The Elephant's Girl
Food Group: Middle Grade
Flavor: Magical realism
Key Ingredients: Fantastic family and platonic relationships, marvelous mystery, a sweet ghost, elephants, homeschool representation, and character complexities
Cookie Rating: 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪
Taste Test: You can check out The Elephant's Girl on Bookshop (support independent bookstores!), Amazon, or read my full review on Goodreads!
The Story Hunter
Food Group: Young Adult
Flavor(s): High fantasy, Christian
Key Ingredients: Fast-paced plot, crazy-endearing characters, beautiful allegories of faith, and broken stereotypes
Sentences to Savor:
"A year passed...I probably would have insisted on being in the thick of the fighting. I would have balked at the idea of being kept out of it, left behind, assigned to protect and guard rather than charge ahead.
But now I've lost enough that I just want everyone to get across the city in one piece. If that meant I couldn't be in the middle of the action, that was fine as a fluff-hopper."
Allergy Warning: The author deals (very tactfully) with issues of sexual assault and abuse.
Cookie Rating: 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪
Taste Test: You can check out The Story Hunter on Bookshop (support independent bookstores!), Amazon, or read my full review on Goodreads!
The Witches of Willow Cove
Food Group: Upper Middle Grade
Flavor: Contemporary fantasy
Key Ingredients: AMAZING platonic relationships, strong, diverse friendships, fresh approach to magic, and a complex/intriguing villain
Cookie Rating: 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪
Taste Test: You can check out The Witches of Willow Cove on Bookshop (support independent bookstores!), Amazon, or read my full review on Goodreads!
Fade to White
Food Group: Young Adult
Flavor(s): Contemporary, (slight) magical realism, Christian
Key Ingredients: The power of compassion, character growth, mental health advocacy, hopeful endings, faith in God
Cookie Rating: 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪
Allergy Warning: Mentions of suicide and self-harm. Brief mentions of substance abuse. The author (very tactfully) deals with issues of mental health.
Taste Test: You can check out Fade to White on Bookshop (support independent bookstores!), Amazon, or read my full review on Goodreads!
Why "Bite-Size" Book Reviews?
These "bite-size" book reviews are a fun way for me to promote authors and provide short, tasty reviews for readers, but they're also a way for me to raise awareness for a debilitating digestive disease called gastroparesis.
People with gastroparesis have paralyzed stomachs. Severe cases (like myself) can only eat a few bites of food at a time, so we have to make those bites count! I hope these
"bite-size" book reviews help feed your mind's appetite in the same way.
Learn more about gastroparesis by reading my blog post on Gastroparesis Awareness Month or by visiting G-PACT (the Gastroparesis Patient Association for Cures and Treatments).