Gateway Reviews

MERMAIDS NEVER DROWN Sirens seeking vengeance. Mermaids seeking legs. Cryptozoology. Boardwalk amusement parks. Deadly storms on the Eastern Seaboard. Generations of secrets. These fourteen tales dive into the depths of aquatic existence, at sea and on land. Mermaids walk among us. Mermaids watch us from the ocean swells. Welcome to the shadows, the murky depths, the line between magic and mundane. Welcome to the waves. THOUGHTS I absolutely loved this collection. It was everything I could have wanted from mermaids and more. I wasn't expecting much--it's an anthology, after all, and those tend to be pretty middle-of-the-road for me--and so I was absolutely shocked and wonderfully surprised by this read. PROS Marvelous Mermaids Everything I could have wanted from mermaids was in this collection. Dark and stormy sirens played their part, sometimes ma...

ALL THE FIGHTING PARTS Amina Conteh is a lot like her mother: she doesn't believe in holding back. Not when she has something important to say, and Amina is never short on words. Others might find her loud, brash, and mean but Amina doesn't believe in holding back. Even when it gets her in trouble. Even when she gets stuck "volunteering" at church as penance. Working under Pastor Johnson isn't that bad. At first. But Pastor Johnson isn't the upstanding Man of God everybody thinks. When Amina is sexually assaulted by Pastor Johnson, everything changes. The voice she's used as a weapon all her life is silent. She can't speak about what happened. She can't even think about it. Her father's frustrated that her grades are slipping and she doesn't care. Her friends and boyfriend are frustrated that she's aloof, quiet and distant. And the church doesn't know anything is wrong in the congregation...

THE DARK PLACE Memento mori. Remember you will die. There's one night that Hylee Williams will never forget: the night her childhood home was invaded. The night of the gunshot. The night her brother vanished, never to be seen again. Losing a brother is hard enough. It's harder when you have to live that night again and again and again. It's not like Hylee chose to disappear. It's not like she chose to go to... that place. It's not like she chose to return to that night . She just vanished. And when she reappeared, that night was different, twisted and dark and rotten. However she did it, Hylee knows this might be the key to unravelling what happened to her brother. But just as she can't control vanishing, she can't make herself stay in the other place either. Until she meets Eilam. Until she disappears right in front of him and he doesn't seem surprised in the least. Until he has answers, and he's willing to hel...

YOUR LONELY NIGHTS ARE OVER Best friends Dearie and Cole don't exactly have the best reputation. They're judgy, mean, and exclusive, just two queer besties against the world. So when a killer tries to frame Cole, it's pretty hard to get anyone on his side. Everyone is obsessed with Mr. Sandman, a serial killer from decades ago who was never caught. He had style. He had flair. And he just vanished. When a series of violet deaths strike Stone Grove High School, everyone fears that he might be back... or a copycat killer is taking inspiration from him, at least. Mr. Sandman had a type: sad, lonely, forever alone. And this new killer has that type, too, but with a new twist: queer as well. As evidence and bodies start piling up, everything points to Cole. Dearie and Cole will need to work fast to unmask this killer if they want any of their friends to survive, but tracking him down might be exactly what Mr. Sandman wants. ...

SECRETS NEVER DIE Sam Hall and his friends have secrets, secrets nobody can ever know. That's why they have their ritual. Every year on Halloween, they sneak off into the woods to spill their secrets in an abandoned shack. The Dark Place, as they call it, eats their secrets, never to be shared again. But this year, something's gone wrong. Someone followed them. Or maybe something was already waiting. Caught in the middle of their ritual, these friends run. And the next day, they start getting texts, ominous and threatening: somebody knows their secrets. As a former child actor, Sam is no stranger to being in the spotlight, but this attention is different. This attention is menacing. Who followed them? Who knows their secrets? Sam will have to find out before its too late for them all. THOUGHTS This book is simultaneously high melodrama and, somehow, incredibly ...