Following the pattern from last week, I’ve finished another novel and read a few more comics from the queue—some old, some new! As a disclosure, all of the titles highlighted here were sent to me (either in digital form, as uncorrected proofs, or finished copies) unless otherwise noted. Clicking on a title will take you to Bookshop.org, a site that helps support independent booksellers, and earns me a small commission if you make a purchase.
InvestiGators: All Tide Up by John Patrick Green
The newest title on today’s list is so new it’s not even out yet—it’ll be released in September, but you can pre-order it now. And, hey, if your kid has been a fan of the InvestiGators series so far, you know you can’t go wrong with book 7 in the series. All Tide Up sends Mango and Brash out to sea, as they investigate a missing cruise ship. Billionaire Bill N. Dollaz, the owner of the cruise line, distracts everyone from the missing ship by offering everyone at the press conference a $1 cruise—but what’s he hiding? How could he be making a profit on these impossibly low tickets? Mango and Brash are on the case. As with the previous books, there are puns aplenty, visual gags, musical montages, and the return of some fan-favorite characters.
The Prisoner of Shiverstone by Linette Moore
The young Helga Sharp is found drifting in a rowboat near Utley Island, which turns out to be a prison for exiled mad scientists. While the island’s guards work on tracking down Helga’s family, Helga learns a bit more about the island and starts poking around… because she didn’t wash ashore here by accident. Helga is actually on a mission to rescue a trapped scientist, but she’ll have to be pretty sneaky to get everything she needs without getting caught. The story has a good message about being yourself when you don’t feel like you fit in. I also really liked the illustration style, which reminds me a bit of old picture books (like Madeline, for instance) since the drawings don’t all have a uniform bold outline around everything, and it gives it a bit of a timeless feel.
Shirley & Jamila’s Big Fall by Gillian Goerz
I read the first book in this series, Shirley & Jamila Save Their Summer, a few years back and enjoyed it. It’s sort of an odd couple story, with two very different kids who start spending time together out of convenience, but gradually they become friends and work together to solve a mystery. In the second book, school is starting and things get busy—Jamila meets a new friend through basketball and starts to worry about maintaining her friendship with Shirley.
Meanwhile Shirley has been hired for a new case—though it’s not exactly a mystery this time. Chuck Milton is a terrible sixth-grader who deals in secrets—the more scandalous, the better. He buys secrets from kids, and then uses them to blackmail or extort his subjects. Shirley hatches a plan to take Chuck down once and for all, and Jamila soon gets roped in as well.
Goerz explains in the afterword that the story is based on “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” a Sherlock Holmes tale about a blackmailer, though it’s been modified to make it kid-friendly. While this one wasn’t really a mystery, it still had plenty of tension and some surprises, too.
The Curie Society by Heather Einhorn, Adam Staffaroni, Janet Harvey, and Sonia Liao
If you like stories about kid spies and secret organizations, this book fits the bill! The Curie Society was formed by Marie Curie to advance the careers of women in science, and three first-year college students are the newest recruits: Simone, an early-admission biologist who has been studying ants; Maya, a mathematician who carries a burden of expectations from her parents; and Taj, a computer expert who also happens to be pretty good at parkour. There’s some friction at first in their shared dorm room, but when they each get a mysterious invitation they have to work together to figure it out.
As they train for their first mission, it becomes clear that Professor Burkhardt, the leader of this chapter of the society, has some history that she hasn’t shared with them, and it’s not clear whether her personal connections will throw a monkey wrench in the plans. It’s a fun book with cool gadgets, some fun scientific facts blended with fiction, and a team of young women that will be fun to follow—it looks like there may be a second book coming next year.
The Ones by Brian Michael Bendis and Jacob Edgar
Throughout literature, there are lots of stories about the Chosen One—sometimes it’s a baby that’s destined to save the world; other times it’s the unlikely person who is gifted with amazing powers. Well, what if they all existed together in the same story? That’s the premise of this comic book: there are seven different “Ones,” each with their own backstory: a demon hunter who still doesn’t believe in demons even after eleven years of slaying them; a young man with extradimensional mystical powers that are only to be used for a particular threat that has never arrived; an old-school hero chosen to wield a powerful sword.
Now, they’ve all been summoned by Wilson, the Keeper of the Prophecies—but he’s kind of new at this and isn’t very good at explaining things, and the Ones aren’t in agreement if they’re on board with the mission, if they can even figure out what the mission is. But soon enough, cataclysmic events convince them that it’s time to act.
The book is a fun mix of Chosen One tropes, mashed up into a team of misfits. Some of them are strong fighters or have special powers, and others … well, it’s not entirely clear why they’re even here. But, hey, gotta follow the prophecies, right?
Atomic Anna by Rachel Barenbaum
I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I’d started this novel—I heard about it recently because it was written by a college classmate of mine, and when I found out that it was about time travel I was particularly interested. The story jumps back and forth in time (as you’d expect), mostly from the 1970s to the early 1990s, and follows three generations of women. Anna Berkova is the first—she is a scientist who helped develop nuclear power in Russia, and her prototype amplifier for the reactor also turns out to be a time machine, sending her to the future where she sees a catastrophe that she spends the rest of the book trying to prevent. But she also feels responsible for the meltdown at Chernobyl, and so her other goal is to go back in time to prevent that.
Anna’s daughter, Manya, eventually escapes to America with Anna’s friends, who become her adoptive parents. She starts going by the name Molly, and really wants to pursue a career in art, creating a superhero comic book series called “Atomic Anna” inspired by the stories of her faraway mother. But Molly’s life has a lot of ups and downs, and when she has her own daughter, Raisa, things don’t always work out well. As Anna jumps back in time from a remote mountain laboratory, she tries again and again to find the right actions to send her daughter and granddaughter in the right direction, but each jump is tearing her body apart.
It’s an engaging story with some shifting-history shenanigans, but ultimately is about the relationships between the characters, not just the grandmother-mother-daughter trio, but also between Anna and her friend Yulia (Molly’s adoptive mom), as well as the men in each of their lives. There’s a good bit of intergenerational trauma—Anna and Yulia are both Jewish, and a lot of the characters are driven by fear or worries about being caught, as Jewish women in WWII-era Germany, or as escaped Soviets in America.
My Current Stack
I’ve been reading a number of movie-related books recently, so I may try to put together a stack of those soon. I also started an other novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, about a world in which prisoners can opt to fight in televised deathmatches—it’s dystopian fiction that critiques America’s penal system. I also started reading Flash Forward, a comic book with ties to the Flash Forward podcast, with a dozen stories about the future by different artists, paired with essays by Rose Eveleth about the realities of those futures.
