Bayou Bytes Blog

 Devon Richards and Chiamaka Adebayo are the only two Black students at Niveus Private Academy. It’s their senior year and everything seems promising. Chiamaka is popular, has great grades, and is on track to get into Yale and become a great doctor. Devon is working on a piano arrangement he hopes is good enough to get into Juilliard.   When they're both named class prefects, the year seems to be off to a great start. But then an anonymous text get sent to the entire student body. The sender, Aces, reveals a new dirty little secret with each new message. But is only targeting Chiamaka and Devon.   Determined not to let Aces win, Devon and Chiamaka team up to find out who Aces is and why they're being targeted.   This YA novel is absolutely worth the read. It's well-written, full of suspense, and every move Aces makes is absolutely horrifying. As the story moves along it only grows more intense, and I wondered how the author would possibly pull together...

So Meddelin Chan accidentally killed her blind date. In self-defense, but still. Now, at 3AM, her mother and three aunties crowd around the kitchen table planning how to get rid of the body.  They have a solid plan set out. But it will have to wait until after the huge wedding their company is working in the morning. So they set the body to chill in one of the aunt's cake coolers, where it can wait until safely after the ceremony.  But when one of the baker's assistants sends off the wrong cooler, the Chans find their corpse at the wedding venue. They'll have to scramble to keep the body secret and make sure the biggest, most important wedding the Chans have ever taken on is a success.  And it doesn't help that Meddelin's ex-boyfriend, the one that got away, happens to be at the venue. She'd love to reconnect with him, but he really does show up at the worst possible time... This was a delightful read. It was funny, touching, and absolutely a little harrowing wa...

  Hani and Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating follows two sixteen year old Bengali girls in Ireland.   Hani comes out to her friends and they pull some classic biphobia – how can Hani *know* she's bi is she's never dated a girl? Fed up, Hani lies and tells them she is in fact dating someone. Ishu, the only other Bengali girl in class, who she's barely spoken to.  Ishu is cold and distant, unwilling to put up with class drama and determined to show her parents she's on the right track in life. To prove it to them, she plans on being voted Head Girl, on top of getting top marks in her classes. But Head Girl is a popularity contest, and Ishu's not exactly popular.   So the two agree to a fake dating scheme.   This has all the classic fake dating tropes. Fake-dating-whoops-real-dating and the classic grumpy one/happy one pairing. And it's wonderfully diverse.  I really enjoyed this story. It was well done, had all my favorite tropes, and provided an ex...

I picked up Salvation Day because it was included on a list of Luminous Dead read-alikes. It's been two years since I've read The Luminous Dead , and I still bring it up every chance I get. So I should have known I'd be a little disappointed by anything I tried to compare to it.  Still, Wallace wrote a solid story. Salvation Day switches back and forth between two narrators.  Jaswinder Bhattacharya was the sole survivor of the House of Wisdom disaster. Ten years ago, when he was just twelve, a deadly virus broke out aboard the space station, killing everyone within 24 hours.   House of Wisdom has floated silently in orbit for ten years, and Jas has spent each one trying to forget that fateful day.   But Jas is the only person who can open the genetic locks aboard the ship, and Zahra and her crew need him. They're outsiders, brought together by a man named Adam, who has a plan to free them all from Earth's oppressive government.   If they can ab...