missrosymaplemoth's reviews
183 reviews

A great book for middle schoolers on learning to love your body and practice self-acceptance. It did get a bit repetitive to read incident after incident of extreme bullying sandwiched by self-deprecating comments by Ellie and bullying from her mother. I enjoyed that she went to therapy; I don’t read a lot of books that explore that. Overall, good for the tween in your life who struggles with body image, or any middle school kid.

☀️3/20

I enjoyed This Poison Heart, which made This Wicked Fate a bit disappointing. The pacing was a major issue and I thought the book had a lot of filler and could have been 100 pages shorter. I enjoyed the way the story wrapped up and the interpersonal relationships but couldn’t get myself to root for some characters such as Marie. I would have liked this story more if it was just one long book.

☀️2/20

☀️Broke down basic concepts in chess and helped with my comprehension of chess information. A great book for chess novices. Some examples were tedious.

Misprint on pg224.

Funny and real coming-of-age book for preteen girls.

Fast paced, a bit raunchy and very funny. Friendly, page-turning narrative style. My main complaint: I wish the FitzRoy issue had been wrapped up cleanly. It felt like there was more to discover there. Overall, way to make a romance-avoider enjoy a romance novel this much!

One year ago, Teddy’s twin sister Izzy mysteriously disappeared. Now, Teddy’s trying to find out how- and why.

This book is slow-paced, picking up slightly after the 50% mark, but still manages to be a page-turner. The writing style and perspective makes this novel interesting and unique. The ending was anticlimactic for me personally, but I still enjoyed the way the story unraveled. This is more of a suspenseful book as opposed to a thriller or mystery, and makes for a good summer-themed read.

I would recommend this to upper YA readers.

The first book a read on chess. Hard to fully understand as a beginner but still valuable and breaks down tactics as concepts decently. I did only a fraction of the puzzles, so I will come back to this book to do more.

Beautiful and heartbreaking especially for those of us with complicated maternal relationships.

It’s 1944. Twelve-year-old Doris “Dory” Byrne’s Pop has just been called away to fight Hitler and the Nazis, leaving Dory and her two brothers to fend for themselves during the time he’s away.

“Nothing Else But Miracles” is a heartwarming story of kinship and siblings coming together to not just survive but thrive in the midst of a terrible and parentless time in their lives.  This read like a slice-of-life to me; enjoyable, but not much of a gripping plot line. All of the children were oddly characterized and it took me out of the story. The writing was often too on the nose and I wished other plot lines (Mae and Chester, the Morellos) had been wrapped up instead of ignored.

A book about a book taught in a classroom challenged for being “gay.” Donovan is reading “The Adventurers” in his fifth-grade class. When his mom checks out the book, she disapproves of the two male main characters being in love with each other. She challenges the book through the school administration and the situation snowballs.

This book explores what it means to censor a part of the human experience and how hatred is taught rather than inborn.

The multiple POVs were distracting at times, as I didn’t see a fundamental need to read excerpts from “The Adventurers.” However, I enjoyed Gideon’s chapters and they made sense in the end.

I would recommend this book to readers aged 9 to 13, although anyone older could read and enjoy this as well.