I really enjoyed Sutanto’s Dial A for Aunties, but Vera
Wong was even better.
First, it’s hilarious. Just the premise: a
50-something-year-old widower who owns a tea shop in Chinatown in San Francisco
thinks she can solve a murder better than the police. And then she does.
It’s
written from multiple perspectives of various suspects, but the whole thing is
super lighthearted and still a great mystery. My wife and I read it aloud to
each other, as we often do. If you enjoy the Thursday Murder Club series, this one is definitely for you.
A lonely shopkeeper takes it upon herself to solve a murder in the most peculiar way in this captivating mystery by Jesse Q. Sutanto, bestselling author of Dial A for Aunties.
Vera Wong is a lonely little old lady—ah, lady of a certain age—who lives above her forgotten tea shop in the middle of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Despite living alone, Vera is not needy, oh no. She likes nothing more than sipping on a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy detective work on the Internet about what her Gen-Z son is up to.
Gibberish is one of those brilliant picture books
that couldn’t be made any other way.
The combination of words, symbols, and
multiple art styles perfectly tells the story of an immigrant child’s
acclimation to an English-speaking classroom. At first, the English words are
all written in symbols, which read as gibberish, and those speaking them are
depicted as old-timey cartoon characters.
As the child begins to
understand, the symbols slowly transition to letters, and the characters gradually
merge with the style of the rest of the book. It is so clever, so emotional, and so
simple for even the youngest of us to understand.
It's Dat's first day of school in a new country! Dat and his Mah made a long journey to get here, and Dat doesn't know the language. To Dat, everything everybody says - from the school bus driver to his new classmates - sounds like gibberish. How is Dat going to make new friends if they can't understand each other? Luckily there's a friendly girl in Dat's class who knows that there are other ways to communicate, besides just talking. Could she help make sense of the gibberish?
A young adult / middle-grade
crossover, Dead Flip is told from multiple perspectives and time periods.
It’s a horror mystery about two seventeen-year-olds in the early
nineties whose third crew member disappeared in 1987 when they were twelve. And
he might be stuck in a haunted…pinball machine? Yup.
I’ve loved Farizan’s
work in the past (Here to Stay is one of the funniest books I’ve ever
read), and Dead Flip is equally as good but way more spooky.
Edge-of-your-seat YA horror perfect for fans of Stranger Things Growing up, Cori, Maz, and Sam were inseparable best friends, sharing their love for Halloween, arcade games, and one another. Now it's 1992, Sam has been missing for five years, and Cori and Maz aren't speaking anymore. How could they be, when Cori is sure Sam is dead and Maz thinks he may have been kidnapped by a supernatural pinball machine? These days, all Maz wants to do is party, buy CDs at Sam Goody, and run away from his past. Meanwhile, Cori is a homecoming queen, hiding her abiding love…
Two pen pals receive the
shock of a lifetime in this giggle-inducing ode to art, friendship, and keeping
an open mind. Connie's class is partnering up with pen pals, and she loves
exchanging letters with her new friend, Nic, even though the two of them are
polar opposites.
Connie takes art seriously, while Nic has a more whimsical approach.
But both eagerly await the pen pal art festival when their two classes finally meet. But they're in for a
shock: Connie doesn't know Nic is a unicorn. And Nic has no clue that Connie is
a human.
With Josh Funk's signature laugh-out-loud humor and Charles Santoso's
explosively fun illustrations, Dear Unicorn is a celebration of art, new
friends, and stepping outside your comfort zone.
