Jonesy

Written by: Sam Humphries and Caitlin Rose Boyle

First line: Hey! Over here! It's me, Jonesy! Welcome to the worst day ever. 

Why you should read this book: Angry teen Jonesy has a secret power: she can make anyone fall in love with anything, unless that thing is her, which makes her even angrier. Plus, every time she uses her power on people, it backfires in ways that one should expect if one goes around willy-nilly telling people one dislikes to fall in love with random things. But not everyone sucks as much as Jonesy wants to think they do, and her shenanigans may very well help her find love in the long run. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: You're just a perfect kid with no flaws. 

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Stand Up, Yumi Chung!

Written by: Jessica Kim

First line: I should have known better than to think anyone would listen to me at the Korean beauty salon.

Why you should read this book: Yumi Chung's Korean immigrant parents will never understand her love of stand-up comedy, and they don't care that she isn't interested in earning an academic scholarship to a school where all the kids make fun of how she looks and how she smells; her mother sends her to cram school over her entire summer break, expecting her to improve her skills and score high enough to get free tuition. But shy, compliant Yumi has a secret now, because she accidentally started attending comedy camp with her favorite YouTube star when she was supposed to be studying in the library, and now everyone thinks she's a Japanese girl called Kay Nakamura who is pretty good at telling jokes, and she has to lie to absolutely everyone all summer. Will Yumi find a way to come clean before her cover's blown, will she launch her comedy career or bomb onstage, and will her parents ever understand her?

Why you shouldn't read this book: You missed out on the biggest opportunity of your childhood because you broke both legs.

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Camp Spirit

Written by: Axelle Lenoir

First line: The legend of Bear Lake tells the story of the Spirit of the Forest.

Why you should read this book: It's 1994 and disaffected young adult Elodie is still reeling from the death of Kurt Cobain, and to make matters worse, her mother is forcing her to work as a counselor at an overnight camp the summer before she starts college, and she already hates all the other counselors, especially "Little Miss Perfect: Catherine," but off she goes to have the worst summer ever. Her campers are all crazy redheads, she can't poop in a public toilet, and there's definitely something very strange going on at Bear Lake, including all the camp songs being mildly satanic, the very strange camp chief being very strange, and also there might be an actual monster in the woods. But it turns out that Little Miss Perfect Catherine isn't any of the things Elodie thinks she is, and the camp chief is not dangerous to humans, and whatever is lurking in the woods can be handled, one way or another. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: This is like Lumberjanes for big kids, but it's probably too sexy for little ones.

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Fearless: The Story of Daphne Caruana Galizia, Defender of Free Speech

Written by: Gattaldo

 

First line: In a house by the sea, on the island of Malta, lived a little girl names Daphne, together with her mom, dad, and three sisters.

Why you should read this book: A brief biography of writer, civil rights protestor, and free speech advocate Daphne Caruana Galizia, written by an old friend of Galizia’s after her murder in 2017 (Galizia’s murder is not part of the story, but is mentioned in a brief appendix at the end). The book tells of Galizia’s childhood, then transitions to her life as an activist, using the power of the pen to call out problems in her home country of Malta, even as she makes enemies and suffers for her beliefs. This is primarily a story about self-confidence and the power of one individual’s voice to work for positive change in the face of big problems and powerful enemies. 

 

Why you shouldn't read this book: It's intentionally vague about the issues that Galizia wrote and protested about as well as the retaliation she experienced, which perhaps makes it less interesting as a story about the struggle for human rights but more appropriate for first, second, and third graders who are ready for general concepts, but not the specifics details of corruption and intimidation that go hand in hand with the work of a defender of free speech.

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When We Say Black Lives Matter

Written by: Maxine Beneba Clarke

First line: Little one, when we say Black Lives Matter, we're saying Black people are wonderful-strong.

Why you should read this book: This is a lyrical, read-aloud story in which Black parents explain to a Black child what they mean when they say, “Black Lives Matter.” Some of the language and imagery discusses the violence, pain, and fear that has accompanied the struggle for equality and hindered the progress of the civil rights movement. More of the book focuses on the positive: strength, joy, solidarity, courage drawn from the past, and the narrator’s hope for a radiant future for their child. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: It's for very young people and seems best suited as a bedtime story or perhaps a jumping off point for a slightly older kids.

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The Book of Delights

Written by: Ross Gay

First line: One day last July, feeling delighted and compelled to both wonder about and share that delight, I decided that it might feel nice, even useful, to write a daily essay about something delightful.

Why you should read this book: In the tradition of daily affirmations and daily gratitudes, an award-winning poet seeks to catalog those fleeting moments of delight, which bring sometimes unspeakable joy to a moment, but, unrecorded, often vanish with the passage of time. But these delights (high fives from strangers, Botan rice candy, the reactions you observe in others when you board an airplane carrying a tomato seedling) are immortalized in a book that transcends its stated motive and also examines the intersection of these delights with experiences of racism, death, or similarly undelightful concepts. These mini-essays, 102 of them, allow the reader to dip into the book for just the right sized helping of delight to combat difficult times.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You don't believe in happiness.

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Plutona

Written by: Jeff Lemire, Emi Lenox, Jordie Bellaire

First line: ...another busy night in Metro City as the Bang Bang Gang tried to crash the mayor's Annual Harvest Gala.

Why you should read this book: Five children become entangled with each other and bound by a secret when they stumble upon the body of a fallen superhero in the woods. They have different ideas about how to handle this situations, and different motivations for their reasoning, and different stressors at home that guide their worldviews. A parallel story interweaves the life of the fallen superhero and how she came to be lying where these kids find her. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: I guess I didn't quite "get" the ending, which seemed to suggest that one child's behavior was worse than the others and deserving of terrible punishment, but then I saw that this is volume one of five, so perhaps there's more that I'm missing.

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Wombat

Written by: Christopher Cheng and Liz Duthie

First line: Far underground, where dirt and tree roots mesh, tunnels lead to a burrow.

Why you should read this book: A really charming and accessible biology text for young readers, with great information about wombat physiology and behavior, featuring wonderful illustrations and knit together with a narrative about a day in the life of one particular mother wombat. Wombat digs, eats, sleeps, challenges other wombats for territorial rights, escapes predators, and protects the baby in her marsupial pouch. Comforting, exciting, and informative, a story that straddles the adult's desire for order and the child's for adventure. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: You don't want to know about wombats or you might be offended by a brief description of a wombat's poop (it's square).

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Gris Grimly's Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus

Written by: Mary Shelley and Gris Grimly

First line: You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.

Why you should read this book: Unquestionably one of the finest (if not the best) graphic novel adaptations of a classic work of literature I've ever had the pleasure of devouring, and not only because Grimly does an excellent job of preserving the original text while judiciously cutting bits that don't serve his work and won't be missed. With Victor and Elizabeth drawn as OG gothic punks (although this does highlight the fact that Victor is also, at heart, the OG emo kid), the monster looming more physically monstrous than in any other iteration (making his depiction somehow even more sympathetically pathetic), and the whole thing being set in a world that appears simultaneously pastoral and post-apocalyptic, naturalistic and steampunk-infused, this book seems to cut to the heart meat of the tale while also reviving its antique heartbeat for a modern audience. As always, this is a story about the price of being an irresponsible white guy with more money than common sense who isn't accountable to anyone and kind of gets away with murder until he horrifyingly doesn't.

Why you shouldn't read this book: I have to admit that I grabbed it off the shelf without really looking at what I was getting, because I just saw the G G of the author's name and my brain assumed it was a book from a completely different author whose title also contains the initials G G and which also has a powerful steampunk aesthetic (God bless the Foglios, my absolutely favorite webcomic creators of all time, but they simply haven't got the control/love of darkness needed for this undertaking).

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