Bookcase Bizarro: MG/YA Book Reviews, September 2025

MG/YA Book Reviews by a MG/YA Writer

Welcome to the September edition of Bookcase Bizarro!

In author news, I’ve started revisions on Rogue Wizard, a Garrison Creek prequel novella that features our spirited wizard friend, Colin.

Colin longs to be recognized as the top magical technology student at the St. Anselm’s Boarding School for Orphans. He’s also a wizard, a secret he guards closely since wizards are outlawed in the settlement of Garrison Creek. Rather than learning to cast spells, Colin decides to use his wizardry to give him an edge over the other students. His conjurements are so fast, so good. His best friend, Ermin, warns him he’s showing less and less control over his wizardry, but Colin refuses to believe her. The sooner he can make it to the top spot, the safer he’ll be. Nobody will think to accuse him of being a wizard then. He won’t have to worry about being hunted down by the Magistrates and expelled from the Creek ever again.

When Colin inadvertently unleashes a dangerous conjurement on his top rival to stop her from taking first place, Miss Fetchkeep, the headmistress, summons the Magistrates to the school to examine both students for signs of wizardry. Colin discovers the Magistrates’ plan to force the students to fight a magical duel with each other until the real wizard loses control and reveals themselves. Colin has studied none of the spells the Magistrates will expect him to perform, and he can’t use conjurements for fear of being detected. How will he survive the duel without unmasking himself as a wizard, especially when he can barely control his power?

All current subscribers will get a free ebook of Rogue Wizard, since I’ll be using it as a reader magnet to attract more signups to my blog newsletter. I don’t have a timeline or release date yet. I should have a better idea once I’ve completed the developmental edits.

Dropping social media has been GREAT. Still, writers who do this are in the minority, so I asked indie author Joanna Penn about her social media use. I’m a member of her Patreon group, and I noticed that she’s stopped using social media as well. Joanna’s a highly successful author at the peak of her career, and I’m just beginning mine, so I was curious about what she would say. Here’s my question and her answer (edited for clarity):

Question: I'm on Instagram and my posts get very little engagement these days. Is my content even showing up in my followers feeds anymore? If not, what's the point? Lately I've refocused my efforts on my website, blog newsletter and writing more books. I'm keeping Instagram to announce new posts and releases. I might be in the minority here, but
I'm starting to think of social media more as a placeholder while my real networking and community building happens elsewhere. Any thoughts? 

Answer: Linda, I totally agree with you. I saw this thing somewhere that said Generation X, and I'm Generation X, I'm not sure what you are, but Generation X uses Instagram as a photo album. And I was like, yes. Isn't that what it's meant to be? And of course it isn't. It isn't meant to be that, especially with short form video. 

So the point is Instagram, any social media, TikTok, even X, like any of Facebook, they all have rules. Rules in inverted commas, and they have algorithms and if you are actively using social media for book marketing, you need to be doing a heck of a lot more than just sticking up some photos now and then, which is what I do.

So Linda, it sounds like you are pretty similar, and if you want to do well on social media now you actually need to make a study of it and you need to be doing it every day. You need to be a heavy user of it. Like the people I know who are really doing incredibly well on TikTok, they spend a lot of time on it and they make a lot of content and they're always experimenting with different things, and sure they're doing amazing financially, but you have to decide how you want to spend your time.

And Linda, it sounds like you would rather spend your time doing other things. Me too. So my community building is partly this. So I have my Patreon, which is my community You lot. Thank you very much. And I guess I, my podcast brings people in and for my fiction, it really is my email list. So yeah, you just have to decide what you want.

And if you are not seeing any real benefit from social media, then the question is, do you still enjoy it enough? And like I said, I really use my Instagram and it automatically posts to Facebook to just prove I'm human, to prove I'm still alive...

..this does come back to all these sort of questions about why do we do certain things and is it just an ego thing that we get X number of. Follows or comments on a post or whatever, versus a real reason why we want to build content for the long term.

So again, you have to think about it, but certainly Linda, for sure. I think social media for me is similar to you. It's just sort of proof of humanity. 

I’d rather release free, long-form content here on my blog every month. A monthly schedule gives me enough time to produce a thoughtful piece without interfering with my book writing, and keeps me engaged with other bloggers and readers, especially when paired with commenting on other people’s blogs. Like Joanna, I’m hyper-focused on building my mailing list for long-term marketing. When I have 3-4 books out, I’ll start adding in some free and paid promotions, and I’ll continue to focus on getting reviews. I’m very interested in getting into libraries, and have enabled pay-per-click purchases, and DRM-free ebooks that won’t expire to encourage this. I don’t plan to run ads in the near or foreseeable future. Slow, sustainable growth. That’s what I’m aiming for.

And speaking of sustainable futures…

This month, we explore what life looks like after a permanent blackout shuts down a northern Anishinaabe community. Then we accompany a scouting party as they journey south through a ruined world on a quest to reclaim their stolen homeland. I’m reviewing a post-apocalyptic duology on Bookcase Bizarro that asks: What does an apocalypse look like to people who’ve previously experienced the end of the world—and survived?

A quick note to new readers: books that are available from the Toronto Public Library will be marked #TPL, because books don’t have to be new or owned in order to be loved.

YA+ Book Reviews

When Evan Whitesky’s small Anishinaabe community goes dark, there’s no time to wonder how it happened or how long the blackout will last. It’s winter, and without power or deliveries from the south, people will go hungry. And worse. It’s only a matter of time before survivors—intruders—arrive from the south. Desperate. Hungry. Determined. Like Justin Scott, a white man who insinuates himself into the community, preying on people’s fears as the community’s leadership crumbles. Repelled by Scott and frustrated by the leaders’ ineffective governance, Evan and his group of friends turn to traditional ways and teachings to restore some semblance of order while Scott’s destructive influence threatens to destroy everything they’ve worked for and the community itself.

---

Evan’s journey continues in Moon of the Turning Leaves. Over 10 years after the blackout, hunger once again threatens Evan Whitesky’s small community. Dwindling resources mean that the site they’ve chosen will no longer support them, especially as the community continues to grow. Evan’s newborn granddaughter is among the new arrivals. A few years ago, the community provisioned a scouting party to go south in search of a new home, but no one returned. In the face of this latest crisis, a new generation of young scouts, including Evan’s daughter, Nangohns, persuades the reluctant community to let them go south once more in search of their ancestral homeland. Evan decides to accompany his daughter and her friends on the journey. As they set out, Evan, Nangohns and their friends have no idea of the dangers they will face, or just how much their journey will cost them.

---

I’m embarrassed to confess how long Moon of the Crusted Snow lingered on my TBR pile. This turned out to be a good thing because I got to read Moon of the Turning Leaves right after it. Author Waubgeshig Rice hadn’t intended to write a sequel, but fans kept pestering him for it. While most readers loved Moon of the Crusted Snow, reviews of the second book are decidedly mixed. As someone who loves both books, I thought I’d spend some time unpacking why I think this may have happened and to encourage readers to be open to what Rice is trying to do in Leaves.

While both books fall under the post-apocalyptic banner, Moon of the Crusted Snow is more tightly focused on the end-of-the-world event itself. It’s the story of a struggle between good and evil with an integral—and horrific—mystery at its core. Several themes about colonialism are woven into the story. Rice said in an interview at the Kitchener Public Library in 2024 that his intention was to flip post-apocalyptic tropes on their heads by putting indigenous voices at the centre. He’s definitely done that and provided a fast-paced read, which is exactly what you’d expect in a post-apocalyptic, good-vs. evil thriller.

Rice also sees the opportunity for renewal beyond the destruction. In Moon of the Turning Leaves, Rice devotes a whole book to exploring that renewal. Here, the action isn’t oriented around defeating an antagonist or solving a grisly mystery, yet the stakes are no less stark: if Evan and his community cannot find a new place to live, they will slowly starve. The land itself sets the pace for this story. How the characters move through it and respond to the land is central, emphasizing a return to traditional teachings and land-based knowledge. In the interview, Rice explains that teaching is passed on in the context of doing things as a way to remember that knowledge:

Telling a story about how things were made around you or why certain things are the way they are, it becomes a part of every action. So when you’re out there harvesting birch bark or sumac or dandelions or whatever, the older person who’s with you is telling you the story behind those things, what they do, how they came to be and and what you have to do with them in your community. Land knowledge, passing everything down is embedded in everything you do, says Rice. That’s part of how we are as Anishinabek, how things stayed alive for thousands of years prior to anything being recorded in any way. It helps people mentally and spiritually to recite these things to other people all the time.

Rice mirrors this teaching in context for his readers by embedding Anishinaabe words into the text of the story itself, careful to layer in enough English so readers can learn some Anishinaabemowin as they read. And he mirrors this in the story itself by making the land an active part of the plot: potentially hazardous even while it holds the key to the community’s future.

Rice says that his characters were still figuring out what time was in a world where clocks don’t matter. The characters must take their cues from light, and the seasons, and the weather, learning from the land what they should do and the potential outcomes of each action. The necessity of having to find food, water and shelter on the trail forces the characters to take action or develop goals, as do several hair-raising encounters with a racist militia called The Disciples. Nangohns and her party are aiming for their ancestral homelands on the north shore of Georgian Bay, nearly 500 miles one way on foot, and Rice maintains the tension of not knowing whether they will ever reach it, or what they may find there if they do. The land literally guides them. Maps have become irrelevant as infrastructure decays:

The land itself wiped the temporary lines from collective memory, leaving only the boundaries that mattered most: the weaving rivers, the zigzagging shorelines, and the subtle, irregular slopes of the hills and valleys.

The pacing of Leaves is quite different from that of Snow. Leaves is fundamentally a quest story set in a post-apocalyptic world, where action is shaped by its characters’ responses to the land they move through, rather than a central evil they must defeat. If readers are expecting another thriller, they might well be disappointed. If readers are wiling to take Leaves on its own terms, they will be rewarded with an emotionally complex and moving story that delivers a message of renewal that is in no way contrived or unrealistic.

In a nice twist, Rice asks us to re-examine our ideas of a post-apocalyptic world when an elder reminds Evan that Indigenous people have already experienced the apocalypse time and time again through broken treaties, the displacement forced on their communities by colonialism and residential schools. Each time, they survived. With the traditional skills and knowledge passed down by their elders, Evan’s community is well-positioned for life in the bush. They’re also working to restore a sense of hope and harmony they themselves have rarely experienced to future generations. Rice suggests that the end of the world may actually be a beginning for indigenous people, who are liberated from the state and are free to reclaim their sovereignty and their stolen ancestral lands. For them, the dystopia is over, even if life is still precarious and difficult.

Leaves also has a tender father-daughter story at its core: between Evan Whitesky and his teenage daughter Nangohns. I love that he trusts her to handle herself, with not a single hint of sexism. Nangohns is one of the best hunters in her community, and Evan recognizes her leadership skills throughout the book. My one quibble was minor. I would have loved more details about how people functioned without eyeglasses or indoor light, how they would keep water and snow out of their lodges once canvas and plastic tarps disintegrated, and how they warded off the clouds of mosquitoes and biting flies during their trek when they couldn’t build fires?

Highly recommended for 15+ readers, who would enjoy this new twist on post-apocalyptic literature, if they are willing to approach each book on its own terms. (#TPL)

In the Garden

When I began to garden 27 years ago, the lack of pictures that showed plants at the various stages of their lives often frustrated me. It took me a while to realize that all the pictures in books showed plants at their most lush, not what they look like when diseases and bugs have taken their toll, or when older leaves die back as the plants direct more energy into making seeds and fruit. I can’t tell you the number of hours I wasted fretting over my plants because they didn’t look like the ones pictured in gardening books.

It was only after I realized what was going on that I began to appreciate the beauty of plants throughout their life cycle, including death. For me, late August and early September are times to celebrate both endings and beginnings in the garden.

(FROM LEFT-RIGHT, TOP-BOTTOM)

I left my peas to die out naturally, as the scorching hot weather made it difficult to plant more greens. That will change next year, since my irrigation system will make it possible to grow fruiting crops even when I’m away. Timed, regular irrigation was a great success. The plants absolutely thrived under a straw mulch with regular, early-morning watering. The nice thing about a timer is that I can customize watering schedules as needed. Daily watering during a heat wave changes to every two or three days as the weather grows cooler, or not at all in cool, rainy weather.

I let my arugula go to seed in order to replenish my seed supply, and several new plants self-seeded. I’ll inter-plant them with lettuce seedlings, and plant more lettuce and mild mustard greens in the other pots to carry through autumn into winter. The chard and herbs will carry through as well, but I’ll bring the rosemary and oregano inside to overwinter.

I like to start my seeds in trays and grow them in sunlight to transplant size wherever possible. This saves me from having to harden them off. This won’t work for peppers or tomatoes, which I’ll start indoors.

The Sweet Alyssum got buried by lettuce this year. The plants are only supposed to grow to 6 inches, but they grew to 18 inches to escape the lettuce! Next year, they’ll get their own container. They attracted tons of beneficial insects to the garden. So far, I haven’t seen a single aphid.

---

Thirteen-year-old Ermin is a gifted mechanic and the worst student at St. Anselm’s Training School for Orphans. She’s just failed her exams for the third time—something nobody’s ever done. Worse, Ermin’s been running her own repair business for money—something that’s expressly forbidden. If the headmistress finds out, Ermin will go to prison. Her future will be over before it’s even begun.

But that’s not her only secret.

Her best friends, Colin and Georgie, are wizards in a world where magic is strictly controlled. Ermin worries that her friends will be captured, drained of their power, then banished. When Georgie’s caught aiding the Wizard’s Resistance, Ermin repairs a broken flying carpet so all three of them can escape.

Hesitant to join the Resistance because of her lack of magical power, Ermin steals an experimental device from a wizard hunter that could destroy every wizard in the Creek. She’s faced with a choice: either smash the device or convert it into a different kind of weapon—one that not only helps wizards but just might get her an apprenticeship at the prestigious Guild Academy.

Ermin’s got one chance to get it right. If she fails, she risks losing her two best friends… and her dreams.

Find Shadow Apprentice at your local library, bookstore, or favourite online retailer.

---

Thanks for being a Bookcase Bizarro reader! I’ll be back next month with more author news, and more MG and YA book reviews. See you then!

---