Middle Grade
Gooseberry by Robin Gow
There’s a lot twelve-year-old B doesn’t know—like what their new name should be after coming out as nonbinary. Or what it would feel like to finally feel at home after moving around to different foster families for years. But there’s one thing B does know: they want to be a dog trainer when they grow up. And when they meet Gooseberry—a feisty stray dog who…
Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, tender and edgy,this inventive romance asks what it means to be truly happy.
Tegan Masters is dead.
She’s sixteen and she’s dead and she’s standing in the parking lot of the Marybelle Motor Lodge, the single most depressing motel in all of New Jersey and the place where Tegan spent what she remembers as the worst weekend of her life.
Tegan isn’t particularly happy about this. At all.
In the front office, she meets Zelda, an annoyingly cute teen angel with a snarky sense of humour and an epic set of wings. According to Zelda, Tegan is in heaven, where every person inhabits an exact replica of their happiest memory.
But reconciling with her past, might just lead Tegan, and Zelda, to a happily-ever-afterlife …
If you like: The Good Place, sapphic strangers-to-sort-of-rivals-to-friends-to-lovers, teenage coming of age, quirky characters, figuring out what it means to be happy
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫/5
Synopsis
Tegan Masters is dead.
She’s sixteen and she’s dead and she’s standing in the parking lot of the Marybelle Motor Lodge, the single most depressing motel in all of New Jersey and the place where Tegan spent what she remembers as the worst weekend of her life.
In the front office, she meets Zelda, a cute and sarcastic girl Tegan’s age who is, in fact, an angel (wings and all). According to Zelda, Tegan is officially in heaven, where every person inhabits an exact replica of their happiest memory. For Tegan, Zelda insists, that place is the Marybelle—creepy minigolf course, revolting breakfast buffet, broken TV, and all.
Tegan has a few complaints about this.
As Zelda takes Tegan on a whirlwind tour through Tegan’s past to help her understand what mattered most to her in life, the stakes couldn’t be higher. If Zelda fails to convince Tegan that the Marybelle was the site of Tegan's perfect moment, both girls face eternal consequences too dire to consider. But if she succeeds…they just might get their happily-ever-afterlife.
Content warnings
Death (from a car accident, but it's not described in detail)
Divorce
Grief
Abandonment
Review
Thank you to Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for a review! 😇🪽😵
Ok, wow. Not gonna lie, but this legit moved me, like, I was reading this on the bus trying to hold back tears because I didn't want to cry in public.
There was such a good balance of humour and heart; while some of the characters can be silly, this book is not afraid to confront real issues and lean into the characters' emotional moments. Seriously, this got heavier than I had expected.
I loved how Tegan's narrative arc was handled, like the set-up and her journey with Zelda through her memories leading up to the climax, the pacing and Tegan's emotional journey, everything was so well-executed and felt so realistic. Everything leading up to Tegan's revelation culminates in, well, the Perfect Moment.
Tegan and Zelda's relationship was so sweet and charming, like their dynamic is so fun to read. I loved their banter, which might come across to some as too childish or immature (they call each other stuff like buttface and dickcheese) but I honestly found it so endearing. (Also, I'm in no position to talk; I'm a legal adult and the way I talk IRL is Worse.)
The setting and the world-building reminds me of The Good Place, with the bureaucratic Upper Management, the not-so-perfect afterlife and the cast of quirky characters. But while The Good Place was religiously secular, this afterlife is (surprisingly) Christian-coded, with concepts of Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and capital-G God. Not gonna lie, it kind of bugged me a little to assume that everyone's afterlife would be a Christian one, but as a setting/premise it does work for the story, so I'll let it pass.
All in all, I definitely recommend giving this a read, it will warm your heart and move you to tears and make you laugh. Maybe even all at the same time. 🫶
“When Marlowe gets a heart transplant and a second chance at life, all she wants is to thank her donor’s family. Maybe then she can move on. Maybe then she’ll discover who she is if she’s no longer The Dying Girl.
But with a little brother who dresses like every day is Halloween, a vegan warrior for a mother and an all-out war with the hot butcher’s apprentice next door, Marlowe’s life is already pretty complicated. And her second chance is about to take an unexpected turn…”
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My thoughts:
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So I started to read this book yesterday and I finished it just like 10 minutes ago and just wow. It may be one of the best contemporary young adult books I’ve read in a while. The hype was with other words so real. It wasn’t as sad as you would think with a plot like that, more hopeful and quite humorous actually. I really liked Marlowe as a character and her relations with her family and others around her. The difficulties she faced and learned from. I really liked her and found myself relate to her awkwardness many times. I have had Shivaun Plozza’s debut novel, Frankie, laying around at home for some time and now I really want to bite into it too. Because I really look forward to read more from this author. (4/5⭐️)
I have definitely been behind in cross posting photos here from my personal Instagram! Here are some upcoming books that are coming out this fall - some that I picked up at BookExpo/BookCon and some I picked up elsewhere - that I think you might not know about!
The Library of Fates by Aditi Khorana
The Girl with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke
Odd and True by Cat Winters
The Last Namsara by Kristen Ciccarelli
Mask of Shadows by Linsey Miller
Frankie by Shivaun Plozza
All the Wind in the World by Samantha Mabry
You Bring the Distant Near by Mitali Perkins
Lucky in Love by Kasie West
In the future, these will be separate posts so I can talk about the books a little bit, but since I’m catching up, I’m bunching them all together for now.
Adult Fiction
Translator and winner of Columbia’s Henfield Prize Mariam Rahmani‘s LIQUID, pitched as a subversion of the marriage plot novel for fans of Paul Beatty, set in Los Angeles and Tehran, in which an early 30s queer Muslim adjunct professor sets out to marry rich, resolving to suffer through 100 dates in a single summer, to Evan Hansen-Bundy at Algonquin, in a pre-empt, by Danielle…
