Completely Full Bookshelf

I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving and was able to make the best of celebrating in this pandemic! Today I am reviewing yet another absolutely, stunningly gorgeous book, The Girl Who Drank the Moon  by Kelly Barnhill.           I seriously do not know how I have managed to read so many stunning books this year! I bought a copy of The Girl Who Drank the Moon  before it won the Newbery a few years ago. Reading it now, I thought, "This really should have won the Newbery!" Then I looked, and it did win. And thank goodness for that, because I have rarely seen a book that so clearly deserves medals and praise to be heaped upon it. I was going to write a synopsis of this book modeled after the style of one chapter where each sentence begins with "Once upon a time...," but I do not have enough energy to make that sound beautiful and not pretentious, so I'll stick to what I know. The Girl Who Drank the Moon  is several different, beautiful stories set in the same

Normally, I would review a YA book this week, but I didn't read one because I am super-crazy-ridiculously-busy (I'm already writing this post late at night and a day later than I planned to). With that in mind, I do have an MG review for today, of the fabulous graphic-novel biography Becoming RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Journey to Justice , written by Debbie Levy and illustrated by Whitney Gardner.           Most of you probably know that, as yet another awful moment of 2020, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the beloved second female U.S. Supreme Court justice, passed away several weeks ago. Her seat on the Supreme Court (which she held until her passing) has been filled by another woman (though a far more conservative one), Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett's appointment was marked by drama (as is anything Donald Trump is involved in), but, as I said in my post when RBG passed , it is important not to let the drama overshadow Ginsburg's legacy. Special thanks to #IMWAYR blogger Shaye

OK, before we get to today's review, I have to vent. Today, in our house, we kept hearing a smoke alarm chirping as if the battery was low. Normally, smoke alarms chirp every few seconds, but this one was really irregular. Sometimes it would chirp, and then it would go silent. So my family and I ran around the house, trying to find this alarm every time we heard it. But it was absolutely bizarre: every time we ran toward the sound, it sounded like it was coming from a different place. We went upstairs, but then it was downstairs. We went downstairs, and then it was on the other side of the house. We went to the other side of the house, and then it was upstairs again. We. Could. Not. Find. It. We spent hours  running around, pulling batteries out of five smoke alarms, putting them back in, testing them, wondering if our whole interconnected system was broken, Googling articles about how to find a chirping smoke alarm, and generally agonizing. And then—this is what really kills me—my

YES!!! I am so glad that Biden and Harris have won the U.S. presidency/vice-presidency. I try not to get political on this blog, but it's hard to spotlight and value different perspectives in books when the president is screaming hateful rhetoric for four years straight. Obviously, this win will not solve all of America's problems, and depending on the results of the Senate elections, it may not allow for any real policy improvements, but at least we can sleep at night knowing a reasonable person has the nuclear codes and veto power. This is an unusual post, because I didn't read a YA book to review for my #IMWAYR-only post this week, so I have a picture book instead: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse  by Charlie Mackesy. I also decided to post two reviews of movie adaptations of books I reviewed a while back. I actually meant to put these up around 3 months ago, but I was going to wait until I had time to watch the movie adaptation of The Hate U Give  with my famil