Curated by Jen Moyers (@jen.loves.books)
Today, I'm sharing five reviews of books about found family. This idea is one of my favorites: watching individuals come together to find comfort or support or power can be such a fabulous reading experience—it's one of our favorites here at Unabridged.
For each book, I'll share an excerpt from our full review. All of these reviews were written by us, and you can click the links to dive deeper into each book. If you decide to purchase any of the books, our affiliate links to Bookshop.org and Libro.fm are in the full reviews. We earn a small commission if you shop through those links, and we truly appreciate your support!
Okay, on with the books!
Roshani Chokshi's THE GILDED WOLVES (from Jen):
"I love a heist. Whether it’s cinematic—like Ocean’s Eleven or The Da Vinci Code—or literary—like Leah Bardugo’s gorgeous Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom—heist narratives (when done well) are compelling and fast moving and just plain fun. They thrive on misdirection and subterfuge, both for characters within the story and for the reader. Roshani Chokshi’s young adult novel The Gilded Wolves, the first of a duology, falls solidly into the heist tradition. (Thanks to NetGalley for the egalley!)
"The Gilded Wolves opens in a late 1800s Paris imbued with magic. An established crew of diverse characters successfully has completed a series of missions and is, at the novel’s beginning, in the midst of another. In this world, certain people are adept at Forging, a sort of magical engineering, and a circle of Houses control the world. Each House represents a different facet of magic connected to fragments of the Tower of Babel." Click to read the full review.
T. J. Klune's THE HOUSE IN THE CERULEAN SEA - A Beautiful Story about Finding Your Home (from Ashley):
"Linus Baker lives a quiet, routine-oriented life with only his curmudgeonly cat, Calliope, for company. As a low-level worker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, Linus finds himself going through the motions of his life and feels a bit like a cog in the machine. He feels that he has accepted his life as it is.
"But when Linus gets called up to Extremely Upper Management and is given a super secretive assignment on a faraway island, his life drastically changes. He and Calliope reluctantly pack up their things and go on an adventure that will change what he knows about himself and the world. I love Linus in this book and the way that he takes everything in stride. He is quirky and reticent, and yet he is perfected suited for the task at hand—evaluating the nature of the orphanage on the island that houses a number of unusual, potentially dangerous magical children and a mysterious caretaker. Linus's ability to handle tumultuous situations with an awkward ease and with dry humor makes him so very lovable." Click here to read the full review.
Nita Prose's THE MAID--Cozy Mystery At Its Finest (from Sara):
"Hooray for a wonderful, delightful, heartfelt cozy mystery!
"Admittedly, I am a total sucker for the cozy mystery genre. Give me all the cozy mysteries. However, I do think in The Maid, Nita Prose has elevated the genre and created an excellent story and well-developed characters.
"The narrative centers around Molly Gray, a maid at at the Regency Grand Hotel. Molly is such an interesting and lovable character. She struggles with social situations, and often takes words meant to be figurative quite literally. In the nine months following her beloved Gran's death, she has had to navigate the difficult waters of social interactions on her own. Prior to this, her Gran helped her navigate social situations and helped her understand a world Molly often found confounding." Click to read the full review.
"Here's the setup: Avery Grambs is living out of her car when she finds out that she's inheriting the bulk of billionaire Tobias Hawthorne's wealth. The strange thing? She doesn't know who he is. While she's trying to figure out the connection—she thinks it lies with her mother, who died a while back—she's required to live in his mansion along with his understandably frustrated family, including his two daughters and four very different, very appealing grandsons." Click to read the full review.
Nina LaCour's WE ARE OKAY: Finding Hope in Someday (from Ashley):
"What happens when a teenager loses her support system? Nina LaCour's We Are Okay (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm) is a hard read in some ways, but it is also beautifully written and explores how it's possible to find a glimmer of hope amid heartbreak and despair. (Thanks to Jen for choosing this one as one of our Unabridged buddy reads!)
"Readers meet Marin, who is alone in a dorm room, preparing to spend the winter break on campus despite the fact that almost no one else will be there. She is constructing a plan for herself to pass the interminable, desperately lonely time. Marin is also counting down, with a sense of both dread and longing, to the arrival and brief visit of Mabel, a dear friend from high school who is coming all the way to New York from California to see her. We can tell there has been a rift between Marin and Mabel, but it's unclear what led to the fracture in their friendship." Click to read the full review.
(A note to our readers: click on the hashtags above to see our other blog posts with the same hashtag.)
Interested in what else we're reading? Check out our Featured Books page.
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