And if you haven't read Ninth House I highly recommend it.

I put it on hold at the library just the other day!

I put it on hold at the library just the other day!

Reading Ninth House I really appreciated Bardugo's honed storytelling expertise.

It's sort of like Suzanne Collins when she did Hunger Games, she had learned in the trenches how to tell a story that really moves.

Bardugo's long experience in YA paid off in her pacing and structure. It's not rushed and it does give plenty of room for the characters to breath and their dynamics grow. But as she shifts gears in the second half she drives the story hard and it pays off again and again. Just really well crafted.

I just checked my library holds list, and apparently I lied. The dark academia book I put on hold was If We Were Villains. For some reason I had Ninth House on my "for later" list (I don't know when my library started doing "for later" lists). But I just moved it over to on hold list.

Ninth House is available through Kindle Unlimited right now if that is an option. I just finished Hell Bent and am thinking I might need to refresh my memory of Ninth House…

I'm going to reread Ninth House this week before starting Hell Bent. I actually really enjoyed Catherine House, and I keep waiting to see if there will be another book by the author.

Looking for some great authors, poets, and books? I recommend pretty much every writer I heard at the Key West Literary Seminar the past four days. You can read their names and the titles of their talks here:

[link]

Where to start? Well if you haven't read everything Jacqueline Woodson has written (she's known from children and YA but also writes for adults) maybe start with her. Her gorgeous novella "Another Brooklyn" or longer memoir in verse "Brown Girl Dreaming" are both ways to dive into her work. For middle grade fiction, check out "Harbor Me" (and for smaller children, "Visiting Day" or so many others).

Who else...hm, maybe the incredible memoir "Somebody's Daughter" by Ashley C. Ford or the horror of "Lakewood" by Megan Giddens or the gorgeous, rich poetry of Jericho Brown or Rowan Ricardo Phillips or the inimitable Kevin Young — or go all in and check out the incredible poetry collection he edited: "African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song."

Want history? Read anything by intellectual geniuses Annette Gordon-Reed and Kerri Greenidge. If you just want a taste, Gordon-Reed's historical, personal book on her family and Texas might be your in: "On Juneteenth."

Horror or gritty reality? Sure, how about S.A. Cosby, Tananarive Due, or Victor LaValle?

I could go on, but you can Google the authors from the link to see more. I have so much rich reading in my future!

Pix, I'm so jealous, what a great list of writers! Especially Jacqueline Woodson.

They were amazing! I wish I could win that scholarship every year.

Key West Literary Seminar

Driving to the dog park this morning NPR had a story on the Key West Literary Seminar! I may have said out loud that I knew someone there. It was in the top 5 stories at the top of the hour. It sounded like it was amazing.

It was! Here's the blog they asked me to write about Jacqueline Woodson: [link]