Today @KirkusReviews...

...I wrote about Margo Rabb's Kissing in America, WHICH IS SO GOOD, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PRE-ORDER IT RIGHT NOW:

I loved everything—EVERYTHING—about it, about Eva and her story and THE UTTER JOY of her habit of fantasizing about her life using Stereotypical Paperback Romance Voice:

Will took off his cowboy hat. As the moon rose into a perfect crescent in the indigo sky, he told her, “I know everybody supposes I’ll head off to Santa Cruz, but I ain’t goin’. I’m stayin’ here with you, Miss Eva. Now get over here and lie down with me by the creek on this bed of moss.”

And of COURSE I loved the parts of the trip where she actually MEETS real cowboys and experiences real ranch life and her fantastic back-and-forths with Annie and HOO-BOY her relationship with her mother and the depictions of peoples’ very different ways of working through grief, but as a librarian and a reading evangelist and a person who wholeheartedly believes in the power of story, I feel that I have to mention the thread about reading shaming. Because as much as I loved everything else about this book, that thread—which will be a relatively minor one for most readers—resonated with me so, so powerfully.