Jessica Woodbury

It is a little weird to start the "oh hey books are coming out" train after it slows down so much at the end of the year. But if the extremely anecdotal evidence of my galley stacks are to be believed, January is going to be a very

It is that time of year when everyone wants to cozy up with a book. Not just cozy up, but read in its entirety. There is time to read and we want to use it. I am not immune from this, even though I read much more than the average

So much for always sending on Tuesdays! It's ok. You do not need me to tell you what a long and strange year it's been, but it's been so long and strange that I honestly thought some of these books came out a few

I quit a lot of books. Usually I quit them very early but sometimes I quit when I'm a few chapters or even 100 pages in. The ones where I make it further have been happening more lately, where it starts out interesting enough to grab me but

I thought I might be able to convince the kids to give you some middle grade recommendations but no such luck. Maybe next year. As for me, I have my Honorable Mentions list for you, which is basically the catch-all list for all the things that are also Best but

Continuing with my Best lists (though if I can swing it I am going to try to get a little detour and have the kids recommend books next week, fingers crossed) and today we have the genre I read the most, which of course also means it's the

It always feels like Best of the Year time creeps up on me. Even the years when I am bursting to share my lists. This year it extra crept up on me because my sense of linear time is shot. My lists are always too long and this year is

I only have one more new release to tell you about before the end of the year so I realized it's time to start my Best of the Year lists. This is always an enjoyable task, but also a bittersweet one, since inevitably there were books I enjoyed

I used to have very long reading slumps. Once I had one that lasted nearly a year. Like a lot of people I had one at the beginning of the pandemic that went for a few months. For me, a reading slump doesn't mean I don't

Recently I was reading a book with a protagonist who was clearly coded to be neurodivergent. I say "coded" because this character had no formal diagnosis of anything, though the signals clearly pointed to a form of Autism. On the one hand, it is good to see neurodivergent