)  Students from certain families have an automatic leg-up.  Those who grew up in Enclaves, concentrated communities of magical power and safety, enter the school already allied to each other with coveted “reserved Enclave spots” ready to hand out to the best of the best who will join them.  Everyone knows to look out for themselves.  Very few seniors make it through the monster-filled gauntlet that is Graduation.

As a non-Enclaver working against her natural magic-style, El is already working with both hands tied behind her back.  She is not going to grin while she bears this.  If her bad attitude loses her friends, then at least they do not have to worry about her destructive magic as well as getting to class on time.

Then, El runs into Orion Lake.  Literally.  An Enclaver who has been the school’s White Knight since his freshman year, saving everyone from the dangers of the Scholomance in the stupidest ways possible, Orion is everything El is not.  Naturally they hate each other.  El, however, may be the only person capable of saving Orion from his self-sacrificing ways and getting him to the end of the school year and Orion may be the only person El can turn to when she learns that she would rather die trying to help others than survive and remain alone.

A Deadly Education is the first book in the now completed Scholomance trilogy.  The second book, The Last Graduate, came out in 2021 and the final volume, The Golden Enclaves, was released last September.  The Alamance Public Library system has all three.

The worldbuilding is as fun as it is complex.  El’s snarky, but full-hearted first-person narration makes everything hilarious and grounded, even when the story dives into classism, murder, and grief.  In the darkest of places, we can find the best of ourselves even if that makes everything else more complicated, dangerous, and just plain annoying.

Rebecca Mincher is the Children’s Librarian at Graham Public Library. Contact her at rzimmerman@alamancelibraries.org or 336-570-6730.

“Ink Blood Sister Scribe,” Törzs, Emma. New York, NY : William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, [2023].

Content Warnings:  Blood, Death of a Parent, Gun Violence, Body Horror

Books can be magic.  Magic can be dangerous.  Esther and Joanna Kalotay have known this all their lives, growing up above their father’s hidden collection of magical books.  Joanna can hear these mystical tomes.  Esther is not affected by any of the magic within them.  Their father protects these books obsessively after Esther’s mother was killed by people trying to find them.

Then Joanna comes home to find her father dead, his blood soaking into a book that is not part of the family’s collection.  Frantically, she calls out to her mother, Esther’s stepmother, for help, but Cecily cannot say anything.  Esther will not come home.  Despite this, however, Abe Kalotay’s death plunges the whole family into a rollercoaster of magical spells, schemes, and scrapes that follow Esther and Joanna around the globe before pulling them both back home.  There they must confront their family, their future, and what they will choose to do with the magic that they have.

Ink Blood Sister Scribe is clearly Emma Törzs’s debut novel.  The book starts out slowly with atmospheric, if sometimes repetitive, writing from both Joanna and Esther’s points of view.  Then, a fourth of the way through the novel, Törz adds a third point-of-view character to the story and makes the plot take off.  Ink Blood Sister Scribe becomes as much of a thriller as a contemporary fantasy as you try to puzzle out the secrets of magic, who the characters can trust, and how everything connects in this twisted web of intrigue and blood.

This story’s strength lies in its main characters.  Esther, Joanna, and their companions are complex yet lovable.  You feel their conflict about their parents and guardians with them, mixing anger with love and understanding with hate.  The family struggles in Ink Blood Sister Scribe keep the book grounded in reality, despite the book’s magical leanings.  The novel’s trust in chosen family keeps the novel feeling hopeful, despite how dark the story gets.

While Ink Blood Sister Scribe ends a bit too neatly for my tastes, with a stereotypically evil villain bringing the characters together beyond their other messy connections, the book is a rampantly engaging exploration of family, power, magic, and the dangerous line between preservation and control.  The book will appeal to fans of family-centered contemporary fantasy like The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd or The Villa by Rachel Hawkins.  I love the way that it ended, turning the page so another story could begin.

Rebecca Mincher is the Children’s Librarian at Graham Public Library. Contact her at rzimmerman@alamancelibraries.org or 336-570-6730.

“The Golden Spoon,” Maxwell, Jessa. New York : Atria Books, 2023.

Content Warning: Sexual assault, child abandonment, anxiety/panic attacks.

If you love baking competitions and cozy mysteries with an edge, this is the book for you!

Every year for the last ten years, Betsy Martin has invited bakers to her estate for a baking competition. She envisions something less cutthroat than most cooking and baking shows on television for her show, but this year, the network has thrust a co-host, Archie, on her, who hosts one of those cutthroat shows. The six contestants are all home bakers, and the Golden Spoon competition ensures that one of them will go home with a contract for a cookbook and great national exposure. Betsy gets something, too – enough money to keep her estate afloat for the next year.

At first, everything goes well, but when it is time to taste the breads on Day 1, we find out that one contestant used salt instead of sugar (was it an accident, or did someone switch his canisters?). On Day 2, one contestant’s fruit filling for her pie is burnt because a burner was turned up all the way, and another contestant realizes his orange extract that he brought from home has been switched out for gasoline. Someone isn’t playing fair. Then on Day 3, someone finds a dead body, and everyone is a suspect.

Each chapter is narrated by a different person, from the contestants to the hosts, and this provides a fuller picture of what’s going on that you would have with just one narrator. The descriptions of the bakes will make your mouth water!

This mystery is fun to read, but also deals with some serious topics. There is mention of sexual assault, child abandonment, and panic attacks. However, the book also focuses on friendship and coming together when hardship hits, and the ending is just wonderful.

Mary Beth Adams is the Community Engagement Librarian for Alamance County Public Libraries. She can be reached at madams@alamancelibraries.org.

“Happy Place,” by Emily Henry. Copyright 2023, Berkley, New York (388 pages, $28.00).

Content Warning: Death of parent, grief, sexual content, mental illness, alcohol, drug use.

Harriet can’t wait for the annual week-long stay Sabrina’s little summer cabin off a coast of Maine. The relaxation and peace of this cabin being Harriet’s happy place is all she needs right now. Harriet’s been struggling with being so far away from her loved ones, her residency, and the fact that she, and her ex-fiancé Wyn, have been hiding that they’ve been broken up for six months. So, you can only imagine her surprise (and devastation) when she arrives at the cabin to see that Wyn has joined everyone on this trip and that Sabrina’s father is selling the house the following month. Wyn and Harriet decide to keep up the rouse of still being together so the trip isn’t a total waste and so they don’t upset the rest of their group of friends.

One thing that I really liked with Happy Place was Henry’s focus on her character’s and their dynamics with one another. Even though we’re following Harriet and Wyn’s relationship from the pass and present and they’re the main focus of the story, we’re still able to see how Henry made the supporting cast make sense. How they’re well-rounded with themselves and with how they interact within the group/with Harriet and Wyn.

I do feel like the ending was a little rushed, but if Henry had pulled out the conflict and resolution more she would have lost her readers. I’m also not normally a fan of a lot of angst with my books, but in this case, Henry knew what she was doing by twisting the reader’s heartstrings. She has truly out done herself with her newest novel, Happy Place.

Kayleigh Dyer is a Library Technical Processing Assistant at May Memorial Library. Contact her at kdyer@alamancelibraries.org.

Once there was. Monsef, Kiyash. New York : Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers, [2023].

Once There Was is more than a wonderful YA (and upper Middle Grade) fantasy. It is also a gentle reminder that we can do better in preserving our world, in protecting wildlife, in putting others’ needs above our own.

Marjan has had a difficult life. Her mother died from cancer when she was 7, and her father just died a month ago. He was killed, and Marjan wants to know who did it. She inherited his veterinary clinic, which barely scrapes by. But more than anything, she wants to know what he hid from her and why there is a piece of her missing. Her best friends Grace and Carrie are trying to understand her, but her anger and emptiness makes it hard to get close to her. Marjan has stopped attending school, because she knows her classmates won’t know what to say to her. Her neighbor, Mrs. Francesca Wix, is her guardian, providing food occasionally, supervision and signatures when needed, and love all of the time. She is one of the people who kept an eye on Marjan when her dad had to leave on mysterious business trips.

Then, someone comes to the clinic and gives her a first class ticket to England, telling her she’s needed to heal an animal. Marjan has no veterinary training, and has no idea why anyone would think she can help, but she’s curious about her father, and the person who brings her the information promises they will help her find who killed him. When she arrives in England, she finds a sick griffon. She may not be a vet, but when she touches the griffon, she can sense what is wrong with him. The owner’s son, Sebastian, quickly becomes her friend as she tries to figure out what this special gift means, and why her father never told her anything about it.

She remembers all of the folk tales from Iran, his homeland, that he had told her, and is amazed to realize they are real. She meets the other players in the magical creatures world, and has to decide for herself what is right and wrong when it comes to taking care of the animals.

I can’t say enough about the writing and the storytelling in this book. It is luminous, and makes you feel everything the characters are feeling. The author interspersed folk tales among the main story, illuminating the creatures she’s seeing, and it made me want to pick up a book of Iranian folk tales. But beyond the story of how Marjan learns about this hidden world, there are lessons on how to be a friend, how to care for our world, how absolute power corrupts absolutely, and how to navigate the world when you aren’t sure about anything.

The one question that many have with this book is, who is the audience? It reads more like a young adult book on one page, then more like a middle grade book on the next. I would put it in the Young Adult section, but recommend it for elementary and middle school kids who are ready for something a little more mature than typical middle grade books.

Mary Beth Adams is the Community Engagement Librarian for Alamance County Public Libraries. She can be reached at madams@alamancelibraries.org.

“That self-same metal (the forge & fracture saga, book 1).” Williams, Brittany N. New York : ABRAMS, 2023.

Content Warning: Racism, Death.

This book was recommended to me because I really enjoy Rick Riordan’s books (both the ones he writes and the ones his imprint publishes). However, it also reminded me of Bloodmarked and Legendborn by Tracy Deonn. In short, this is a great book and a wonderful start to a new series!

Joan and James Sands work with the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s acting troupe. James is an apprentice actor and Joan is the fight coordinator, props person and all-around craftsperson for the group. Joan and James are part of a family that is blessed by the Orisha. Joan is a child of Ogun, the Orisha of iron, and is able to manipulate metal (making her the perfect person to take care of the blades used during Shakespeare’s plays, as she can fix any nicks and make them blunt or sharp). James is blessed by Oya, the Orisha of wind and death, and can produce a storm on cue and senses death. Their mother is a child of Elegua, the Orisha of crossroads and doorways, and can create doors to travel between far-away places. Their father is a child of Yenoja, the Orisha of the oceans and motherhood, and can control salt water and speed healing. Another gift of the Orisha is being able to tell who is Fae by a glow around them.

Joan and James’ parents tell them they are not spiritually mature enough yet to know certain things, but that doesn’t stop them from finding out that the Pact between human and Fae has expired, and the Fae are are spilling into the human world. Joan’s godfather, who was supposed to complete the ritual to renew the Pact, has been arrested, and no one knows where he is being kept. He, too, is a child of Ogun, and the only other child the god has claimed is Joan. But her parents don’t want her getting involved and completing the ritual.

However, when a Fae seduces Burbage and causes him and Shakespeare to try to kill each other during a sword practice, Joan uses her powers to wound the Fae, Auberon, with iron. She finds out one of the acting troupe is actually Fae and has shared his stories with Shakespeare, leading to him writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But Auberon is a hundred times more scary than Oberon, and is now on a quest to get rid of Joan and take over the world. And he’s not the only Fae wreaking havoc in London and all over the world.

This book has romance, swordfighting, characters from history, and magic, but it also tackles more weighty subjects, such as racism. Joan and her family are Black, and are insulted in large and small ways every day. While this book is set in the 1600s, many of the things said and done to the Sands family happen to Black and Brown people still to this day.

If you have a child who is ready to move past Percy Jackson, but isn’t quite ready for serious romance yet, this series is a great stepping stone. While Joan has a crush on two different people (one male, one female), they do nothing more than kiss. This is the first of a series, and I can’t wait to see what happens next!

Mary Beth Adams is the Community Engagement Librarian for Alamance County Public Libraries. She can be reached at madams@alamancelibraries.org.