Kiki MacAdoo and the Graveyard Ballerinas
Food Group: Middle Grade
Flavor: Contemporary fantasy
Key Ingredients: Sister love/friendship, a graveyard variety of spookiness, a Giselle-inspired ghost story, and a powerful counteraction to our culture's obsession with romance
Cookie Rating: 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪
Taste Test: You can check out Kiki MacAdoo and the Graveyard Ballerinas on Bookshop (support independent bookstores!), Amazon, or read my full review on Goodreads!
Stories That Sing
Food Group: Flash Fiction Anthology
Flavor(s): Fantasy, scifi, humor, thriller, mystery
Key Ingredients: Song-inspired stories, disarming plot twists, spot-on humor, and off-the-walls imagination
Cookie Rating: 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪
Chef's Note: My short story "Siege of the Dead" - involving clueless zombies, a dangerous desert, and Febreze - is featured in this anthology!
Den
Food Group: Young Adult
Flavor(s): Contemporary, Biblical retelling, suspense
Key Ingredients: Fantastic platonic relationships, murder mystery, poignant insight into the dangers and delights of social media, thoughtful questions of faith in the midst of a hostile society, and a bold but tactful approach to heavy subjects
Sentences to Savor:
"Some people need space, even from those they love the most...Some birds need to stay in a cage before they feel free to fly again."
Allergy Warning: Suicide attempts and mentions, topics of mental health, racism, religious intolerance, and bullying
Cookie Rating: 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪
Taste Test: You can check out Den on Bookshop (support independent bookstores!), Amazon, or read my full review on Goodreads!
Mary Underwater
Food Group: Upper Middle Grade
Flavor: Contemporary
Key Ingredients: STEM girl, kick-butt banter, healthy friendships, first crushes that genuinely care about each other, a tactful touch on difficult topics, and riptide-fast chapters
Allergy Warning: Domestic violence and abuse, mentions of an affair
Cookie Rating: 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪 🍪
Taste Test: You can check out Mary Underwater 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. You can learn more about gastroparesis by reading my blog post on Gastroparesis Awareness Month.
Kristiana Sfirlea is the author of the spookily hilarious MG fantasy novel, Legend of the Storm Sneezer. Her flash fiction, featuring clueless zombies, undercover werewolves, and grumpy ghosts, has been published by Havok, and her second MG novel, pitched as Five Nights at Freddy’s meets Inception for kids, is contracted and in the works. Kristiana dreams of the day she can run her own mobile bookstore. Or haunted house attraction. Or a haunted bookmobile! (And this is precisely why writers should never become Uber drivers.) She loves Jesus, her family, and imaginary life with her characters.