All Aboard the ARC: Flower Crowns and Fearsome Things by Amanda Lovelace

Review

***Note: I received a free digital review copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.***

In her newest standalone collection of poetry, Amanda Lovelace makes Persephone of Greek mythology her muse, exploring through her the dualities inherent in femininity as well as the fragmented self that we must all contend with—the self we are with others and the self we are when we’re alone, and the result is nothing short of brilliant.

…Lovelace makes Persephone of Greek mythology her muse, exploring through her the dualities inherent in femininity as well as the fragmented self that we must all contend with—the self we are with others and the self we are when we’re alone, and the result is nothing short of brilliant.

Also tackled herein is the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways it has changed and remade us, from the reasons why wearing a mask is an act of love and respect but also an act of defiance to telling her beloved how close she’ll be able to come to them when the world stops ending. God, that phrase is one I can’t stop turning over and over in my mind. When the world stops ending, when the world stops ending, when the world stops ending….Because isn’t that how it feels right now? As if every day is being lived in survival mode with no end in sight? Thank God we still have poetry to get us through.

Because isn’t that how it feels right now? As if every day is being lived in survival mode with no end in sight? Thank God we still have poetry to get us through.

All in all, Flower Crowns and Fearsome Things is a stellar collection sure to please new readers of Lovelace’s work as well as her longtime fans. The gorgeous illustrations by Janaina Medeiros complement Lovelace’s words perfectly, giving them more depth and clarity. I feel safe in saying this is a title I’ll be hand-selling to my customers who enjoy poetry.

Flower Crowns and Fearsome Things is due to be released on October 5th, 2021 by Andrews McMeel Publishing and is now available to preorder wherever books are sold.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

All Aboard the ARC: Dad Bakes by Katie Yamasaki

Review

***Note: I received a free digital review copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.***

Katie Yamasaki has gifted us with a heartwarming story about a devoted father, his beloved daughter, and the delightful activities they enjoy doing together. It’s evident that Yamasaki’s work as a muralist informs and influences her work as a picture book author and illustrator. Her uncluttered, dynamic, and vibrant images leap off the page and drive the narrative forward from the father’s early morning shift at the bakery before the sun rises to the time in late evening when he finally gets to rest.

Dad Bakes is due to be released on September 28th, 2021 by Norton Young Readers and is now available to preorder wherever books are sold.

Book Review: How to Be You by Jeffrey Marsh

*How to Be You: Stop Trying to Be Someone Else and Start Living Your Life* by Jeffrey Marsh

I have followed Jeffrey Marsh on Twitter for years. Before I found a therapist, before I got on medication for my anxiety and depression, their videos helped me to be able to take a breath and center myself so I could get through the day. I’m sure I’m not the only person whose life has been impacted by them in this way, but I will forever be grateful for their calm voice affirming my place in the world over and over again until I started to believe it for myself.

How to Be You is the self-love manifesto that everyone in the world needs to read, but it is especially essential for those of us in the LGBTQ+ community. We live in a world that is often hostile to us, a world that bullies, beats, threatens, harasses, disenfranchises, and belittles us to the point of fracture, to the point where our very existence is seen as a threat to the standing order. Jeffrey’s assertion throughout their book is that it is our choice whether or not we are going to capitulate to the people who would make us smaller. We can be expansive or we can shrink. We can grow and learn and change and accept ourselves in all of our glorious complexity or we can draw lines of demarcation around ourselves and always exist as less than our true selves.

We can be expansive or we can shrink. We can grow and learn and change and accept ourselves in all of our glorious complexity or we can draw lines of demarcation around ourselves and always exist as less than our true selves.

I’m not going to lie, a lot of the self-help material circulating in the world today is worthless pablum at best and an avaricious money-grabbing scheme at worst, but Jeffrey Marsh is the real deal. Their work comes from a deep place of understanding what it feels like to be marginalized and maligned for being queer, and I am so grateful for their existence. I am grateful for this book’s existence. Thank you, Jeffrey. A thousand times, thank you.

Favorite Quotes from How to Be You

Confidence comes naturally if trust is present.

Aren’t you lucky that you get this life, this chance, to learn to set aside the yuck and muck of other people’s sometimes nasty words and do your best to live your life as fully as you know how?

Even if it seems like the whole world is against you, you’ve got to trust yourself. Even if no one else will honor you, you must honor what your truth is in any given moment.

Beginning to see yourself as worthy and trustworthy is the start of something beautiful. Why? Because you can finally let go. You don’t need to spend all your time trying not to be too much. You can relax. You can feel safe. You deserve that. Everyone deserves that.

Trusting yourself is the way to claim the life you’ve always been waiting for.

Trust your own self-examination more than you automatically believe someone else’s pronouncement.

Worry and hate are habits, and so are love and forgiveness.

Whatever your imagined crimes were in the past, they are not worth ruining your today for. You deserve to feel free. You deserve to be let off the hook.

Bonus: Jeffrey Marsh’s TedTalk

From the Archives: How We Fight For Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones

**Book Review: How We Fight For Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones**

***Note: This review was originally posted to my Goodreads account in October of 2019.***

Everyone has a lie we’re quietly waiting to believe.

With startling economy of language, Saeed Jones tells his story with such precision that after turning the last page you feel as if you’ve been borrowing his skin.

If you read one book this year, let this be it. Please.

From the Archives: I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown

***Note: I originally read this book in June of 2020. The review posted here may be slightly altered from its original version and was first posted on my Goodreads account.***

Review

Austin Channing Brown does a superb job of deconstructing the myth of American progress toward racial equality, tracing the evolution of white supremacy from chattel slavery to Jim Crow and further on down the line to our current world characterized by police violence against Black people and their communities, and the prison industrial complex that warehouses Black people with outsized sentences for non-violent offenses in a modern-day proxy to slavery.

I loved her examples of dealing with—on an everyday basis—well-meaning white people whose ingrained racism and belief in their own goodness prevent them from taking responsibility for their racist microagressive behavior. Brown shows us that racism isn’t a problem that exists only at Klan rallies—it is perpetuated by millions of white people who have deluded themselves into thinking they live in a post-racial society where they get all the clout tokens for “having Black friends” while doing none of the work involved in anti-racist activism.

Brown shows us that racism isn’t a problem that exists only at Klan rallies—it is perpetuated by millions of white people who have deluded themselves into thinking they live in a post-racial society where they get all the clout tokens for “having Black friends” while doing none of the work involved in anti-racist activism.

The work of delegitimizing and dissolving white supremacy is a job that can’t happen unless white people (all white people) acknowledge their complicity in reinforcing racist norms and do their part to effect real change. This is a book every white person needs to read.

Favorite Quotes with Commentary

Rather than dwell on individuals, I speak about the system. About white boardrooms and white leadership teams. About white culture and the organization’s habit of hiring people who perpetuate that culture rather than diversify it. But the white consensus doesn’t want me to point out these things.

So many white people in positions of power like to play the numbers game when it comes to propagating their organization’s own racial diversity. “We can’t be racist because we are *exceeding* EEOC guidelines in hiring racial minorities.” “We hire Black people to work in every department within our organization, so therefore we are committed to equality.” Why is it that white people want a pat on the back for every modicum of human decency they performatively display? Why do we still allow this pablum to be volleyed hither and yon as a marker of a nonexistent racial equity?

Why is it that white people want a pat on the back for every modicum of human decency they performatively display? Why do we still allow this pablum to be volleyed hither and yon as a marker of a nonexistent racial equity?

White supremacy is a tradition that must be named and a religion that must be renounced. When this work has not been done, those who live in whiteness become oppressive, whether intentional or not.

I love that here Brown names white supremacy as a religion, because that’s exactly what it is—a faith tradition grounded in the inferiority of BIPOC and the deification of white skin as morally pure and upright. What makes it so insidious and corrosive is that white supremacists attempt to legitimize their racism by purporting to have faith in a form of Christianity completely excised of the primary teaching of Christ—to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

What makes it [white supremacy] so insidious and corrosive is that white supremacists attempt to legitimize their racism by purporting to have faith in a form of Christianity completely excised of the primary teaching of Christ—to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

Far from an imposing beast, I found that white supremacy is more like a poison. It seeps into your mind, drip by drip, until it makes you wonder if your perception of reality is true.

One thing Brown brings up throughout her book, mentioned in the quote above, is the gaslighting element accompanying subtle racism. As if the accumulation of daily micro-aggressions were not enough, Nice White People love to assuage their own guilt by minimizing the impact their own actions (intentional or not) have on the lived experiences of the Black people they interact with. This is not acceptable. If we are going to create the more perfect union touted by American nationalists of every star and stripe, we have to start, as white people, by first acknowledging our complicity in the structures and systems that we benefit from at the expense of our Black siblings and neighbors.

If we are going to create the more perfect union touted by American nationalists of every star and stripe, we have to start, as white people, by first acknowledging our complicity in the structures and systems that we benefit from at the expense of our Black siblings and neighbors.

The role of a bridge builder sounds appealing until it becomes clear how often that bridge is your broken back.

Why is it that we expect Black people in our circles to be the first ones to initiate change, the first ones to make a step toward understanding? Whenever we talk about EDI (equity, diversity, and inclusion), why do we place the brunt of the labor of coalition-building (emotional and otherwise) on our Black colleagues? We should not expect a person to speak for a whole people. Any efforts we make toward increasing inclusivity in our offices, in our boardrooms, and at every level of our organizations should come from a place of shared goals-setting, not simply (as so often happens) expecting our Black colleagues to hold our hands and erase our own culpability.

We should not expect a person to speak for a whole people.

Whiteness constantly polices the expressions of Blackness allowed within its walls, attempting to accrue no more than what’s necessary to affirm itself. It wants us to sing the celebratory “We Shall Overcome” during MLK Day but doesn’t want to hear the indicting lyrics of “Strange Fruit.”

This is something that really bothers me every February—Black History Month—which purports to celebrate the achievements of Black Americans (which was the original intention) but instead has developed to depoliticize the struggles of liberation through a lens of corporatized sanitization. The lovely ads showing Black and white hands so gloriously intertwined and shots of MLK featuring his most well-known and palatable quotes deliberately ignore a bloody history of enslavement, disenfranchisement, segregation, and incarceration which continues today in modalities not very different from their iterations of the past few centuries.

The lovely ads showing Black and white hands so gloriously intertwined and shots of MLK featuring his most well-known and palatable quotes deliberately ignore a bloody history of enslavement, disenfranchisement, segregation, and incarceration which continues today in modalities not very different from their iterations of the past few centuries.

These actions are vomit-inducing because they celebrate the end of a war that is still being fought and they still place a limit on the level(s) of Blackness which is palatable. They say, “You can be Black, but only on our (white folks’) terms, only in modes and frequencies that we find acceptable.” They say, “It’s fine for you to be Black, as long as your Blackness is coded to uphold my whiteness.” It’s not okay.

This is partly what makes the fragility of whiteness so damn dangerous. It ignores the personhood of people of color and instead makes the feelings of whiteness the most important thing.

One thing we white people need to do better is listen. When the Black people in our circles call out something as racist, we need to stop centering our feelings in the conversation. When our knee-jerk reactions to identifications of racism are focused on the way we feel about them, we are minimizing the actual harm caused to the people who have experienced racism, and adding unneeded emotional labor to our Black friends who have to subsume their own pain to coddle our fragile white feelings. We’ve got to do better, and that starts by listening to and acknowledging the veracity of the acts of racism our Black friends tell us about.

When our knee-jerk reactions to identifications of racism are focused on the way we feel about them, we are minimizing the actual harm caused to the people who have experienced racism, and adding unneeded emotional labor to our Black friends who have to subsume their own pain to coddle our fragile white feelings.

White people desperately want to believe that only the lonely, isolated “whites only” club members are racist. This is why the word racist offends “nice white people” so deeply. It challenges their self-identification as good people. Sadly, most white people are more worried about being called racist than about whether or not their actions are in fact racist or harmful.

If we’re going to be radically honest, racism perpetuates not because of Klan members or Proud Boys or neo-Nazis, but because of morally-upright white blowhards who cluck and clutch their pearls and flinch at the very insinuation they could be racist because they voted for Obama twice and how dare you? 🙄

Because I am a Black person, my anger is considered dangerous, explosive, and unwarranted. Because I am a woman, my anger supposedly reveals an emotional problem or gets dismissed as a temporary state that will go away once I choose to be rational. Because I am a Christian, my anger is dismissed as a character flaw, showing just how far I have turned from Jesus.

How convenient it is for people to selectively remember Jesus the Redeemer and Jesus the Healer, and forget Jesus in his other iterations. My Jesus, and here I believe Brown would agree with me, is Jesus the Wine-Drinker, Jesus the Friend of Sinners, Jesus the Caller-Out of Hypocrites, and Jesus the Table-Flipper. Table-flipping Jesus is by far my favorite.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

All Aboard the ARC: Alias Anna: A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis by Susan Hood with Greg Dawson

***Note: I received a free digital review copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.***

Expected Publication Date: March 22nd, 2022

Publisher: HarperCollins

The Holocaust (also known as the Shoah) was the attempted genocide of the entire Jewish population in Europe carried out by German dictator Adolf Hitler and his collaborators between 1941 and 1945. Crafted as the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, Hitler’s ultimate goal was the extermination of an entire people from the face of the earth, a horrific crime in aggregate.

While the crimes of the Nazis are unparalleled in the history of humanity, forgetting the stories of the people who were murdered and the people who survived is also a crime of incalculable magnitude. It is our duty to call out injustice wherever we see it, to speak truth to power, and to hold in memory the crimes of the past so that we can be the architects of a more just and equitable future.

It is our duty to call out injustice wherever we see it, to speak truth to power, and to hold in memory the crimes of the past so that we can be the architects of a more just and equitable future.

This duty is not one that can be transferred or reassigned. We remember not only as an act of preservation but as one of defiance. Zhanna’s story is one of millions.

We remember not only as an act of preservation but as one of defiance.

Alias Anna: A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis tells the story of Zhanna Arshanskaya and her sister Frina, who survived the Holocaust by quite literally hiding in plain sight, creating new non-Jewish identities for themselves and using their musical abilities to perform for high-ranking Nazi officers, providing entertainment to the very people responsible for the murder of their entire family because they had no other choice. It was play or die. And too much had been sacrificed for the sisters to die.

When most people think of the Holocaust, they conjure up images of concentration camps, of gas chambers and emaciated bodies stacked carelessly in mass graves. There were indeed many concentration camps operated by the Nazis, but they were indifferent to the methods used as long as the job—annihilating the Jewish people from the face of the earth—was done.

For the majority of the Soviet Jews, the Nazis’ primary method of execution was the firing squad, whereby they would march them to pits and ravines and unleash volleys of bullets. They also used fire and carbon monoxide when bullets were deemed insufficient. In December 1941, the Nazis rounded up the majority of the Jews from Kharkov and made them march to an abandoned tractor factory outside the city. After a few weeks of extreme deprivation, given little to no food and having scant protection against the elements, the Jews of Kharkov (including Zhanna, her sister Frina, her parents, and her grandparents) were marched to the ravine at Drobitsky Yar, facing certain execution.

I don’t care what you do. Just live.
Dmitri Arshansky

Before the ill-fated march to Drobitsky Yar, Zhanna and Frina lived what could be called charmed lives with their family in Kharkov. They were musical prodigies of the highest caliber, becoming the youngest students (ages eight and six at the time) ever accepted into and given scholarships to the famed Kharkov Conservatory of Music. It was there that Zhanna was first introduced to her favorite piece of music, her choice composition—Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu. The sheet music for this composition would become Zhanna’s only material possession and thus the only physical reminder of her former life, though she could not have foreseen this.

Dmitri Arshansky was no fool. He knew with absolute certainty that the Nazis were marching them toward their deaths, and he also believed that young Zhanna was the only one who might have a chance of escaping.

Knowing this, his last gift and last act of fatherly love was to give one of their guards his golden pocket watch that he’d managed to hide during the long march in exchange for the man turning a blind eye when his daughter jumped out of line and made her escape. His final admonition to her was this: I don’t care what you do. Just live. The greatest expression of love has to be giving the last thing you have to the person you love the most; if a greater love exists, I am unaware of it.

The greatest expression of love has to be giving the last thing you have to the person you love the most; if a greater love exists, I am unaware of it.

It was Fantaisie-Impromptu that she clutched against her chest as she jumped out of line and blended into a crowd of onlookers. Knowing it was to be the last time she would see her family, she wept and wept. Not knowing where else to go, Zhanna made her way back to Kharkov. Once there, she first sought shelter with her friend and classmate Svetlana Gaponovitch and her family. She thought that since the father of the family was Jewish, despite the fact that he longer lived in the household, she would be shown mercy by people who understood her situation. Instead, she had the door slammed in her face.

Unsure of where to go next and desperately tired, hungry, and cold, she knocked on the door of another classmate, Lida Slipko. Rumor had it that Lida’s mother was an anti-Semite, but young Zhanna was out of options and at the end of her rope. To her great surprise, they (Lida and her mother) hastened her in and shut the door behind her, showing her more compassion and common humanity than she had received at the hands of the Gaponovitch family.

Her brief respite was not to last, however. Zhanna knew that to stay too long in one place would endanger not only herself but the people who sheltered her, and so Lida suggested she go to the home of Nicolai Bogancha, an acquaintance and crush of hers who lived in the same neighborhood as Zhanna did growing up.

The Bogancha family was a saving grace for Zhanna. There in their home she felt safe, cared for, and hopeful for the future. It was also during her time staying with the Bogancha family that she learned something truly miraculous—her sister Frina was still alive. After learning this, one night Nicolai’s father snuck out and retrieved Frina, bringing her to Zhanna, back to the last link she had left in the world. Words are insufficient to describe the absolute elation Zhanna experienced when she learned that her sister had managed to escape. To this day, historians have no idea how Frina managed to escape the death march to Drobitsky Yar. Frina herself never revealed how, not even to Zhanna. Some things are just too painful to share, even with the people we love most.

To this day, historians have no idea how Frina managed to escape the death march to Drobitsky Yar. Frina herself never revealed how, not even to Zhanna. Some things are just too painful to share, even with the people we love most.

Together, the sisters were far too recognizable. After all, they had been performing in public for quite some time, given their enormous talent at such young ages. They knew they had to leave Kharkov, their home, and forge a new path somewhere else, somewhere the Nazis couldn’t reach them. Nicolai’s parents helped the sisters to craft new identities, giving them aliases and a backstory to protect them moving forward. They thus became Anna and Marina Morozova, orphans who had lost both parents—their mother during the German bombing of Kharkov and their father in battle while acting as an officer in Stalin’s Red Army.

As non-Jewish Russian orphans, if they could secure admission into an orphanage they could have identification papers drawn up, legally ratifying their new names and stories and giving them a modicum of protection against Nazi inquiry.

They managed to do just this, and by some act of divine providence or merciful coincidence, the orphanage they ended up at had a decrepit piano. It wasn’t much, this battered and careworn old instrument, but the talented sisters coaxed it to life and made it sing, bringing life and joy to all who heard their beautiful music. German soldiers passing by heard the lovely notes emanating from the run-down orphanage, and the director of the orphanage was so elated at this attention that he hired a piano tuner to make the instrument worthy of its practitioners.

The piano tuner’s name was Misha Alexandrovich, a kindly and intelligent man who took to Zhanna right away. He pleaded with her to come and play for the directors of the music school at Kremenchug. She was highly resistant to this suggestion, naturally not wanting to draw that much attention to herself and her sister. However, in the end she realized it would draw even more attention to refuse such a beneficent offer, and thus agreed to go.

Zhanna and Frina (Anna and Marina) accompanied Misha to Kremenchug, and the director of the school was so taken with them that they were given a studio to live and practice in. The sisters couldn’t believe their good fortune.

There was a catch to the director’s generosity, however. She needed the girls to play piano for the singers and dancers who were required to perform for the Germans at the theater next door to the school. When the theater director heard Zhanna play, he hired the sisters on the spot. And so that is how the Arshanskaya sisters came to play for the very Nazi officers who had upended their lives forever. They had taken away their home, their family, their state, and their very names, but they could not break their spirits. In the end, Zhanna and Frina would reign triumphant while the Nazi regime crumbled.

They had taken away their home, their family, their state, and their very names, but they could not break their spirits. In the end, Zhanna and Frina would reign triumphant while the Nazi regime crumbled.

Alias Anna is a beautiful story of courage, resilience, and the triumph of the human spirit. It is a testament to the Arshanskaya sisters who survived despite all odds and the Jewish people who showed the Nazis and the world that you can destroy the body but you cannot destroy the soul, not with any force or weapon known to man. I want every person living to read this book.

*Conflicting birthdates are given for Zhanna. Alias Anna gives her birthdate as April 1st, 1927 while the oral history recorded with Zhanna by The Breman Museum gives her birthdate as February 1st, 1927. In deference to Greg Dawson, I have kept the date listed in Alias Anna.

More on the Arshanskaya Sisters and the Ukrainian Jewish Population During WWII

Playing to live: Pianist survived Holocaust by performing for Nazis (CNN) by Moni Basu

The WWII Massacres at Drobitsky Yar Were the Result of Years of Scapegoating Jews (Smithsonian Magazine) by Lorraine Boissoneault

Zhanna Arashanskaya Dawson (oral history),
Esther and Herbert Taylor Oral History Collection (The Breman Museum)

Defying Destiny—A Miraculous Tale of Survival (The Juilliard Journal) by Greg Dawson

Book Review: The Guncle: A Novel by Steven Rowley

If Full House’s Uncle Jesse had been an actor instead of a musician and gay instead of a womanizer, you’d have Gay Uncle Patrick (referred to affectionately as GUP by his niece and nephew).

When we first meet Patrick O’Hara, he’s a semi-retired former sitcom star who’s exiled himself to Palm Springs with nothing but a big empty house and his coveted Golden Globe to keep him company. He’s witty, charismatic, and wholly self-absorbed—a stereotypical Hollywood darling if ever one graced the screen.

His tranquil life is interrupted when his best friend and sister-in-law Sara passes away from a long illness. He learns that in addition to the tragedy of Sara’s death, his brother Greg is addicted to painkillers and needs to check himself into rehab for the duration of the summer. While he’s in rehab, Greg asks Patrick if he will take care of his children, Maisie and Grant.

Initially, Patrick is aghast at the prospect of being the sole caretaker to two young children who have just lost their mother, but he reluctantly agrees. It’s only for the summer, after all, and he feels like it’s the least he can do for Sara—a final act of kindness.

Patrick’s first bumbling interactions with his niece and nephew are comedic gold because it is obvious Patrick is not used to entertaining children. His oblique pop culture references would be lost on almost anyone outside of a drag bar, so he might as well be speaking Japanese for all Maisie and Grant understand him.

Throughout their stay Patrick realizes how much he’s been missing from his life. As taxing as the children can be at times, they give him purpose, direction, and clarity. In the midst of grieving for Sara, he also starts processing the loss of the love of his life which we learn happened several years prior to the begging of the story. He finds his way, so to speak, at the same time he’s helping Maisie and Grant learn to navigate the scary new world that’s deprived them of their mother and isolated them from their father.

The story benefits from having several strong supporting characters, and Rowley’s narration of the audiobook version of his book is superb. The Guncle is a perfect mix of comedy and drama, with plenty to satisfy casual readers at the beach as well as the more serious-minded members of the literati. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Favorite Quotes from The Guncle

Anger, when justified, is glorious.

How can you tell where you’re going when you’re always looking up at the past?

You don’t want to live with Grandma and Grandpa. Why? Because they think Fox is news and raisins are food.

You can’t spell nemesis without me, sis, and you do not want to make me your enemy.

All Aboard the ARC: The Littlest Yak by Lu Fraser (Author) and Kate Hindley (Illustrator)

***Note: I received a free digital review copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.***

Gertie is a little yak with a big heart. Eager to be big and tall like the other yaks in her herd, Gertie tries her hardest to make herself bigger and stronger but finds her negative self-perception tested when an emergency calls for someone smaller like her.

In the end, Gertie learns that it’s not the size of your horns that matter but the strength of your character, and that everyone in the herd has something amazing to offer regardless of their size or ability. Reminiscent of the story of Rudolph with his blinking red nose or Kyo Maclear’s picture book Spork, The Littlest Yak shows readers of all ages that sometimes the things we don’t like about ourselves end up becoming our greatest assets. Five stars and two thumbs way up for Gertie, who now holds a coveted spot as one of my favorite heroines in all of children’s literature.

Five stars and two thumbs way up for Gertie, who now holds a coveted spot as one of my favorite heroines in all of children’s literature.

The Littlest Yak is due to be released in the U.S. on October 1st, 2021 and is now available to preorder wherever books are sold.

Book Review: Havana Nocturne by T.J. English

Audiobook cover of *Havana Nocturne* by T.J. English

***Note: I read the unabridged audiobook version of Havana Nocturne, which was narrated by Mel Foster. It is available to order wherever audiobooks are sold.***

The post-Prohibition years brought the United States Mob a lot of unwanted governmental scrutiny. Gone were the days where they could do pretty much whatever they liked and get away with it. Gone was the unchecked commercialization of vice and sin that filled the Mob’s coffers and lined the pockets of more than a few corrupt politicians. No, the Mob knew that if it was to remain a dominant force, a new playground would need to be found. Luckily for the Mob, Havana was ripe for the picking.

Gone was the unchecked commercialization of vice and sin that filled the Mob’s coffers and lined the pockets of more than a few corrupt politicians.

Truth be told, the convergence of circumstances couldn’t have been more perfect. While the Mob could no longer count on a complacent government to turn a blind eye at home, Cuba in the 1950s was suffering under the brutal and repressive regime of Fulgencio Batista, a cruel and avaricious tyrant if ever one drew breath. Meyer Lansky, one of the most infamous gangsters of that era, got himself, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, and their compatriots in good with Batista and started building casinos, hotels, and other entertainment venues in Havana. As long as Batista received his cut, the Mob was free to turn Havana into a kind of alternative Eden, a place where any sort of illicit fun could be had—for the right price, of course.

As long as Batista received his cut, the Mob was free to turn Havana into a kind of alternative Eden, a place where any sort of illicit fun could be had—for the right price, of course.

What Lansky, Luciano, and Batista failed to realize is that there were other players at the table with agendas of their own. Fidel Castro and his 26th of July Movement was determined to overthrow Batista’s regime and usher in a new era for Cuba, one based on Marxist-Leninist principles as well as egalitarianism.

Fidel Castro being questioned by reporters, date and location unknown

From 1956 to 1958, Castro and his fellow revolutionaries staged their uprising and engaged in guerrilla warfare on both urban and rural fronts, all culminating in the Battle of Santa Clara on January 1st, 1959. Led by Che Guevara, the battle was a decisive victory for the rebels as it led to Batista’s departure to the Dominican Republic (ruled at that time by former ally Rafael Trujillo) and allowed Castro to seize power. The Mob’s playground had new kids on the swings. The rest as they say is history.

Che Guevara after the Battle of Santa Clara

T.J. English’s book is impeccably researched and expertly told, making the narrative equally compelling for those familiar with the story as well as those who are reading about it for the first time. Havana Nocturne is not to be missed.

All Aboard the ARC: Anthony and the Gargoyle by Jo Ellen Bogart and Maja Kastelic

***Note: I received a free digital review copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.***

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. Anthony and the Gargoyle tells the story of Anthony, a little boy who lives with his parents in a house full of photographs. These pictures tell the story of his life and his parents’ lives before him. In the background of some of them, you can see Parisian landmarks beside the smiling happy couple.

In one of the photographs, Anthony can be seen holding a pet rock. One day, this rock breaks open and from it springs a gargoyle that teaches Anthony an important lesson: sometimes loving something means being willing to let it go. He also learns along the way that love doesn’t end at separation—it can break any boundary and traverse any distance.

Perfect for fans of Aaron Becker’s Journey trilogy and Molly Idle’s Flora and Her Feathered Friends series, Anthony and the Gargoyle is sure to delight readers of all ages. It is due to be released on October 5th, 2021, and is now available to preorder wherever books are sold.