Lily Braun-Arnold

The Last Bookstore on Earth / Lily Braun-Arnold

/ Alisha Helms / Leave a comment 
The Last Bookstore on Earth
By: Lily Braun-Arnold
Genre: YA
Number of Pages: 320
Published: January 7, 2025
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Dates Read: February 16, 2025 - February 18, 2025
Format: Library Book / Hardcover

Trigger Warnings: body horror

Ever since the first storm wreaked havoc and changed the world as we know it, seventeen-year-old Liz Flannery has been surviving in her old job, the bookstore in the New Jersey suburb she grew up in, trading books and letters for supplies. It’s her safe space. Until she heard about the next storm coming soon.

Then she meets Maeve, someone who breaks into the bookstore one night looking for shelter. Maeve and Liz butt heads, but Maeve has the skills Liz lacks that are needed to fix the dilapidated store before the next storm hits. Liz agrees to let her stay.

As the girls grow closer and feelings start to appear, they realize there are more threats than just the storm and they find themselves fighting to stay alive.

Though this book is post-apocalyptic, I will say it does focus more on Liz and Maeve’s relationship than it does the world around them. Which ended up being a little disappointing to me because I would have loved to read more about it – especially how Liz handled the days following the event and making it into the bookstore. 

I didn’t think realistically that Liz would have even lasted the amount of time that she did last before Maeve showed up. Maeve came in and showed a lot more of what it was like in the “new world”, but we never got into detail about Liz’s. <spoiler> and then what she did with her hand and the generator as a whole was crazy </spoiler>.

Overall, this was a cute sapphic post-apocalyptic young adult novel set in a bookstore where people still exchanged goods for a book.

*Thank you Delacorte Press and NetGalley for a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review

My Week Late, Stoked For This: January 2025

/ Alisha Helms / Leave a comment

I know I’m a week (and a day) late in this, and there will be loads of books already out – but that means there’s loads more books already out (Trying to be a bit more positive this year)! I tried to get this done yesterday, but stuff happened and I couldn’t get back to this.

I’m also going to try something new with my formatting of this series. Let me know what you think! Do you like the new way? Prefer the old way? Have no comments or concerns?

January 7, 2025

Amber arrives home one spring afternoon on her bike. As soon as her mother sees her, she screams. Why? Because Amber’s been dead seven years – hit by a car on the very bike she pulled up to the house in.

After Life

By: Gayle Forman

Bletchley Park. London. 1923. Dragons soar through the skies, but Vivian Featherswallow isn’t worried, she’s going to study the dragon language and make sure her little sister doesn’t have to grow up in Third Class. But by midnight, civil war has started. Viv is recruited for a codebreaker job to save her family – but the more she learns, the harder it is for her to distinguish what what war she’s actually fighting.

A Language of Dragons

By: S.F. Williamson

A dystopian, water covered world where a family tries to save the history of humans while creating a settlement on top of New York City’s National History Museum.

All the Water in the World

By: Eiren Caffall

A sapphic YA debut novel that follows two girls has they fall in love, fighting for survival in an abandoned bookstore.

The Last Bookstore on Earth

By: Lily Braun-Arnold

January 14, 2025

Written in prose and verse, this YA novel following sixteen-year-old Carmela as she’s finally able to help in her mother’s apothecary in the Campo Marzio neighborhood of Rome. But the workroom is no simple place, for every simple ingredient, there is else even less pleasant, and Carmela begins to find out the secrets she never bargained for.

Everything Is Poison

By: Joy McCullough

What would you do if you found a magical bookstore that transports you back through time to be face-to-face with your teenage self?

The In-Between Bookstore

By: Edward Underhill

A multi-level, page turning murder novel about pyramid schemes.

Death in the Downline

By: Maria Abrams

January 21, 2025

Ex-Chicago detective Carrie Starr is now at the reservation where her father grew up: they need a new tribal marshal to help with the women who have disappeared from the rez. Now, local college student is missing and Starr begins drown in memories of her own daughter’s murder. As she works on the cases, Starr can’t shake the feeling of a fearsome spirit watching her, one of a woman with antlers of a deer.

Mask of the Deer Woman

By: Laurie L. Dove