The Books I'm Reading Now
I'm reading Emiko Jean's Tokyo Ever After, in which Japanese-American teen Izumi Tanaka discovers that her father is the Crown Prince of Japan; Damnation Spring, Ash Davidson's dark and beautifully written literary mystery set in the Pacific Northwest; and Good Girl, Bad Blood, Holly Jackson's sequel to the young adult mystery The Good Girl's Guide to Murder, which again features the fantastic main character of Pippa Fitz-Amobi.
Which books are you reading and enjoying these days, bookworms?
01 Tokyo Ever After by Emiko Jean
Emiko Jean's Tokyo Ever After is the story of Izumi (Izzy) Tanaka, an everyday, average Japanese-American teen...who discovers that her father is the Crown Prince of Japan.
She's been raised by her single mother in a mostly white northern California town, and she's never known the identity of her father. She's gobsmacked to discover that she's literally a princess. The only thing more outrageous is that she's asked to travel to Japan to meet her father for the first time.
Cue the ball gowns, thousands of years of customs and traditions to learn, tricky rivalries and jealousies within her family--and the uncomfortable implication that the outspoken Izzy should quiet down and fall in line. Is being a princess all it's cracked up to be?
02 Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson
Rich Gunderson has been carving out (pun!) a living from logging in the Pacific Northwest for his whole life--just like his father before him and generations of family before that.
It seems his livelihood may be on the verge of obsoleteness as the heavily harvested woods dwindle, and Rich makes a desperate bid to make his own way by investing into logging a corner of the forest--and he does so without mentioning his move to his wife or young son. Secrets, money, uncertainty, straddling the line between awareness of ecology and demanding human consumption--what could go wrong?
When a skull is discovered and local logging is shut down indefinitely by protesters, procedural delays, and investigations, Rich grows more and more concerned that regardless of what is uncovered about the mysterious death, his whole life may be about to implode.
Damnation Spring is a literary mystery from Ash Davidson, and it's wonderfully wrought so far, with plenty of tension and few black-and-white answers but many fascinating gray areas to consider.
03 Good Girl, Bad Blood by Holly Jackson
Yay, the fantastic character of Pippa Fitz-Amobi is baaaaack!
In Holly Jackson's sequel to the wonderful young adult mystery A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, Pip has sworn off amateur detective work. After all, last time around, all kinds of horrible things happened as she dug into (and solved, thank you very much) the mystery of the Andie Bell and Sal Singh case.
Now Pip and Ravi are happily dating, her family has stopped worrying about her so much, and Max Hastings is on trial and is almost certainly about to go to jail for the heinous crimes revealed in the last book.
Pip is still producing her popular podcast, but after the trial, she's convinced that she'll be finished with all of it. Really.
That is, until her friend Connor comes to her in a panic. His twenty-four-year-old brother Jamie is missing, the police aren't responding with any urgency, and Connor just knows Pippa is the only one who can help figure out what's going on.
Jackson offers layer upon layer of intrigue and twisty turns in this mystery, and Pip is as perfectly imperfect a character as ever. I just love this--I'm listening to it as an audiobook.
Holly Jackson's third book in this series, As Good as Dead, is coming out next month, and I can't wait.