Bayou Bytes Blog

Oh, did you want to hear about a mermaid story? No, not the delayed live-action Disney movie remake... I'm talking about the horrifying Jackson Pierce retelling of the Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Anderson. Half of this book is so, so good. And the other half is just...okay.  That's actually a great way to describe the main character Lo. Lo is a water nymph-- not explicitly a mermaid-- who dwells with her sisters beneath the ocean waves.  Lo and her sisters used to be mortal human girls before the ocean swallowed them whole-- but their mortal lives, memories, and identities have slowly eroded in the wake of their eternal hedonistic lives that the nymphs enjoy under the sea.  The water nymphs will shed their humanity underwater for as long as it will take. Once a water nymph has shed the last of her humanity, she'll ascend the waves and become part of the ocean. But after Lo rescues a mortal boy from drowning, she begins to realize she's curious about the person she...

What exactly is so valuable about feeling... human? Human beings measure their lives by years, but for the faeries in An Enchantment of Ravens by Margaret Rogerson , a century can go by within a snap of their fingers. Faeries are immortal and impervious to aging, but the inevitable trade-off to immortality is the lack of a full range of emotions and individual expression. Faeries simply exist; most of the time, they exist without feeling anything but simple contentment, displeasure, curiosity, and confusion.  Confusion is their primary feeling about the human world. Human emotion (and any expression of those emotions through art) both fascinates them and confuses them. Fortunately for 17-year-old Isobel, a human girl living in a human settlement near the faerie courts, these immortal faeries are thrilled to grant special enchantments to humans that can create or demonstrate a skill that faeries can't replicate for themselves. Isobel is young, but she's a renowned master of pain...

I stumbled upon The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels after putting down several other titles in frustrations. I had never heard of it and went in with low expectations. I was pleasantly surprised.  The Wisteria Society is an organization of some of England's most proper and courteous women. They also happen to be pirates. With houses that use an ancient Latin incantation to fly about.  It is absurd and wonderful. Cecilia is a junior member, raised by her aunt and the other Wisteria women, she hopes to be promoted to senior member soon. When Ned Lightborne shows up, admitting he's been hired to kill her, she is delighted. Surely having been deemed important enough to assassinate will prove her worth to the Wisteria Society.  But when the villainous pirate captain Morvath shows up and kidnaps the Wisteria ladies, Cecilia is forced to team up with Ned in order to infiltrate Morvath's flying fortress and rescue her society.  This was a delightful read. It's a charmin...

Let's imagine, for a moment, that you're an innocent bystander in a superhero story.  Sailor Moon: Meme Princess The bad guys have you cornered-- but then, from almost out of nowhere, a superheroine interrupts the action. Whew! What a relief! You're saved! Sort of.  She didn't yank the bad guy away from you with a golden lasso. She doesn't incapacitate anyone with expert martial arts action or sneak up on anyone with world-class stealth.  She doesn't even seem to want to be there. It then starts to dawn on you -- as you watch your superheroine run in terror from the fight she started with the bad guys -- that she doesn't seem like she wants to be a heroine at all.  Oh, well. At least she showed up.  Sailor Moon, or Usagi "Serena" Tsukino, first made her way from Japan to American audiences via the Toonami block on Cartoon Network about 25 years ago. No one-- not even the Powerpuff girls-- defeats the forces of evil with 90s girl power more effecti...

       The beginning of the popularity of the Internet as we  vaguely remember  it: dial-up, cherished cassette tapes, and grunge. It’s the 90’s after all in Matthew Bogart and Jesse Holden’s Young Adult  g raphic  n ovel, Incredible Doom.          As the chapters alternate, so do the POVs. There’s only child Allison,  who’s been forced to be a magician’s assistant for her controlling dad.  Then there’s Richard,  a   new kid in town, struggling to make friends.  Both teens find  solace in the Bullet in Board System (BBS) , a virtual community before the World Wide Web was a thing.  At the time, members joined up with  their local BBS to avoid International-calling fees.   Its local option led   to  Allison meet ing  Samir, and Richard meet ing  Tina, his  defense against bullies.        The authors paint their realistic story ...

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...

She Drives Me Crazy combines two of the best romance tropes in a combination similar to Red, White, and Royal Blue that I simply can't pass up. An accident forces together mortal enemies when gorgeous, popular Irene Abraham accidentally crashes into Scottie Zajac. When their parents arrive to work out the insurance details, they pretend to be friends to avoid some awkwardness. Maybe they were a little too convincing because now Scottie has to drive Irene to school until her car can get repaired. They spend a week antagonizing each other, until Scottie realizes that dating a perfect cheerleader like Irene would be just the thing to drive her ex crazy. So she proposes a fake dating scheme, and to her amazement Irene agrees.  Kelly Quindlen used two of my favorite tropes in this work, so I certainly enjoyed it. It's a sweet and simple plot with a lot of drama. But I enjoyed how Quindlen emphasized healthy relationships, healing post-breakup, and finding yourself before finding a...

In this dark retelling of Sleeping Beauty, Walter breaks down the classic elements to create a drastically different story. Alyce is half Vila, a Fae race known for their cruelty and destructive magic. Alyce isn't thrilled that her powers can only bring destruction, but her life selling petty curses to petty nobles isn't particularly awful.   Until she meets Princess Aurora, the last heir to the Briar throne. Like every woman in the royal line, Aurora is cursed and will die if she doesn't find true love by her twenty-first birthday. Her older sisters have already fallen victim to the curse, and if Aurora doesn't break it the line will end and the kingdom will fall into turmoil. Her parents present her with suitor after suitor in desperation, but Aurora would rather break the curse on her own. And who better to help her than Alyce. If Vila magic is responsible for the curse, maybe a Vila like Alyce is just the one to break it.  I thought that the demand for fairytale ret...

Every Reason We Shouldn’t is a YA ice-skating romance. Fifteen-year-old Olivia is a Japanese American figure skating champion. Or she was, before she blew a big performance last year and washed out of her Olympic dreams. Now she’s adjusting to life as a “normal” teen. She’s back in public school and working at her parents’ ice skating rink, teaching six-year-olds how to skate.   Then Jonah Choi shows up, buying private ice time every day to practice his speed skating. Jonah and Olivia immediately hit it off. They share the intense and isolating experiences of child professional athletes and they develop a playful rivalry that pushes them both to train harder.   This was a cute story. It’s a light romance, aimed at younger teens, and the love story is intertwined with Olivia’s struggle with whether she should return to professional skating. The narrative also touches on some tough topics, like the pressure to succeed that child athletes often experience, as w...

The book that started it all... Very rarely do I pick up books with covers that feature a fetching young woman in 1920's garb, looking resolute, worried, or scared. These always end up being campy, poorly written, and redundant. However, in 2013, I picked up The Haunting of Maddy Clare (2012) by Simone St. James and thought, "What the heck? Let's go for it." I read it in one day. It was full of intrigue, historical accuracy, clever women, fighting the patriarchy, sexual tension (St. James can paint a steamy picture!), and, possibly best of all, ghosts. I made my mother read it, I did an entire display around it at my library job, and then unfortunately for me, forgot about it. Fast forward five years later, when I check out Lost Among the Living (2016). I read the other five St. James novels in a month. And am still obsessing over them. Simone St. James Simone St. James is a Canadian author who worked in television before becoming an author. She has made ...