Completely Full Bookshelf

I hope everyone is doing well! I know I already did this last week , but I have yet another movie to wholeheartedly recommend to you all—I just saw the Netflix original movie The Half of It , and I can confidently say that is is 100% a new favorite movie of mine! All the characters—Ellie, Paul, Aster, everyone —are so layered and so compelling, there's so much real-world insight into love and teenage awkwardness and small-town life, there's meaningful explorations of diversity, every single scene was made with a keen eye for what every single character is feeling in that moment, and the movie is cinematically just beautiful! I was seriously blown out of the water—it's definitely worth a watch! And now for the review! I was going to post a different review in my backlog, but because I need to revise it and I don't want to deal with it today, I'm just going against my own schedule and posting this review today! I'm excited to show you all this wonderfully delightf...

Before I dive into my review (ha—get it?), I have a few quick things to mention. First of all, I recently had the chance to watch Disney's newest animated film, Encanto , and it is SO GOOD that I cannot believe it! It has it all—a totally awesome protagonist who defies the typical Disney Princess stereotypes (in fact, her foil is a Disney Princess-esque older sister who she does not  get along with), a compelling plot with some serious emotional beats and insight, absolutely gorgeous visuals that you can't look away from, and quite a few original songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda that are so catchy they'll be stuck in your head, but so lyrically clever you'll be glad for the chance to hear them again and again and to pick out all the details you missed! If you were thinking Encanto  sounded meh and you would skip it, well, think again. (Oh, and while we're on the topic of animated movies, have y'all seen the trailer for the next Pixar movie, Turning Red ? It looks SO...

Hello everyone! If you're reading this on Monday, I'd like to wish you a happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day! This past college semester, I took a class where we read King's Letter from Birmingham Jail , and he made a very profound point that I wanted to share. He discussed people's insistence that Black people just remain "patient" and wait for change to arrive naturally, before pointing out that change does not, in fact, just arrive over time—it takes specific actions on the part of the public to make it happen. I think so many of us nowadays sometimes feel like we need to be patient and allow change to be made incrementally, but we can see that the decades and decades Black people waited for change actually resulted in stagnancy and no change  until they started a movement in the 1960s. I think it's worth remembering with many of today's issues that maybe we don't need to wait for change at all—maybe we need to demand change now , because that may...

The moment has come...I'm participating in #MustReadIn2022! I've seen many of my fellow kidlit bloggers participating in this challenge (including Cheriee Weichel at Library Matters , who cohosts the challenge with Leigh Anne Eck at A Day in the Life ), and I don't participate in too many reading challenges, but this one seemed like a great opportunity to get to some books/authors that I've been waiting to read for far too long! By the way, if you want to learn more about the challenge or enter, you can do so here! Here are my picks for the challenge: First of all: yes, I spent an unreasonably long amount of time designing that graphic in Canva. But, I was planning to start learning how to use Canva over the break, so at least I made progress there—it really is surprisingly easy to use as far as graphic design programs go! Now let's see the full details of what I'm planning to read. And if you're looking at this post throughout the year and want to see which...

( Update:  I wanted to announce that I'm participating in #MustReadIn2022 this year! Click here to see what I'll be reading. ) It's time for another round of Picture Book Pandemonium! My plan is for this to be my last picture book post for a while, since I have a bazillion reviews already waiting to be posted and a bazillion full novels/graphic novels that I really  want to read AND  a bunch of Cybils finalists that I hope to discuss once the winners are announced and I'm allowed to post about them! So I've crammed 4 books into this post that I wanted to talk about now—let's take a look at them! My Rainbow Written by Trinity Neal and DeShanna Neal Illustrated by Art Twink Preview the illustrations on Amazon         A little over a year ago, Lisa Maucione at Literacy on the Mind  recommended this book, and I would have read it a lot sooner except that my library just recently added it on Libby. So I finally read it now, and it is great!!!   ...

It's time for my last Thursday Thoughts post until the summer! (I'm skipping the post I had considered for 1/13, because I'm tired—what can I say?) Also, before my post, I must share some completely random news: I just found out that one of my favorite graphic novelists, Svetlana Chmakova, is coming out with the sequel to Awkward , Brave , Crush , and Diary , called Enemies , in September! Here are the details. It's a long wait, but it will be so  worth it! Today, I'm posting my second-ever Reviews Revisited post, in which I look back over a 6-month period of books to see if they ended up being as memorable as I thought they would be when I reviewed them. Rather than looking at the previous 6 months (which would include books at the end that I had literally just finished), I actually look at the 6 months before that, so this post covers January – June 2021 rather than July – December 2021 (I'll look at those books in July 2022). Let's dive in! (Please not...