Good Different by Meg Eden Kuyatt .  I read this book yesterday, from cover to cover, in a about 1-2 hours.  It's a story that's written in poems.  It's about a teen named Selah who's different and has a List of How to Be Normal and wears a Normal-Person Mask.  As the school year progresses, she ends up learning that she's not damaged or dangerous, instead she's autistic.  She becomes empowered by this truth and uses her poetry to educate her family and school. She also loves dragons.  When I was reading the beginning of the book, I kept thinking to my old love of dragons, too.  When I was a kid/teen/young adult, I loved dragons.  They were my travel companions.  Anytime I'd get in the car, I'd look out the window and seeing a world of dragon and the human living and coexisting with them.  Dragons of all different shapes and sizes.   I had names and species information about them all. I'd draw them in notebooks and wri...

 Again, I'm not a professional blogger or book reviewer, just a lover of books and writing. Seeing that I don't have any more Goddess Girls or Thunder Girls books on hand, I decided to read something more for my age and something a little bit closer to Norse Mythology: The Witch's Heart by Genevieve Gornichec . The story is about Angrboda, Gullveig, seidr, her relationships with Loki and Skadi, she and Loki's children, Odin, Ragnarok, and the new world born from Surt's fires and ash.  It's about love and friendship, betrayal and loss, healing, rage, and finding oneself.  I loved how the author weaved the surviving myths together, filling in chunks that we just don't have, as we only have what's survived with her own imagination. I laughed and cried, and really felt Angrboda's pain and strength. I think it's a beautiful story, skillfully written, and one of my favorite retellings of modern mythology so far. It also highlights the issue of why...

Needing some feel-good happy energies, I've been checking the middle grade school level books Goddess Girls and Thunder Girls by Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams . Yes, even at 40-years-old I still enjoy reading children, teen, and young adult books.  It's good for my Inner Child and I don't care what others think I should be reading at my age!  I read plenty of scholar-level books.  My brain and soul needs a break from time-to-time.  Plus I have kids in elementary and middle school--I like to check out what they're reading or may want to read. * Just a heads up, I'm fairly new to writing my own book reviews.  I am far from a professional.  This post derails few times.  I enjoyed these books and felt like talking about them, and maybe others will want to check them out, too. I also have dyslexia and I don't have an editor. * The Goddess Girls deal with Greek Mythology and the Thunder Girls with Norse Mythology. Although neither are true to those a...