December 2021 Wrap Up Pt. 1

At first, I decided not to do this wrap up halfway through the month, but then I finished a fourth book and I decided to go ahead and do it. As usual, I'm hoping to read a lot more books over the next 2 weeks, so future me might be really happy that I've done this. I hope.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel - This was the library staff book club book for this Fall. We read it over 3 or 4 months and had monthly discussions. It's a memoir in graphic form that talks about her life as the child of a high school English teacher who was also the local funeral director. Her family was a little bit dysfunctional (or a lot bit) and then her dad died suddenly when she was 20, right after she had come out as a lesbian to her parents. It was funny and heartbreaking, as you'd expect a graphic memoir to be.

Black Birds In the Sky by Brandy Colbert - This is a nonfiction account of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre written for teens. It wasn't very long, but it could have been a lot shorter. There was a lot about black people in other parts of the country and about race riots in other cities. I makes sense to have that included, but there was A LOT. There was also a big section about newspapers by and for black people in other cities. This felt unecessary. The epilogue was completely out of left field and had very little to do with the subject, which was weird. My biggest problem with it was the factual inaccuracies in the text. I have studied this subject a lot. I'm not an expert, but I can find documents to back up my problems with the facts presented here.

Fangs by Sarah Andersen - I just found out this existed and ordered it from the library immediately. Turns out my family has already read it online. ANYWAY, it's a graphic novel made up of a bunch of little comics about a vampire girl who meets a werewolf boy at a club and they fall in love. The jokes are hilarious, especially the ones you have to think about just a little bit. They are both too cute for words, especially when he turns into a wolf. It's just a fun little book.

Love In English by Maria E. Andreu - Everyone who read this on my award committee raved about it. It's about a girl from Argentina who moves to New Jersey to join her dad who came 3 years ago to start a new life. She barely speaks English and she is struggling. In her math class there is an American boy who looks like he walked straight off the set of a Netflix show. In her ESL class there is a boy from Greece who knows even less English than her, and they are learning together. This sets up a nice tidy little love triangle. This is not a thing I enjoy. My favorite character is the ESL teacher. The only thing that saved this from being entirely mediocre is the fact that it shows how hard it is to be an outsider who doesn't even speak the language.

So there are the four books I've read so far in December. I have 4 more on my TBR. Unfortunately, I also have 3 library books checked out that are not on my TBR. Sigh. Wish me luck.