Salty, Bitter, Sweet

Cuevas, Mayra. Salty, Bitter, Sweet. 2020. 320p. ISBN 9780310769774.

Born of a Cuban-American father and a French mother, Isabella Fields has focused her entire life on cooking. An amazing cook and baker in her own right, Isabelle has won the right to participate in a summer competition designed to select next year's apprentice to world-renowned Chef Pascal Grattard. At seventeen, Isabella is traveling to France to spend the summer with her father, who divorced her mother last year following a torrid love affair with another French woman, and who is now expecting a baby. On top of grieving for the loss of her family, she's also mourning the death of her beloved grandmother, her father's mother. An exile from Cuba, her abuela taught her everything she knows about cooking and instilled in her a passion for the delicious.

In France, she's one of 13 competitors. She makes fast friend with the two other girls, but the guys studiously avoid all three of them. Chef Croissant supervises the competition, and Isabella is quick to run afoul of the myriad rules that govern the kitchen's operations. At her dad, she meets her pregnant stepmother's former stepchild, a hot Spaniard with a lovable albino bulldog. She finds him annoying and full of himself, but that doesn't seem to prevent her from falling for him. 

With eveyrthing that happening with her and around her, can Isabella focus long enough to earn the prestigious internship she has always wanted? Filled with memorable characters and a well-developed stories, readers who enjoy romance and cooking are about to be served a wonderful story about being true to oneself and question one's own desires and motives. Fans of books like Once and For All and P.S. I Love You will love Isabella and her trials and tribulations

Into White

 Pink, Randi. Into White. 2016. 288p. ISBN 9781250070210.

LaToya is not comfortable in her skin. Instead of being Black, she wishes she were White. The people in Birmingham, Alabama, are so much nicer, and life is so much easier if you are White. One night, she makes the wish to be White, and when she wakes up the next morning her wish has been granted. Her family doesn't notice a difference, but everyone else sees her as White.

As White, LaToya suddenly finds herself propulsed up the social hierarchy at her mostly White high school. She ranked so low as a Black girl that even other Black people disrespected her. But now that she is White, she gets more attention and more respect. However, LaToya suddenly realizes that not everything is as rosy as she thought it were. She's still at risk from sexual predators. Her rapid climb up the social ladder is more driven by her newness (she claims to be a transfer student) than the fact that she is White. And the people who loved LaToya are really missing her. In the end, LaToya must decide whether to be true to herself, or become something new and different from everything she has known before.

Dealing with the hard topic of race relations with humor and mirth, Into White explores several sensitive issues and provides one answer to "what if" questions. Readers interested in discovering more about how such changes would affect them will enjoy LaToya's struggles.

My Hero Academia, Vol. 28

 Horikoshi, Kohei. My Hero Academia, Vol. 28. 2021. 200p. ISBN 9781974722884. 

The battle between the heroes and the Paranormal Liberation Front continues in several locations, as the Front seeks to revive Shigaraki after he has been imbued with the quirks of many foes. Endeavor and the other heroes have their hands full with the Nomis, and Midoriya and the students from Hero Academia are tasked with evacuating the city as combat rages on by the hospital.

At the villa that served as the Front's headquarters, Hawks has been defeated and is on the verge of being destroyed by Dabi when Tokoyami intervenes to save his mentor. The nagging question remains in Tokoyami's mind, however, as to whether heroes' hands are dirtier than the criminals they seek to imprison.

Shigaraki's escape triggers wanton destruction as most of the city is obliterated by his decay quirk. Midoriya is alerted to Shigaraki's rise, and he attempts to attract the monster away from the evacuees, hoping to save as many of them as possible. Shigaraki, hoping to capture the One for All power of All Might, obliges and follows. With such power released, all the heroes can hope for is to minimize damage ...

Poemsia

 Leav, Lang. Poemsia. 2019. 294p. ISBN 9781524851071.

Verity and her best friend Jess are in the early twenties, and both of them are stuck in personal ruts. Her parents died when they were little, and she's lived with her grandparents since then. She works in her grandfather's bookstore, and she knows a lot about books. Her passion is poetry, and she writes and thinks it all the time. She would love to be like her favorite poet, Mena Rhodes. She's never admitted to Jess that this is what she would love to do with her life, but Jess nevertheless knows, and when she binds a collection of poems Verity has written and encourage her to sell them, Verity is touched, and she agrees to place a few of the books in her grandfather's shop, and she also agrees to keep up the Instagram page her friend created.

Sash, the cute boy that comes in requesting a book of poem soon becomes more than an acquaintance, and as Verity begins to date him, she soon gets snared into his former girlfriend Penelope's traps, as she is undermined at every turn. Verity doesn't know what to do about this situation.

While browsing the shop's poetry section, she comes across an old book, called Poemsia. She posts a few of the poems from the book on Instagram, clearly identifying them as not hers. But in the mix of all of the poems she wrote and posted, her page takes off and soon she's inundated with requests. People love her poetry, but the most popular are the poems from Poemsia. Verity is not sure how to handle this newfound fame, but when calls from New York start to arrive, Verity must now make a very serious decision: Move to the poetry publishing capital of the world and pursue an exciting career as a poet while accompanied by Mena Rhodes, or remain in her country with friends Jess and Sash, running an old bookstore that hasn't been successful in a long time? 

A fun dive into the backstabbing universe of poets and writers, fans of poetry and life struggles will appreciate Verity's progression from a beginning writer to her ultimate decision guiding the rest of her writing career.

The King of Crows

 Bray, Libba. The King of Crows. Book 4 of the Diviners series. 560p. ISBN 9780316126090.

Following the death of Mabel during that explosion meant to destroy Jake Marlowe in Before the Devil Breaks You, the Diviners are pursued by the Shadow Men, ruthless agents of the US government. Marlowe has been feeding diviners to the Eye, his machine that opened a portal to the lands of the ghosts. He has made a bargain with the King of Crows to allow the U.S. army to set up an outpost on the other side of the portal, into the dead lands. Marlowe looks forward to unlimited energy to power the American economy. The King of Crows, however, has other ideas. His plan is to release an army of the dead through the gate opened by the Eye.

The Diviners need to split and make their separate ways out of New York City, hoping to escape the Shadow Men. Memphis, Bill, and Isaiah flee on a train heading to New Orleans. As African-Americans traveling through the segregated South of the 1920s, their lives are even more in danger than from the government agents chasing them. Isaiah, who has visions, meets teen Sarah Beth Olson in a dream. She's in Bountiful, Nebraska, and she tells Isaiah that the Diviners need to come to her home, for they can only triumph over the King of Crows if they unite their forces. How can Isaiah tell the others about this?

Theta and Henry free Sam from Marlowe's estate where he was about to be fed to the Eye, and they run away, chased by Theta's former husband and his Ku Klux Klan friends. Evie, Lin, and Jericho join a traveling band and successfully escape the city. As all travel west, they find themselves drawn to Bountiful and Sarah Beth. But everywhere they travel they encounter evidence that the ghosts are laying waste to small rural towns. As the King of Crows marshals his forces, the Diviners must learn to work together, or humanity is doomed.

This conclusion to the Diviners series is satisfying and neatly wraps up the disparate stories that have been weaved throughout. Fans of the series will not be disappointed with a bittersweet ending as Diviners come into their powers, but the cost is deadly and some of the friends do not survive. 

Keep This to Yourself

 Ryan, Tom. Keep This to Yourself. 2019. 320p. ISBN 9780807541517.

Mac grew up on a spit of land outside of Camera Cove, Maine. There were only four other houses and a farm on his stretch of road, and within a few years of his birth each house had a child living in it of the same age. Soon the five kids were inseparable, more because of necessity than through real connections, but they grew up together. Mac, Connor, Benjamin, Doris, and Carrie met at the end of middle school by the ocean, and they each dropped off an envelope in a time capsule, to be opened on graduation four years later.

Following high school graduation, Mac, Ben and Doris meet under darker circumstances than four years earlier. Carrie has long since stopped hanging out with the group. Connor, for his part, was one of the four victims of the Catalog Killer, a serial killer who last year terrorized the community of Camera Cove and killed the "perfect" family, a father, a mother, a daughter, and a son. 

Despite the time that has passed and the fact that police determined the killer was a transient who had  since moved on, Mac is convinced that the killer is actually much closer to home. Still in love with Connor, but not wanting to admit even to himself, Mac begins asking probing questions to family members of those who were killed, and details that the police ignored or downplayed emerge, pointing to a killer that is closer than Mac realized...

What We Say and How We Say it Matter

 Anderson, Mike. What We Say and How We Say it Matter: Teacher Talk that Improves Student Learning and Behavior. 2019. 168p. ISBN 978-1-4166-2704-3. 

Every teacher strives to make sure that each and every student is successful. But the words that we use, and the way in which they are expressed can often convey the opposite of what we wished to communicate. Language can easily sabotage all efforts made to ensure that students love their learning experiences while at school.

In this provocative book, the author provides a road map to focus on words and ways of speaking that are not conducive to students developing positive attitudes towards school. Words like "I'm disappointed" indicate to students that they better perform for the teacher, instead of wanting to perform for themselves. The ownership of the language ("you didn't turn in my homework") can indicate to students that it's not really their performance and their work, but rather that of the teacher. And extrinsic motivation such as stickers or pizza parties undermine any intrinsic motivation possessed by students.

Teachers and other professionals who work with people will read a lot of concrete advice that can help change what they do to become more positive and instill a joy of learning that used to be there, as anyone who has ever observed preschoolers or kindergarten students can attest. Specific techniques are described, and can help make the transition to a more powerful language habit that will actually support what the teacher is trying to achieve, instead of unwittingly undermining what they do.