Tessa lives in a dystopian nation where both political rights and personal rights like literacy and freedom of religion have been stripped from the populace. Her brother Theo has recently disappeared, and everyone is expected to pretend like he never existed, but when her elder neighbor Miriam leaves her some boxes behind as she moves into Elder Care, she learns that books are truly magical and may be the solution to finding Theo.

I thought the worldbuilding in this book was well done. It’s sort of a hybrid of science fiction and fantasy, although the reason that books can act as portals to other universes was never really explained. If you like books where a sort of wonder is maintained and the reasons behind the fantasy mechanisms aren’t explained, that may not bother you, but if you more prefer things on the science fiction side that may be a problem for you.

There was a surprising amount of religious theming in this book as well. This would be good for children who want to read speculative fiction but still have their stories grounded in faith. The family also all clearly loves each other, and the adults (Tessa and Theo’s parents and their neighbor) are more useful in this book than they are in a lot of middle grade fiction. If you’re frustrated by middle grade protagonists always saving the world on their own without parents who believe something bad is happening, this book is the antidote to that.

I had a problem with both the pacing and with the gender dynamics in this book. The characters didn’t start solving the problem until about 3/4 of the way through the book, so it felt very rushed. It also seemed like the ending was too easy for a dystopian book. It also seemed somewhat anti-feminist to me, as Tessa’s brother and her father are written as genuises and they leave their wife and daughter out of a lot of things because they allegedly won’t understand them. Tessa and her mother are of normal intelligence, and they mostly solve things through their emotions. It’s little messages like this that can tell girls that they’re not smart enough for science and normalize young girls being left out of things they could understand if it was just explained to them.

This book would be good for parents who are looking for a speculative fiction book for their children that’s age-appropriate but still has faith as a strong theme. I’d recommend it to fans of Margaret Peterson Haddix’s The Shadow Children series or of The Chronicles of Narnia, but I wouldn’t say it’s as similar to The Giver as the marketing material implies.

Building 903 releases September 26 from Clarion Books. Thank you to Netgalley, Lois Lowry and HarperCollins Children’s Books for the ARC. All opinions are my own.

DNF @ 37%

This book seemed promising to me, but in the end I ended up DNFing it. True Color is primarily the history of the inclusion of color in third edition of the unabridged Merriam-Webster dictionary. I think I misunderstood what the book was about when I chose to read it on here. I was less interested in the discussion of the interpersonal drama among the editors of the dictionary than I was in the discussion of color and etymology in this book. True Color would have been more interesting to me if it focused more on the history of color (like how it became standardized during the war due to a need to keep army uniforms a very specific color) and less on the interpersonal dramas of the dictionary editors. This book wasn't for me, but if you're interested in a book that's half biography of dictionary editors and half the science of color, you may enjoy it. I did enjoy the whimsical tone, although the author's snarkiness did get somewhat repetitive.

True Color releases March 31 from Knopf. Thank you to Netgalley, Knopf and Kory Stamper for the ARC. All opinions are my own.