Katie is a born and raised Bendite who graduated from Mountain View High School in 2017. She then went on to receive her Bachelors in Agricultural Science from OSU Corvallis in 2020. She spends her free time exploring Central Oregon and traveling when she can. She loves collecting vinyl records, listening to music (of all kinds), writing poetry, and getting creative anyway she can!
Katie mostly enjoys reading Young Adult Fiction, Fantasy and Sci-Fi, Historical Fiction, and Poetry. Magical realism, in-depth world building, and strong character development are some of the things Katie looks for most in a good book. She is always reading something new, and loves nothing more than to recommend or talk about books with fellow readers and customers. Ask her for some of her favorite reads when you see her in the store!
The perfect combination of Derry Girls and The Craft, All Our Hidden Gifts is the story of an Irish Highschooler who, after finding a mysterious deck of tarot cards, accidentally makes her ex-best friend disappear. The trip to get her back is full of magic, misadventure, and the occasional religious cult using Christianity as a cover for dark magic. I loved this book, it's queer representation, and it's completely accurate description of High School life as a determined, Irish Witch.
If you're looking for a dark, witty, gruesome fantasy about lesbian necromancers exploring a castle in space, look no further. This is one of the funniest, grittiest novels I've read, with more than enough twists and turns to keep you from guessing the ending before you read it. Beautifully dark, and beautifully queer, it's one of my new favorite fantasy novels.
Mary Oliver never seems to disappoint when it comes to simple, beautiful poetry. This is just one of my favorite collections, as it centers around love. How we experience it, how we receive it, and how we give it to others.
I loved McQuiston's previous novels, and her Young Adult debut does not disappoint! It's an incredibly intense enemies to lovers story, with plenty of mystery and humor. On their Senior prom, Shara Wheeler kisses three people and vanishes. Leaving clues behind, it's up to this seemingly random team of teens to follow Shara's map, and discover where she went. I also loved this story for it's beautiful message about queerness and identity, and how it becomes easier to stand up for who you are when you let your friends help you out. I Kissed Shara Wheeler shares the message that we are never as alone as we think we are.
I loved this series, but especially this fourth volume. It's by far the most serious and intense, as it features a character with an eating disorder trying to live the life of a "regular" teen. Regardless, I think the story, it's message, and the love between the main characters is told so beautifully and accurately that I'll continue to reread it in the future.
As the world is ending, an a few thousand people get selected to board a ship to a planet 400 lightyears away, young Petra is the only human left who remembers anything about Earth as it was. She becomes the Last Cuentista, the Last Storyteller, as she navigates her way through a new planet with many different challenges and dangers. Follow Petra as she tries to preserve her culture and stories through the new "adventure" of starting over on a new planet.
This is a beautifully tragic historical fiction centering around a young German orphan during the Holocaust. Liesel Meminger is whisked into her new home, learning her life’s lessons the hard way, and through one of the most brutal events in human history. Liesel’s story is heartbreaking, and the personification of Death, the story’s narrator, is by far one of the most compelling parts of the novel.
This poetic, beautiful, and destructive story shows the push and pull between Achilles and Patroclus, and it shows us just how far people can go to protect the ones they love. There are countless agonizingly lovely moments between the two, but one quote from Patroclus about Achilles stuck out to me, “I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.” This is one of my favorite books of all time. It reads like poetry, and is so beautifully sad. I would recommend it to anyone!
One Last Stop is McQuiston’s second novel, and unlike her debut, this story takes on a more fantastical approach. What happens when a cynical, stressed out, and overworked August Landry meets and falls in love with a girul who is a lot more than she seems? On the outside, Jane is the coolheaded, confident, somewhat aloof girl August met on the New York subway. However, after finding out that she’s actually caught in a time loop that has her forgetting the last 45 years and not ageing a single day since then, August does everything she can to help Jane escape the subway, while trying her hardest not to fall head over heels in love.
Centering around a 14-year-old girl in Baltimore in the 70’s. Mary Jane quickly comes to learn about a different way of living after becoming the summer nanny for the young daughter of a psychiatrist. Mary Jane tells the story of her summer, punctuated by the carefree lives of the family she’s working for, the love and acceptance from the psychiatrist’s patient (a drug-addicted rockstar), and the beautiful singing and guidance of his movie star wife. Mary Jane learns to love better, sing louder, and stand up for who she is in this perfect coming-of-age story.
This is the first novel in the Six of Crows duology that follows shortly after the Shadow and Bone trilogy. In this novel, six unlikely friends team up to conduct a massive heist on a foreigen government, each with their own motives. It's a fast-paced, thrilling read that has plenty of funny moments as well as one's that will melt your heart. I loved the world building from the first trilogy that made this book so much easier to dive into. An incredible Young Adult Fantasy read!
I loved this novel! Set in China Town in San Fransisco during the 1950's, this book follows the coming-of-age story of Lily Hu, a teenager who is simply trying to get by. Lily's High School experience is cataloged in this novel as she visits the Telegraph Club, an underground safe space for members of the LGBTQ+ community during that time. Lily also experiences her first love, while trying to please her family, keep up her grades, and manage other friendships that have been strained as of late. This is a story of love, heartbreak, friendship, self identity, and acceptance in the face of rejection and fear.
Out of all the Young Adult fantasy I've read, this is the series I keep coming back to for more. It's the story of four boys attending a private school in Virginia, who are trying to find a Welsh king buried in a cave in order to wake him and have him grant them a wish. Along the way, they meet a non-psychic girl from a family of entirely magical women, they travel in a forest where the seasons change as they walk, they meet trees that talk to them, and they get themselves into major magical trouble. I love the characters in this series, and how real they feel. I love the romance, the mystery, and the small pieces of foreshadowing that can only be truly appreciated with one or two rereads. If you're looking for your next YA obsession, The Raven Cycle is where you should look!
This is one of the better dark academic, creepy, magical books that I've read. It follows the story of Alex, who gets a shot at Yale University, but only to join the Ninth House, the secret society in charge of protecting the other eight houses from evil and dark magic. Each of these societies does actually exist, but in this book they all have their own dark and sinister form of magic that they practice and perform, which attracts plenty of different monsters and villains. It's mysterious, dark, and morbidly funny, with the perfect amount of magic & fantasy that makes it a great book!