Author: sbhowell
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The Light in Front of Me by Aria Howell
Rating: 4/5, good Full disclosure: This is my partner’s book and I edited it. The Light in Front of Me by Aria Howell is an LGBT high fantasy book. It’s about Valerie, the princess of a kingdom called Rayleth, who is engaged to marry Eliot, the prince of Va’cerio. Valerie and Eliot have been good…
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The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Rating: 4/5, good Diverse Reading Challenge #4 This book was originally published in 1984 and it’s been a standard in classrooms. I’ve definitely seen it around, though I was never assigned it. We did read Sandra Cisneros’s story “Eleven” in class in 7th grade, and I loved that story. I think The House on Mango…
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The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Rating: 5/5, excellent Diverse Reading Challenge #3 I don’t know why I slept on this book so long. It came out February 8th, 2017 and it was a huge hit, with a movie adaptation that came out in 2018. I’ve heard so many great things about it, and it 100% lives up to the hype!…
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12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson
Rating: 3/5, average I promised myself I wouldn’t read any male authors this year, but my dad said I should read this one shortly before he died so I made an exception (kind of, I found a loophole by listening to the audiobook instead of reading it with my eyes, haha). I think 12 Rules…
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The Murderbot Diaries vol. 1: All Systems Red
All Systems Red by Martha Wells Rating: 3/5, average I really loved the concept of this, but I wasn’t crazy about the execution. All Systems Red is about a nonbinary asexual robot who went berserk in their last job and killed a bunch of their employers, so in their head they call themselves “murderbot”…
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Sula by Toni Morrison
Diverse Reading Challenge #1 Rating: 4/5, good Sula is a modern classic. It was published in 1973 and is Morrison’s second novel after The Bluest Eye. I tried to read Beloved in college (it was assigned for Helene Moglen’s Gothic Imagination class – by the way, there’s a colloquium in her honor happening in March) but…
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New Invisible Man is an Edge-of-Your-Seat Horror Flick
Rating: 4/5, good I have long believed that invisibility is the coolest superpower. It may not be the strongest or the most useful, and it may have some serious drawbacks (like we saw in the Invisible Man book with the having to run around naked in freezing weather because clothes aren’t invisible) but it’s just…
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A Little Life by Hanya Yanigahara
Rating: 5/5, excellent This book is amazing. Basically, A Little Life is the story of four men – Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm – who we follow over the course of thirty years of friendship. The main character, Jude, has been severely abused as a child and as a teen and only started to…
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Yes, You Are Trans Enough by Mia Violet
Rating: 5/5, amazing I started following Mia Violet on Twitter (@OhMiaGod) once I started being more active on Twitter a year or two ago and she consistently posts good stuff, mostly on trans topics but also on mental health and other subjects. This book is a memoir of Mia’s life from her childhood in a…