WCW: Leslye Walton

Another new crush. Unfortunately, this author doesn't have a backlog of books for me to read my way through.

Leslye Walton's debut novel The Strange & Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender came out in 2014. It's a Morris Award nominee, and oh boy does it deserve it.

Walton has an MA in writing, and she also teaches middle school (brave soul!). She lives in Seattle, and I think that fondness for the Pacific Northwest definitely comes through in Ava Lavender.

Walton's prose is extraordinary beautiful and lyrical. I wanted more constantly. I cannot wait for her next book to be published.

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More Diversity in Your Book Diet

Hello Lovelies! As usual Top Ten Tuesday is brought to you by the lovely people over at The Broke and the Bookish . Today's topic is Top Ten Books for People Who Like X, and I'm going to go with... Top Ten Books for People Who Like Diversity Thanks to the efforts of groups like We Need Diverse Books, diversity is having a resurgence in young adult and children's books. For the last couple years, I have been trying to read more books with diverse characters or by diverse authors. (Diverse in this respect includes race, sexuality, gender, and disability). I haven't endeavored to challenge myself to only read a certain type of book i.e. only those by women of color or anything that isn't by a white heterosexual male, but I try to be extra aware of the characters and ask myself if they actually are white (sometimes the text doesn't say it, sometimes people just assume it!) and if being white is necessary for the character or not. But here are my top t...

TBT: The Witch of Blackbird Pond

In middle school, I was a member of this reading club where we had a set of books to read as a team, and then we did like little quizzes on them against other teams. (SUPER NERD!). And now, I'm not entirely certain, but I feel pretty sure that club was where I read this book for the first time. The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare is a Newbery award winning historical fiction novel. Orphan Kit Tyler has been moved from her home in the Caribbean to her puritan relative's home in Connecticut. She feels like she has nothing in common with these relatives, but she does form an attachment with an old Quaker woman and a young sailor, Nat. Of course breaking out of the mold is not without its price, and Kit learns this for herself when she is accused of witchcraft. This is one of those books that I think about constantly. I haven't reread it in several years, but I always want to. I recommend it frequently to other. This is a book for readers...

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is a very entertaining classic. I think everyone knows the story of young Alice who follows a White Rabbit into the world of Wonderland where everything is just slightly (or significantly) strange. For some reason, every time I've picked up Alice's Adventures before, I've put it down without making it more than 10 pages or so. But this time, I managed to finish it. It's a quirky sort of book, but I enjoyed it. It did make me think of The Phantom Tollbooth (here's my review of that classic), but I preferred Carroll's novel to Juster's. There's some great play on words and delightful misunderstandings because of homophones and characters not paying attention to each other. I think this is a worthwhile classic, but I don't actually have that much to say about it. Middle Grade March Count: 5

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