Young Adult
Book 56 of 52: Murder, She Wrote: By the Time You Read This I’ll be Gone by Stephanie Kuehn
My exploration of the Murder, She Wrote universe continues! Did you know there’s now a YA branch of the Jessica Fletcher world? I didn’t either By the Time You Read This I’ll be Gone by Stephanie Huehn, the first entry into a series of books about Fletcher’s great great grand niece, dropped last month. It’s an interesting endeavor.
The protagonist here is Beatrice Fletcher, a high school student and anonymous contributor to TrueMaine, a true crime blog. This particular mystery starts when her friend Jackson, who has been struggling with his mental health, disappears. He’s not the only child of Cabot Cove’s upper crust to have gone missing either. Are these disappearances connected? Is the local elite boarding school involved? What about an all powerful homeowner’s association that has advocated for more surveillance to keep their residents “safe”? And is it all possibly tied an old cold case involving a mayor’s daughter, one of the few crimes the town’s world-famous mystery writer/sleuth has not been able to solve?
Unlike the adult Murder, She Wrote novels, this is not a cozy murder mystery. By The Time You Read This I’ll Be Gone addresses issues like child abuse, grief, addiction, economic inequality, the […]
Book 27 of 52: None of the Above by I.W. Gregorio
None of the Above by I.W. Gregorio was not chosen by me, per se. It’s on the Vandegrift High School Banned Book Club reading list. The group formed in response to the Leander Independent School District banning a whole bunch of books for ridiculous reasons. These students wanted to read the books and discuss them anyway.
None of the Above was yanked by the school district because it features “sensitive topics” and “concepts of sex and anatomy,” according to the Washington Post.
Yes, this book does such horrible things as recognizing that 18 year old ADULTS, who in Texas can buy assault rifles, might have sex. It’s also cognizant of the very real fact that gender is not a pink/blue binary. The protagonist here is track star and homecoming queen Kristin Lattimer. After experiencing incredible pain when having sex, she’s diagnosed as intersex. In Kristin’s case, she has Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS), which means she looks traditionally feminine, but has male chromosomes. That means no uterus, a short vagina and two very small gonads.
How didn’t she know, you might ask? Her mother died of cervical cancer when Kristin was young, and she was hesitant to talk to her father about why […]