This focuses a lot on schools/education, but also discusses the history and current state of each of the suburbs featured. Lots in this book to be frustrated and upset about.

Middle grade historical fiction set at Bletchley Park during WWII. Lizzie is a clever girl who escapes her guardian who is supposed to take her from London to her grandmother in Cleveland. She joins her brother, a code breaker, at Bletchley Park and investigates their mothers disappearance.

Book 4 in fun middle grade graphic novel series. Gotta love a book full of cats!

Good start to new mystery series. Vandy is a former cop and now a PI. She is tough and damaged.

I didn't like the main character, which would be fine if that was the author's intention, but I think he was meant to be sympathetic. Instead he came across as wooden and arrogant. The mystery was ok but the narrative structure didnt work for me.

Cozy evening reading with the kitty 😻

Fun middle grade mystery. 2 siblings + 2 friends + 1 mischievous grandpa try to find Al Capone's treasure but find current crimes instead.

Not my favorite by this author but still really good.

Pretty good. Easy read.

This would probably be really interesting for someone who wants to know about the technology and people involved in the invention of motion pictures. I was more interested in the story of the disappearance of Louis le Prince and his wife's accusation that Thomas Edison murdered him. That turned out to be a small part of the story.

Great cover, boring book. I would have bailed but it's for book club.

This was ok but I didn't love it.

Light pick. Started out clever. The paranormal aspect didn't quite work with the rest of the story, in my opinion. If the pace were faster and the length a little shorter I might have enjoyed it more.

I like how suspenseful and fast-paced this is. Although I was suspicious of certain characters, I didn't see the twists coming. I'm just not sure how I feel about how victims of traumatic loss and violent crime are portrayed in it (don't want to say more and spoil it)

Kind of boring. No big reveals or anything. No insight into how these people think - how they justify murder instead of divorce or how they act like a normal married couple going to marriage counseling when obviously what's wrong with their marriage is that they committed murder to make it happen!

Good mystery with a few twists (that I suspected were coming).

Good teen mystery. If you liked Johnson's Truly Devious series, you'll also like this. This is a standalone with a teen solving a disappearance in the current time paired with historical story happening in the same location.

I tried reading this a few years ago and bailed, which was the right decision. I just read it again for book club and did not like it. The 1st half was very boring and nothing really happened. Way too much time was spent explaining the main character's thoughts and feelings.

A middle grade book about grief and family, disguised as a murder mystery, that manages to have a mostly light tone in spite of the tough topic. Charming characters, including a parrot

This teen thriller is full of twists and more twists! Maybe too many, but I liked it.

I liked the plot/mystery and Juliette's timeline/pov, but otherwise the execution was lacking. The main 2 characters in the other timeline were very flat and not distinct from each other. And some of the discoveries were conveniently made possible by AI software.

Book 2 in the fun middle grade mystery series about the eccentric Swift family.

This is a necessary expose, but I didn't care for the writing style. But it is clear that Beatrice Sparks, author of Go Ask Alice, was a pathological liar and a terrible person. What she did in writing Jay's Journal (a book I hadn't heard of) is reprehensible. Her books should not be in print any longer, but publishers are still making money off them.

Very good. Also tragic.

Somehow, I've never read anything by Edith Wharton, so I started with this short novel. I know that certain topics could not be directly talked about at the time, but I sometimes get frustrated with older books because I don't pick up on some things that I'm supposed to be inferring. The ending was kind of a letdown, but could have had a worse outcome. But overall I liked it.

I liked this. It was hard to see Molly get used by all these people while completely misunderstanding what they were doing. Good ending.

This was good. Lots of great characters. A little preachy but I agree with the point of view so it didn't bother me and felt a little inspiring.

I mostly enjoyed this audiobook. The PTA shenanigans were fun. The characters and their relationships were good. I liked the main character but she was kind of slow connecting the dots. I thought the narrator was great, but I can see how some of the voices might be irritating. Some of the details near the end made me want to scream “that's not how things work!“

Memoir about the author's family's battles with mental illness. Important story to shine a light on the need for better treatment for mental illness.

Loved this. Several elderly folks who all have some slightly (or seriously) shady secrets join a social club at the neighborhood community center and make some friends, help their middle-aged director with her bad marriage, and help a teenaged single father get his life sorted..

Teen suspense/thriller, sequel to The Girls I've Been. Good plot, but the author narrated the audiobook and was not good at it. All the PoVs sounded the same and were all in 1st person so it was difficult to keep them straight. She also badly overacted the narration.

Nonfiction about a jewel thief who operated in Dallas in the 1950s-1960s and was never caught. It's also an interesting history of Dallas society at the time.

This was entertaining and somewhat clever. I'll probably read the next in the series.

Wow! Kariko's story is amazing. She was born in communist Hungary, became a biologist, moved to the U.S. in the 80s, toiled in obscurity for years, got demoted and fired when she couldn't obtain funding for her research, then took a job at BioNtech, and then her work became critical for the development of the COVID-19 vaccine!

Some interesting themes, but these themes and the characters were not developed enough.

History of MLMs in the U.S., including the histories of several companies and how they continue to operate their shady businesses thanks to their political connections.

Nonfiction for middle grade/teen about young women working at Bletchley Park during WWII.

I'm in the minority in not liking this book much. I had no interest in reading it, but my book club picked it. I'm not into video games and don't understand how games are made, so I didn't like those parts, and I just didn't care about the characters.

Middle grade graphic novel about Vega, an introvert who just moved to a new city and has no friends so her dads send her to summer camp, but something is not quite right at this camp.

I really liked this historical novel about a young American woman living in Saigon during the early 1960s because of her husband's job.

This was good, but not as good as I expected, given all the hype it's gotten. Character development was good and I liked how all the different threads of the plot were woven together but I found the ending somewhat unsatisfactory, especially the lack of resolution for some of the threads.

This was interesting in many ways: the Astor family is legendary in American history and the rise and fall of a wealthy dynasty is full of drama. But sometimes it was repetitive and there were some irrelevant tangents.

Dispels many myths about historical families and some myths about how the "decline" of families is the cause of current problems. Originally published in the 90s and updated prologue and epilogue in 2016, so all the "current" (90s) statistics are out of date. Unfortunately some of the same things are still problems 30 years later. Much has changed even since the 2016 updates.

I enjoy this series. This is book 4, but even though it is the Harbinder Kaur series, she is not the main focus. Similar vibes to Thursday Murder Club series, although only one character is elderly.

Almost 30 hours on audio! Long, dry, academic, but also interesting to learn about the trends, mistakes, and attitudes regarding drug use and law enforcement over the decades, specifically in middle class white suburbs.

Good, but not my favorite by this author. It's a dual timeline but more time is spent in the contemporary one, and I prefer historical.

#botm arrived today! I've been hearing lots of hype about both of these, so I hope they live up to it. They're also both long (All the Colors is almost 600 pages!).

I really liked this teen mystery set in LA in 1932. A young Chinese-American actress is murdered and her friends have to find her killer.

Good mystery; 1st in series.

Three actresses who played or will play Lady Detective Dahlia Lively in film/tv adaptations of the Golden Age mystery series attend a fan convention at the manor house of the late author of the series. Murders happen, of course, and the actresses have to solve the mystery.

Teen mystery; sequel to Missing Clarissa. Mattie asks Cam and Blair to help them find out if the girl who has returned home is really their missing sister Lola. Cam and Blair will absolutely not make a podcast this time after it got them in so much trouble last time. But they still manage to find trouble while solving the mystery. The best part of the book is the characters and their relationships.