Jennifer Hubert's Blog, page 2
November 13, 2022
Ghostlight by Kenneth Oppel
High school history nerd Gabe’s summer job leading the Island Ghost Tour at Island Amusements in Toronto has been pretty boring so far. Long hours in the sun entertaining tourists? Check. Bratty kids who interrupt his stories? Check. But when real ghost Rebecca Strand materializes and tells him she is the murdered daughter of a […]
July 20, 2022
How Maya Got Fierce by Sona Charaipotra
Seventeen year old Maya Gera has a love/hate relationship…with garlic. On the one hand, she’s the heir apparent to her Punjabi family’s California garlic farm, a role she’s been groomed for all her life that will guarantee her family’s future legacy and success. On the other hand, garlic, or rather, an agricultural summer course at […]
May 26, 2022
Slingshot by Mercedes Helnwein
Grace Welles doesn’t see the point of making friends. It’s easier to cultivate jerks. “When people were trying to be nice, there was everything to lose; when they were already assholes to begin with, there was nothing you could say to ruin it. Less pressure. Far more freedom.” She’s not a girl’s girl or a […]
May 15, 2022
Private Label by Kelly Yang
Serene Li is super frustrated. She loves being an intern at her mom’s self-named fashion label, LILLY LEE, and can’t wait to start designing clothes of her own. But her mom’s investors insist on watering down Lilly’s designs, calling them “too ethnic” and urging Lilly to sell to a bigger label so they can reap […]
March 6, 2022
Family of Liars by E. Lockhart
In 2014, this book by criminally awesome mastermind E. Lockhart came out and I was blown away and unable to reveal a single thing, because to say anything was to spoil everything. Now the prequel to this book has come out (or will come out May 2022) and I am AGAIN blown away and AGAIN, […]
January 9, 2022
All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir
Noor and Salahudin are two Pakistani teenagers who live in Juniper, California, a small military town on the edge of the Mojave desert. Noor is a straight A student who works part time in her uncle’s liquor store and has dreams of becoming a doctor. Sal helps his parents run a small motel and fills […]
January 4, 2022
2021 Top Five
Like in 2020, I haven’t read nearly as much YA as I wanted to/should have, so here is a leaner, meaner list of my top five best YA reads of 2021. Please note that there has been absolutely no attempt to balance this list by age, gender or genre. These are just my “from-the-gut” favorites […]
January 2, 2022
New Year, Same old Reading Rants
Hi friends, As you may have noticed, there hasn’t been all that much activity on this blog since my burst of energy last October. And that’s because I had many life changes that upended, well everything! My husband and I moved, I started a new job as a high school librarian (long time readers will […]
October 24, 2021
The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl
As a proud GenX librarian, I had no choice but to crowd surf head-on into former Nirvana and current Foo Fighters band member Dave Grohl’s big-hearted and name-dropping memoir. Starting with his accident-prone childhood (“We always joked that the doctors at Fairfax County Public Hospital (in Virginia) were on a first name basis with me”) […]
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
Ray Carney is a small-time furniture salesman just trying to get by, who is constantly tempted by the easy payday of the criminal life in this fascinating historical fiction by Colson Whitehead. Ray knows that if he wants to keep his little family safe and prosperous in 1960’s era Harlem, he needs to focus on […]
