Fake Dates and Mooncakes by Sher Lee
I was in kind of a reading slump for the last couple of months, only reading comics when I’m reading at all. Recently I realised that I really needed to DNF my then-current read (A Tale of Two Princes by Eric Geron) and pick up something else from my digital TBR stack. And so I started on this book… and it’s really cute?
This book is about Dylan, a teenager working at his aunt’s Singaporean Chinese take-out, Wok Warriors. The previous year, Dylan and his mother agreed to enter a mooncake competition, but his mother passed away soon after that – now, he’s determined to enter the contest in her memory. Then he meets Theo, who is incredibly rich, and very charming, Dylan falls in instacrush – so of course, when Theo asks Dylan to be his fake date at a wedding, Dylan says yes. When he starts falling for Theo for real, though, Dylan has to decide on whether their romance is worth putting aside his culinary dreams for.
As a YA romance, it’s pretty standard – you get a meet cute (of sorts), a pretty quick falling in love sequence, the inevitable conflict, etc etc. It’s not the best I’ve read, but it’s still enjoyable. And I do enjoy the whole Crazy Rich Asianness of it all. What really sells the book to me, though, are the other relationships – Dylan’s family dynamics are fun to read, and I love how they love and support each other despite all their differences. The best part of this book, of course, is the food. Just the mention of sayur lodeh made my mouth water, because I haven’t had any in so long. And the description of various mooncakes makes me crave mooncakes. And! Yay for all the Southeast Asian (Singapore and Malaysia, to be precise) food and ingredient mentions!
This book will be published in May 2023.
I was interested in The Black Witch before all the accusations about it came out (and if you haven’t heard of the controversy regarding this title, you can probably google it.) I’m an avid fantasy reader, and one thing that always bugged me about high fantasy was the way different races were written about. From Lord of the Rings to the Drizzt stories, non-human races were usually portrayed as monoliths – all elves act like this, and all goblins are like that, and so on. 
This book was in my TBR because I was expecting a cute fluffy romcom as well. It’s a romcom, and it’s kind of cute, but not really that fluffy? I’d give it a solid three stars.
There was a moment last month when I felt super ambitious and wanted to read loads of queer YA and write about all of them in a wrap-up post at the end of the month. And then… I was so busy at work I almost missed the entire month. I still read most of the books I intended to read, though, and this was one of them.
To be honest, when I first heard about what The Weight of Our Sky was going to be about, I wondered if we would even be able to sell it here. May 13th 1969 isn’t something many people write or talk about, and the last non-fiction book about it was detained by our authorities for some time before they finally released it and allowed it to be sold. In my high school history class, we learned a sanitised version of it – basic information that didn’t tell us much other than it happened. My grandmother mentioned it a few times when I was a kid, but I don’t have a clear memory of those times, and all that remained with me were vague images and the strong impression that it was a scary time for her. My parents, who were around Melati’s age when it happened, never talked about it at all. 
I read this book last March and I STILL don’t know how to talk about it. Other than “I absolutely love it and Freddy is my new favourite”, I don’t know what to say about this book. See, it was pitched to me as “Diana Wynne Jones meets Madeleine L’Engle” and weirdly enough, that’s exactly how it felt like to me, like these two favourites of mine got together and made this weird lovable baby.
Stevie Bell is weird in the sense that she is obsessed with true-crime, and mysteries in general. Which isn’t my kind of weird, but still endears her to me – because besides being passionate about true-crime she is also smart and ambitious and snarky which are all things I like. She’s excited about being accepted to Ellingham Academy, a private school in Vermont that prides on having the best thinkers, inventors and artists. It was also the site of the kidnapping and murder of founder Albert Ellingham’s wife and daughter – a crime that was never solved. 
Sal is a thief who decides to audition to be a member of The Left Hand, who are the Queen’s personal assassins. The problem: the audition is basically a fight to the death with the other auditioners, who are all professionals with a lot more experience (and privilege) than Sal. At this point, I probably would have written the story off as a generic YA fantasy (which it kind of is), except for one thing – Sal is genderfluid.
I was really looking forward to this book when it was first announced, because I’m a huge Miles Morales fan and Jason Reynolds is high on my “want to read” list. Not to mention that this would be the first story featuring Miles written by a black author.
ghostgrrrl reads 