 Thanks to partners NetGalley and Wednesday Books for the digital ARC of Emma Lord’s The Getaway List. The book will be published on Tuesday!
The Getaway List is Emma Lord’s fifth YA book—I’ve read all five, and I love every single one. Lord has a knack for creating characters who are flawed and real, dealing with difficult transitions in incredibly imperfect—but understandable—ways, and those qualities are all present in this newest novel. It focuses on an often difficult stage: the time right after graduation, when everything is in transition. On page one, Riley Larson is in the midst of the graduation ceremony, in a unique position: she’s the only person in her high school to have been rejected by all ten colleges to which she applied. And now? She’s not really sure what she’s going to do. Riley’s single mom has the plan that she always has for Riley. She’s going to keep her busy, keep her focused, keep her from wandering. So, Riley should get a job and take community college classes until she has a different, mom-approved plan. But Riley isn’t so sure that’s what she wants. After some mild trouble a few years back, Riley’s mother signed her up for a varied and never-ending array of extracurricular activities, leaving her no time just to be . . . or to be with her best friend, Tom. Tom has been Riley’s best friend since they were kids, when their mothers met at an event for single moms and sort of forced the issue of their friendship. But then, that friendship became deep and sincere, a core relationship for each of them, even after Tom and his mother moved to New York City and that friendship was maintained through phone calls and facetime and texting. Since the move, Riley has not been able to see Tom in person, and now seems like the perfect chance for Riley to go to New York (something she’s always wanted to do) and see her best friend. Her mom is REALLY opposed, but Riley is 18, and she makes the choice—unusual for her—to defy her mother and go anyway. That’s the moment this book really begins. Riley reunites with Tom, who is the same guy she’s always known. Sort of. He’s taller and even more handsome. More important, she realizes, he’s become shy and a bit solitary. Back home, Tom had always been the extroverted, friendly glue that held together a bevy of friend groups, but in New York, he’s a loner. So, Riley extends her quick, weekend trip to a longer stay, determined to set up a web of friendships that will buoy Tom even when she returns home. That decision—the decision to stay—sets up a conflict with Riley’s mom and endless possibilities. Oh, friends, I loved this book so much. I teach seniors, so I see how the pressure to do all the things, all the time, can take its toll on students, who are supposed to know exactly who they want to be and exactly what they’re doing for the rest of their adult lives. It’s a lot. Lord deals with that stress so beautifully with Riley, who has been resentful since her mom’s mission began but now finally has the time to stop and really consider what it has meant for her. Riley loves writing, loves creating, loves being around people and building deep friendships and putting together adventures big and small, but she hasn’t had the time to do any of those things because she’s been so busy doing . . . busy things. Now, she has the strong support of Tom again and the leisure time to realize just how much she missed having leisure time. Of course, there are multiple threads that keep this book moving, including the getaway list of the title, which is the list of adventures that Riley and Tom vowed to take the next time they saw each other. There’s also a fantasy book series that they both love, new friends in New York and old friends who move there, too, and an absolutely lovely friends-to-lovers romance that captured my heart. It’s the self-discovery, though, that resonated most for me, that made me cheer for Riley (and for Tom, and for their other friends who are in the same stage of life). It’s the way her relationship with her mother isn’t dismissed but is instead reshaped and reconsidered now that Riley’s out of school (wow, that story hit hard, since I have a high-school junior at home!). It’s the beautiful portrait of beautiful, flawed people who are just beginning their lives and who are making the inevitable, necessary mistakes that it takes to figure out who they are. I can’t recommend The Getaway List enough.
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 Thanks to partners NetGalley and Delacorte Press for the digital ARC of Kristy Boyce’s Dungeons and Drama. The book will be published on Tuesday!
Kristy Boyce’s Dungeons and Drama is a fantastic YA romance, a fake dating story, and a tribute to all things D&D and musical theater. After an ill-conceived (and illegal) trip with her best friend Hoshiko to see Waitress—a trip that involved “borrowing” her mom’s car and driving hours away without a license—Riley is sentenced to a life without extracurriculars, working in her dad’s gaming store every day after school. This punishment is extreme: Riley and her dad haven’t had much of a relationship since her parents’ divorce, she hates gaming, and her extracurriculars are the center of her world. But it’s what she has to do if she wants to be released from her banishment from society in time for the musical, for which she is determined to earn a position as student director. At first, her time at the story confirms all of her fears: she doesn’t understand gaming, the other employee (Nathan) is a jerk, and her relationship with her father is as distant as ever. Her situation begins to change when an awkward run-in with her ex and his new girlfriend leads her to proclaim that she’s also in a relationship . . . with Nathan. What ensues is a quid pro quo with Nathan: he’ll pretend to be her boyfriend to save face with her ex, and she’ll act like she’s head over heels for him as a way to attract his crush, a fellow D&Der who only wants what she can’t have. Soon, those fake feelings begin to feel more real, at least for Riley. I enjoyed so much about Boyce’s world here: she describes the passion of devotees everywhere, finding the commonalities between the worlds of gaming and musical theater as Riley performs her way through a D&D campaign as a bard and Nathan and his friends pitch in to help Riley and Hoshiko save the musical (which the school is trying to cancel). Riley is also working on her relationship with her father, and I appreciated the way each comes to appreciate the other’s passion. As both a big fan of musical theater and the mother of a devoted D&D player, it was fun to see the creativity and passion of both realms represented here.  "Many changes that do profoundly shape the world are not rare, exciting or headline-grabbing. They are persistent things that happen day by day and year by year until decades pass and the world has been altered beyond recognition. . . . My job is not to do original studies, or to make scientific breakthroughs. It's to undersatnd what we already know. Or could know if we studied the information we have properly" (5).
"Optimism is seeing challenges as opportunities to make progress; it's having the confidence that there are things we can do to make a difference. We can shape the future, and we can build a great one if we want to" (9). Thanks so much to Little, Brown Spark for the advanced copy of Hannah Ritchie's Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. This was a revelatory book for me, one that offers an important, optimistic view of the fight against climate change and toward sustainability. Ritchie's viewpoint is not, as she clarifies, one of "complacent optimism." Instead, she advocates for "conditional optimism," the idea that—while the situation facing our civilization is incredibly serious—there has been progress toward a sustainable planet, and there's hope for continued progress in the future. The book's chapters, after the introduction laying out her viewpoint, each take on a different issue (air pollution, climate change, deforestation, food, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics, and overfishing). In each chapter, Ritchie begins with a section "How we got to now," updates "where we are today," and then offers recommendations about what we can do to build on any progress that has been made. She also includes a section on the areas we often worry about that don't make all that much of a difference, systemically. What I loved most about this book is how empowering it is. She never shies away from acknowledging the seriousness of each problem she considers, but she also discusses the ways that false or confusing media narratives have driven us to misunderstand the implications of some statistics (or the statistics themselves). Ritchie never makes light of how difficult some of the changes she recommends will be, but they are eminently realistic. This was just the book I needed to start off the year. I absolutely loved it.  Many thanks to Celadon Books for the ARC of Alex Michaelides's The Fury, which will be out on January 16.
The book begins with a murder on an isolated island in Greece, a story told by a screenwriter named Elliot Chase, and a group of people bound by the most tenuous of threads—their allegiance to ex-movie star Lana Farrar. Chase peels back his story in layers, gradually revealing its origins in an unplanned meeting with Lana at a party, delving into her childhood and the ways it reflected his own, and circling around the answers to the questions about the murder: who is the victim? who is the murderer? This was a fast read for me, and while it didn't bring about the same shock I felt during the twists and turns of The Silent Patient, it was still a compelling enough read. |
AuthorI'm Jen Moyers, co-host of the Unabridged Podcast and an English teacher. Archives
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