These Books Made Me

Send us Fan Mail Crivens! We're tackling the first installment of the Tiffany Aching series, The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. Tiffany is a pragmatic and precocious 9-year-old witch, whose brother has been taken by the Queen of the Fairies. She must rely on the help of tiny blue men, the Nac Mac Feegles, to navigate Fairyland to get him back. Gifted by First Sight and Second Thoughts, Tiff...

Send us Fan Mail Today we are rereleasing our episode on Persepolis to commemorate the life of Marjane Satrapi, the acclaimed Iranian-French writer, artist, filmmaker, and human rights advocate whose work transformed personal memory into a powerful act of witness. Satrapi died on June 4, 2026, at the age of 56, leaving behind a body of work that helped readers around the world better understand Ir...

Send us Fan Mail For a debut novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall sure is a tour de force. Our protagonist, Selina Boyce is caught between her hopeless dreamer father, Deighton, and resilient yet hard-edged mother, Silla, as she navigates adolescence. With the fraught tension between her parents as a backdrop, Selina struggles with feeling unlovable, the complicated feelings of hating...

Send us Fan Mail We try to do a game or quiz that relates to the book in every episode, but for The Egypt Game, the game was pretty elaborate. Hawa, Heather, Hannah, and Darlene are attempting to play Timothy Kendall's 70's spin on the ancient Egyptian Game Senet. This game challenged us in ways we weren't expecting, from a 60 some-odd page rule book to a missing throwing stick and...

Send us Fan Mail Were you obsessed with antiquity, myths, and homemade costumes when you were a child? If so, have we got the book for you! This episode we revisit an oldie but a goodie: Zilpha Keatley Snyder's classic children's book, The Egypt Game . We love the nuanced characters, genuinely exciting and surprising plot twists, and relate to Melanie and April's love of imagination...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we take a sip from the spring of eternal life—or at least from Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting —and things get delightfully complicated. We are capping off season 5 with a children's book that is not afraid to take on deep philosophical topics. This is our second episode in a row diving into books centering on immortality, but there are no sparkly vampires...

Send us Fan Mail We're back with a continuation of our discussion around Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. In this episode, we explore the toxicity of Bella and Edward's relationship, the problematic depictions of Indigenous peoples and the influence of the Twilight movies. We also take a Buzzfeed quiz to find out which Twilight character we are (spoiler: none of us were quite happy with our...

Send us Fan Mail This episode feels like what we've worked toward for the past few seasons. How can we have a library podcast and not do the pop culture juggernaut that was Twilight? Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (yep she spells Stephanie that way) follows Isabella "Bella" Swan on her move from sunny and warm Phoenix, AZ to the cold, rainy and wet Forks, WA. She stands out as the new...

Send us Fan Mail The Poet X was Elizabeth Acevedo's breakout novel, winning the Printz and Pura Belpre awards and becoming the target of many challenges and even a lawsuit attempting to keep it off of school shelves. We are standing firmly behind this book, even if it reduced Heather and Darlene to tears and maybe hasn't aged as well as it could have when it comes to Drake. We adore Xiom...

Send us Fan Mail Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson follows Melinda Sordino as she navigates the aftermath of her sexual assault at a high school party. Unable to speak about what happened to her, Melinda also has to deal with losing her friends, being ostracized by her peers, and having parents who can't seem to parent. Some small beacons of light in her life are her newfound friend, David, who...

Send us Fan Mail We are back with special-expert-guest-on-all-things-BSC Kelsey for Part 2. We're still talking about how arson isn't the answer; because really, arson isn't the answer and perhaps that wasn't addressed strongly enough in the books. In this continuation of our exploration of all things Mary Anne, we're figuring out foreshadowing that doesn't pay off, t...

Send us Fan Mail We are back with more Baby-Sitters Club books, y'all and one of these is all about banned books (and arson) so you know we couldn't keep it to just one episode. We're dissecting the poorly named Mary Anne Saves the Day , the aptly named Logan Likes Mary Anne , and the really burying the lede title, Mary Anne and the Library Mystery . We've got Kelsey back with...

Send us Fan Mail 2 brothers, 1 girl, 0 chance we're onboard with this love triangle. In The Summer I Turned Pretty, we follow Isabel "Belly" Conklin, who hasn't had much luck with boys finding her attractive, especially the one boy she's been pining over for forever, Conrad Fisher. That all changes the summer she turns 16, where not only does she catch Conrad's attent...

Send us Fan Mail Wow. Truly, we are so glad we took a detour to the affluent and completely bananas town of Sweet Valley, California to meet Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield. These books have everything: an evil twin, a greaser who carjacks people and takes them to dive bars, an art teacher named Stuart who has no boundaries, and a lie detector test that measures your pulse with a thimble. In this...

Send us Fan Mail In a TBMM first, we read a book with substantially different editions! That's right, we all came to the podcasting table calling the main character by different names. We got that sorted out (and we're defaulting to the most current edition) and dove right in to this lovely book, The Birchbark House , by Louise Erdrich. This book made us laugh and cry and everything in b...

Send us Fan Mail While Canada has Anne of Green Gables about a girl growing up in the late 19th century, America has the Little House on the Prairie series. This episode we look at 2 books from the Prairie series, Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie by author Laura Ingalls Wilder. These semi-autobiographical books follow Laura, her parents (Charles and Caroline) and her s...

Send us Fan Mail We love a little 90s nostalgia and The Hate U Give delivers on that front. It also delivers on the well drawn characters and hard hitting plot elements front. Angie Thomas took us on an emotional roller coaster with Starr in this book and we laughed, cried, and loved right along with her. We loved the Tupac references and Maverick's take on Harry Potter and cheered for Starr...

Send us Fan Mail We're back post-merge and our Mattel and Pleasant tribes are now the Pattel tribe. Will there be friction in the now combined tribe? Who will be the first member of the jury? Will any of the immunity idols come into play? We're debating personality traits, just how far Katniss's Rue guilt will go, whether Kirsten even needs the money given her dead man's chest...

Send us Fan Mail Have you ever wished your favorite characters from different books could meet each other? Have you ever wished they could fight each other for food, resources, and prizes while sleeping in the sand in Fiji? No? Well we have. In this very special season ending edition of TBMM, we bring back a special guest host, Survivor Superfan Kelsey, to Jeff Probst us through a battle between s...

Send us Fan Mail We're back with part 2 of Gabi, a Girl in Pieces because we needed more than one episode to sing its praises. What can we say, Gabi, a Girl in Pieces just does so much right. Gabi is a complex and interesting character, who doesn't dim her light for any man. The book accurately captured the vibes of border towns, like Tijuana, and the realities of meth addiction. It even...

Send us Fan Mail We've reached the final book of the season and boy was it a good one! So good in fact, we're splitting it up into two parts. In Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero, our central character, Gabi, is smart, opinionated and shockingly self-aware. It's that self-awareness that helps her craft inspiring and thought-provoking poetry that tackles sexism, anti-fat rhet...

Send us Fan Mail Who doesn't love a book steeped in myth, legend, and local culture? Well, we certainly love them and are leaning into our fangirling over Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor.  Sunny is tearing up the football pitch at the Zuma games, getting in touch with her spirit face, and finding her place in her coven. We do have some questions though. For example, can Darlene make it through...

Send us Fan Mail Oh, for Pete’s sake, we can’t fathom why this book was ever banned! While it didn’t live up to Hawa’s spicy expectations, we thoroughly enjoyed the first book in the Anastasia Krupnik series by Lois Lowry. Our charming protagonist may just be the president of the Precocious Children’s Club.  In this episode we discuss the Krupniks’ parenting, the devastating effect of Alzheimer’s...

Send us Fan Mail It's a special 4th of July episode! What's more American than relying on child labor to fix a failing healthcare system? That sounds grim, but we continue to enjoy our time with the girls of BSC. We return to our discussion of Claudia with a leisurely tour of what is possibly the saddest book in the Baby-sitters Club canon, Claudia and the Sad Goodbye . We stray a bit fr...

Send us Fan Mail We are diving back into The Baby-Sitters Club and we've brought a special friend along for the ride. Kelsey proves to be the non-diabetic Stacey of the podcast because she goes away but she always comes back. While Kelsey might be Stacey, we kind of all wanted to be Claudia at some point with her junk food stash, illicit Nancy Drews, love of boys with soap opera names, and &q...