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I got this text for a fellowship program on disability studies and found it very touching and challenging as it made me think about how I consciously and unconsciously judge others for looking different.

This is written for young readers (8-12) and I am going to send it to my 11-year-old godson as it's just a really funny and thoughtful look at what it means to grow up looking, as the author calls it, ugly.

It ends a bit abruptly but overall it's really engaging and thought-provoking. 

This is just a really fun adaptation of Cinderella. It's been on my list for ages and I found it enjoyable with a strong female protagonist and fun world-building.

It definitely ends with you wanting to read the next installment right away though but overall this is a fun read that brings up interesting questions regarding The Other given the status of cyborgs in this society. 

I really appreciated each installment of Kevin Kwan's trilogy. I think they build on each other in a really fun way as you see characters develop. 

I just think his satirical hand mixes deftly with dynamic characterization and funny dialogue. 

I totally understand why this is a classic now. It's long but powerful. It's humorous and serious by turns. Just a fun and yet deep take on King Arthur, Guenever, and Lancelot. 

I have appreciated Bryan Stevenson ever since I saw his TED Talk years ago.

This story highlights in stark and human terms how broken our criminal justice system truly is. 

While this book does get a bit repetitive and could have been a bit shorter, overall, I appreciate that it details the research and takes you step by step through the principles.

I have been waiting for a book to really help me understand what Intuitive Eating means and why it is better than the dieting mentality in the U.S.

While I never was really on a diet, I definitely had unconscious dieting principles and did a bit of emotional eating too so I'm already beginning to implement some of these principles and I am feeling much better about my outlook on food. 

I really appreciate how the authors bring together all the different myths and legends surrounding faeries.

This is probably one of the most beautiful books I've visually just ever read. Such a lovely find and worth purchasing as a very cool coffee table book. :) 

I recommend this to any human being, Christian or otherwise, who wants to grow in kinship with others and feel the loving embrace of the Divine. 

This was such a beautiful and moving reflection on how Fr. Gregory Boyle has encountered the true meaning of God in his life, his friends, and his work through Homeboy Industries. 

I listened to the audiobook of this memoir (a collection of essays) of a person diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and found it a hard but important read. 

I appreciated the honesty and vulnerability in how the author presented her own experiences. It jumped around a bit in a way that might have just been difficult to follow in audiobook form, but overall, I definitely recommend if you want to have more empathy for those who have such disorders. 

I had to read this for a graduate class for my M.Ed. in Education.

Through dialogue between three researchers in the field of digital media, it explores important questions about how participatory culture has been transformed by digital, networked, and mobile technologies. I appreciated the balanced perspective it gave in illustrating the joys and pitfalls and hopes and risks associated with the way we participate in these spaces. 

This is charming, but not nearly as heartwarming as A Man Called Ove. Still, this novel has its own quiet charm. It's much more of a slow simmer, as the most compelling parts happen in the latter portion of the novel.

All in all: not my favorite of his especially compared to the masterpiece of A Man Called Ove but still a lovely read about change, risk, and meaning when all is said and done. 

The book's description and the categorization of this as a romance novel is misleading. It's more about a process of self-discovery and friendship. I was prepared to write this off as just light chic lit about a protagonist with a very specific and privileged type of lifestyle (corporate lawyer in NYC) and, while there are plenty of tropes, the author's aware and thoughtful enough to actually give a decently compelling narrative about life. I enjoyed. I listened to the audiobook and the narrator does a lovely job. 

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this, even more so than the first book, to be honest. Kwan's satirical style is as fun and funny as ever in poking fun of the mega rich - in this case, China rich! - but there's also a fleshing out of relationships and the introduction of new characters that is thoughtfully explored and I'm very excited to read the next book! 

This is a lovely piece of epistolary and historical fiction that focuses on the German occupation of the (British) Channel Islands during WWII, a part of that historical time period that I knew little about.

It's also got a delightful heroine, thoughtful friendships, a simmering romance, and is basically a love letter to books as well.

Worth the read. 

I'm a huge fan of Rogue One and loved the novelization by Alexander Freed, so I was wary of picking this up and wanting it to meet the same standard of the movie and novelization. 

But thankfully, I was not disappointed. This is a highly readable book that works really well in YA form to explain how Jyn Erso came to be who she is.

I really appreciated the development of Jyn's character and her motivations. Her psychology makes so much sense, and Beth Revis did an amazing job of portraying Jyn's relationship with Saw and adding all this wonderful detail that fleshes out the world of Star Wars even more.

Highly recommend! Well worth the read. 

I'm a big fan of Holly Black (ever since her first novel Tithe), and I have thoroughly enjoyed this series, which was wrapped up so nicely in the last novel.

To be honest, the most impressive thing for me in this conclusion of the series is how much I realized I'd come to love and become attached to the secondary characters such as Jude's sister Taryn and her foster father Madoc.

The ending was almost a bit too neat, but there was plenty of intrigue and romance to make up for it. :)