During 2024 I worked on trying to write at least a sentence or two on Goodreads for each book that I finished. I definitely want to continue that into this year, and hopefully try to expand to slightly longer reviews again! In the meantime, what I have now is perfect for sharing for these Monday Minis! So for today’s Monday Mini I wanted share some thoughts on a few of my underrated reads from 2024.

This was an absolute gem of a book.

After 5 years of living in China with her grandmother, 10 year old Lina is finally able to move to the US to join her parents and her younger sister. As soon as she steps off of the plane in Los Angeles, she soon learns that her family’s life is not as wonderful as they had made it sound in their letters.

I was 13 when my family moved to Canada and I related so much to Lina’s experiences of immigrating. School was so different and while I understood English, I didn’t understand a lot of the slang and I was afraid of mispronouncing words so I opted to talk as little as possible. Reading about Lina’s struggles brought me to that time in my childhood and while I never had a book like this growing up where I could see my experiences in a book, I’m glad it exists now and more kids (and adults!) like me can read it.

This is one of my favourite 2022 releases. Meredith hasn’t left her home for over 1000 days. She works from home and lives with her cat Fred, and loves to read, bake, and do jigsaw puzzles in her free time. She has a best friend named Sadie, an online friend Celeste, and Tom, someone sent from a charity organization to be her ‘friend.’ The more we get to know Meredith, the more we peel back the layers of why she doesn’t want to go outside.

It’s been a while since I’ve shared some of these mini reviews! Okay fine, it’s been a while since I shared any reviews in general. I thought this would be a great way to start doing it again. These aren’t all of my most recent reads. But! They are ones that I wanted to highlight and ones that stuck out to me. Also I just realized that each one is a different genre!! We’ve got contemporary, horror, fantasy, and science fiction. I guess I read across quite a few genres, not just sci-fi and fantasy!