Michelle A

BookBrowse Reviewer

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BookBrowse Reviewer Michelle is a BookBrowse Reviewer and has written reviews featured in The BookBrowse Review.

Michelle Anya Anjirbag recently completed her PhD at the Centre for Research in Children's Literature at Cambridge, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Work based on her dissertation has appeared and is forthcoming in several academic journals and edited collections. Having earned her MSc at the University of Edinburgh and her BA at the University of Connecticut, her research interests include Disney, adaptations of fairy tales and cross-period approaches to narrative transmission across cultures and societies, deep stories, and fantasy and the library in the fantastic. She has worn a lot of different hats including essayist, local journalist, leadership facilitator, book reviewer, and shopgirl. More information on her academic and other work can be found at michelleanjirbag.com

BookBrowse Editorial Reviews (28)

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
by Tao Leigh Goffe

(2/12/2025)

Goffe's scope is wide-ranging and dotted with her personal history; she understands the world she inhabits through discovery and exploration of her ancestral connections, examining how her mixed heritage is inflected with the aftereffects of colonialism. In doing so she makes a too often intellectualized problem — how to solve climate change — deeply intimate. By tracing history in this way, she deftly folds together intertwined historical threads to make visible ecological destructi

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Snowglobe: Snowglobe #1
by Soyoung Park

(3/6/2024)

In Snowglobe, Park presents a fascinating dystopian setting that taps into today's climate anxieties, and also imagines the kind of society that might grow out of contemporary celebrity culture, fandom, and the demands of reality entertainment. It asks us to interrogate what happens to the celebrities, the people who fans demand put their whole lives on display, and who lose all privacy just because they are famous. It also makes readers question just what exactly is real in reality telev

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Hotel Magnifique
by Emily J. Taylor

(5/4/2022)

Emily J. Taylor's debut young adult novel is a breathtaking fantasy with a dark edge that will tantalize the imaginations of people new to the genre as well as those who have already read widely within it. Though it suffers at times from pacing issues — too fast in some areas and dwelling a little too long on descriptive moments in others — strong worldbuilding, a fascinating narrative and emotionally engaging characters will keep readers interested to see if Jani makes it home with

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Skin of the Sea
by Natasha Bowen

(2/2/2022)

The novel is intriguing. Simi's perspective is immersive and driven by emotion as she slowly remembers pieces of her life, including her own experience with captivity. However, Bowen does not focus only on the one historical experience. In her author's note she writes that this novel allowed her "to tell a story of Black characters from ancient empires, showcasing their power and magnificence." She achieves her goal, neither skirting nor dwelling on the horrors of slavery, and also providing a r

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Gilded Ones: Deathless #1
by Namina Forna

(5/5/2021)

Forna's debut novel and first book in the Deathless series is a challenge to patriarchal norms across societies and cultures. As her characters find their own power and agency, and learn to love who they are in spite of what others have said about their worth, young readers will be inspired to recognize their own self-worth. The Gilded Ones is a strong opening to what promises to be a compelling series that is taking on as its focus an almost timeless subject: violence enacted against wom

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Last Night at the Telegraph Club
by Malinda Lo

(2/17/2021)

Lo's extensive research makes this a YA novel with real historical teeth, grounded in the time period, geography, culture and history it is representing, offering a new window into an underrepresented intersection of identities. She does not sugarcoat reality, but still leaves readers with a sense of hope and appreciation for the power of young love and the true freedom of knowing oneself. Last Night at the Telegraph Club is a powerful coming-of-age story that expands on hidden histories

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Raybearer
by Jordan Ifueko

(8/19/2020)

In Raybearer, Ifueko opens the genre of fantasy further, stepping beyond old tropes and stories of power struggles to present something new. She proves that fantasy can be simultaneously diverse, political, and filled with wonder, and in dialogue with more than just a tradition. It's a development that the genre has desperately needed for a long time. She also proves that it's possible to explore the themes of imperialism and colonialism in fantasy without alienating readers and in a way

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Wilder Girls
by Rory Power

(8/21/2019)

The two perspectives lead the reader not only through the mystery, but into a meditation on human nature itself, and how people might respond to extraordinary circumstances. Rory Power's Wilder Girls is a powerful novel and a must-read in this current epoch, with urgent messages about what it means to be human when everything is changing.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

How to Make Friends with the Dark
by Kathleen Glasgow

(6/19/2019)

Glasgow uses Tiger's gaze to look not only inward at her own grief, but through a wider lens to account for other kinds of grief, loss and pain too. The result is powerful, and a must-read for anyone who needs language with which to discuss loss.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

How It Feels to Float
by Helena Fox

(5/29/2019)

This story is an incredible, lyrical journey through a teenager's struggle with undiagnosed mental health issues and the hereditary or intergenerational effects of trauma. Readers will be moved not only to empathy, but perhaps a real understanding through being enveloped in Biz's mind. They will be forced to confront their preconceptions of what it might mean to be either strong or fragile and what defines mental health, as well as face the idea that being "normal" or "okay" or "fine" is somethi

BookBrowse Editorial Review

And The Ocean Was Our Sky
by Patrick Ness

(11/14/2018)

All in all, And the Ocean Was our Sky is a challenge that should be engaged with by all readers. Like its source material, it is sure to spark conversation and remain of its time and context while being endlessly transposable and interpretable, and only gain from multiple and multifarious readings.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy
by Mackenzi Lee

(10/17/2018)

Like its predecessor The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue, the impeccably researched historical novel is full of adventure and draws from true events and conditions.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Anger Is a Gift
by Mark Oshiro

(7/11/2018)

It is no secret that contemporary young adult literature has been becoming more political, addressing the real problems and challenges faced by teenagers in the United States today. Anger is a Gift by Mark Oshiro is a welcome addition to the contemporary YA oeuvre, taking readers inside a brutal reality that too many young people today know well. It is a narrative about intergenerational trauma, about hope, and about finding strength in one's family and community, executed in a way t

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Picture Us In The Light
by Kelly Loy Gilbert

(5/2/2018)

The real strength of Picture Us In the Light is how deftly Gilbert demonstrates that to have a powerful narrative a book doesn't have to fit neat categories because, after all, whose life does? She gives us the complexity of life itself: bad things happen, friendships change, we learn things about our parents we could have never imagined, lives fall apart and come together again. And in between all the interwoven good and bad, love and loss, joy and despair, science and art, we reali

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Dread Nation
by Justina Ireland

(5/2/2018)

The combination of period drama, alternative timelines, fantasy elements, zombies, and complex socio-historical-cultural contexts makes this book a welcome departure from other contemporary genre-specific young adult texts. Ireland proves that it is possible to write a rollicking fantasy filled with zombies and brave zombie fighters, and also provide readers with substance and thought-provoking material that challenges them to re-evaluate how they see the world. Above all, despite, or perhaps, b

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Children of Blood and Bone: Legacy of Orisha
by Tomi Adeyemi

(4/4/2018)

This is the first in a series that is going to challenge everything that readers know about what makes good YA fantasy. It's going to leave them demanding more, not only from the series, but from what the standard of "good enough" in publishing already is. Growth, confrontation, trauma, and the search for a better way by two strong women are all part of this epic fantasy. If I have any criticisms, it is that it ends on a cliff-hanger and 2019 is far too far away to wait for the next install

BookBrowse Editorial Review

A Girl Like That
by Tanaz Bhathena

(3/21/2018)

Tanaz Bhathena's debut YA novel, told in flashbacks, gives life to a strong-willed, orphaned Zoroastrian girl living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In a stunning narrative that proves the necessity of more diverse, own-voices young adult fiction, the world of the reader is expanded while also showing so clearly that some things are truly universal.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

A Land of Permanent Goodbyes
by Atia Abawi

(3/7/2018)

The true strength of Abawi's prose comes from her background as a journalist. She grounds the narrative in the day to day lives of her characters while simultaneously balancing the omniscient narration through Destiny, providing scope and detail that will allow the reader to feel an immediacy while also understanding how this family's story fits within a greater historical context. Abawi manages to bring to human scale a pain too great and an experience that should never be known by an

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust #1
by Philip Pullman

(12/6/2017)

Alice has quickly become one of my favorite characters ever written, and Pullman shows us again that he is a master of writing, not only for children, but for anyone. All readers who come to his books will find something for them. It is not a text that can be easily simplified to mean any one thing, and I am certain that those who come to this series first, and then look to read His Dark Materials, will have an utterly different experience. That is the mark of a good fantasy; it should be

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Rules of Magic
by Alice Hoffman

(10/18/2017)

Alice Hoffman's Rules of Magic is the long-awaited prequel to one of her most cherished novels, Practical Magic (1995). With the return of Bridget and Franny, Hoffman proves again that the true magic of her work is not the sorcery itself, but the relationships between families, siblings, and the rest of the people that she brings to her readers. Emotionally wrenching without becoming trite, Hoffman explores l

BookBrowse Editorial Review

You Bring the Distant Near
by Mitali Perkins

(10/4/2017)

This is a love story – not only of romantic love, but of the love between families, the love between mothers and daughters, and how that love frames our lives. And it rings true, because it is an imperfect love, one that grows and changes as each woman grows and changes. But what Perkins accomplishes best is the creation of an individual as opposed to an archetype, which is, unfortunately, all too rare in modern publishing. Each woman's voice is unique and her own. This is the story of Tara

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Too Shattered for Mending
by Peter Brown Hoffmeister

(9/20/2017)

Some books break us a little bit as readers; they force us to walk in the shoes of characters who are so much more than words on a page, who live in an endless mire of challenges, and who still manage to hold on to the slightest sliver of hope without even knowing that this is what they are doing. They teach us, the reader, to be a little bit better at being human. And that is the best thing I can say about Peter Brown Hoffmeister’s third novel: it broke me. The book follows Gavin “Little” McCar

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Genuine Fraud
by E. Lockhart

(9/6/2017)

Readers will fly through Lockhart’s snappy prose; though the plot structure unfolds nontraditionally, the pacing facilitates understanding and makes each revelation manageable to follow. The dialogue, as well as Jule's internal monologue, walk the very narrow line of being formulaic, and in places does cross over into the patterns that genre fiction and thrillers are known for. But because we cannot anticipate the plot as in a true piece of genre fiction, we are still left coming out on the othe

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Black Witch: The Black Witch Chronicles #1
by Laurie Forest

(8/2/2017)

The writing in The Black Witch is solid, the fantasy is developed, the world is immersive, and the characters are not flat – though some are emblematic. That being said, fantasy worlds constructed for young adult/adult crossover audiences are not in short supply, nor are those fantasy worlds that use the constructed world to provide a critique of and reflection on myriad social problems. A world like this, a story like this, will ultimately be put up against the worldbuilding of auth

BookBrowse Editorial Review

House of Names
by Colm Toibin

(5/31/2017)

What could have become a trite, overwrought, emotional depiction of "woman goes mad with grief, and is further corrupted by power" and, therefore, a backwards-looking cautionary tale, is, instead, presented as moving and human. While the depicted deeds by multiple characters are villainous to the point that even Lady Macbeth looks positively virtuous, Tóibín's narrative leads the reader to a place of compassion for these characters, and a better understanding of why darkness may c

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Wonderful Feels Like This
by Sara Lövestam

(5/3/2017)

The power of this book is that it is simultaneously disorienting in myriad ways while still remaining approachable in its exploration of the universal human experience. For a non-Scandinavian native English-speaking reader, despite being written in English, there is just enough culture shock, just enough difference in the ins and outs of daily life, that the reader's attention is drawn to how Steffi's experience is different, but also how some things, such as bullying, feeling isolated

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Inexplicable Logic of My Life
by Benjamin Alire Saenz

(3/22/2017)

Saenz’s presentation is powerful not because of the questions it asks, but because of what the reader is forced to feel.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Saving Hamlet
by Molly Booth

(1/4/2017)

What could have been a run-of-the-mill coming-of-age story is elevated through Booth’s clear prose, and the detailed, expertly researched descriptions of the original staging of Hamlet, as well as the ways in which the play’s staging changed over the years and under different directors. The students have to grapple with these choices while also grappling with their interpersonal relationships, which provides a level of depth to Booth’s description of high school life. Additionally, readers will