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- đź“šOn Reading In May 2026 (Best of)
đź“šOn Reading In May 2026 (Best of)
From page-turning thrillers to picture books, here’s everything I read in May.
Jamie Canavés
June 03, 2026
Because nothing I read in May was below 3.5 stars I’m gonna list everything I finished reading. I read all the graphic novels and picture books either in print or ebook and everything else I went with the audiobook format. I had no negative notes on the audiobooks and many had excellent narrators. There’s also some great full cast productions.
Hope you find your next great read!
Chanel Miller’s children’s books have beautiful souls and great writing (her memoir is also excellent: Know My Name). Plus, she narrates each audiobook to perfection. Three standout things to note in The Moon Without Stars: seventh grader Luna offers a service to classmates of making zines to offer advice for their embarrassments and struggles; big vocabulary of words by a word lover; Luna and fellow classmates who have gotten their periods test the various product options to figure out what works best for them and have discussions about how they feel.
In the case of the latter, it’s been 56 years (!!!) since Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. published, and the lack of even mentioning menstruation across all fiction is a choice when you take into consideration that “[e]very month, 1.8 billion people across the world menstruate.” (UNICEF)
Anyhoo, this is a lovely middle grade book about how hard it is to navigate a changing body, school, socializing, expectations, and figuring out who you are among the chaos of living in a world with other people.
I really enjoyed the structure of this novel and the dive into military and Hollywood history that doesn’t get much focus usually. Aaron Touissant grew up obsessed with films and after service in the military ended up working as a fixer in Hollywood. Think stars whose behavior needs to be covered up. But his greatest ambition ends up being his desire to tell a past lover’s real life story in a film biography. If someone isn’t already adapting this novel into a series they are sleeping on the job.
I spent years thinking this book was SFF/dystopian because of the cover only to find out when I started reading it that it’s a YA contemporary with a romance and a mystery as subplots. Seventeen-year-old Avery gets uprooted her senior year of high school so her mom can care for her dying mother. The problem is that Avery’s mom and her grandma do not get along. As Avery tries to form a relationship with her dying grandmother she also ends up realizing there is an entire family history that has been kept from her.
A beautiful book about accepting the emotion of sadness and giving it the space needed for processing rather than pushing it away or ignoring it. The artwork is emotive illustrations that move from deeply layered scenes to sparse scenes focused on the little blue “monster” that is sadness. As soon as I finished it I flipped right back to the beginning to spend more time with each illustration.
A boy with wings who can fly lives a lonely existence because the birds don’t accept him. That is until a raven who also doesn’t fit in shows up and annoys Arlo with his odd behavior and a friendship blooms. It’s a lovely story with equally lovely artwork.
A sweet picture book about a mole who finds a dandelion seed (the tiny thing) and takes it home where he ends up talking to it, and showing it his daily life. Through this he learns to be more himself and how to be a friend, which ultimately results in him making friends with other animals out in the world.
Totally weird, mind melting type story (in the best way) until it gets to the point/lesson. As an adult who still remembers the things that felt weird when I was little, I loved this picture book about a little girl who wakes up and finds that her mom has literally turned into a stopped clock and needs to find a place to get her repaired.
A group of school children and their dragon are putting on a school play and find the historical story to be outdated and want to change it to make everyone happy. Their teacher teaches them that the point of historical work is to look at it through the lens of the time period it was written in and learn about history. The kids' observations and their friendship with the dragon is humorous and it’s a good way to start the conversation about how to teach history and classics.
An anxious boy ends up wrapped in a giant red blanket during a storm and finds that it keeps his fears in check so he takes it everywhere – to the annoyance of his siblings. It teaches him how to be a bit “braver” in situations until he accidentally gets out of the blanket and realizes the security it offered is something he can still keep without needing the physical blanket.
I learned the term intertidal zone! This is a picture book about nature and teaching kids (and adults) how they can help protect and preserve nature – specifically where the ocean and land meet. The watercolor style illustrations perfectly fit the beach setting as two young kids and their grandfather explore the seashore.
A funny book about a bear explaining how to spot animals while constantly looking through binoculars and thus missing out on everything that actually happens around him during his lessons.
Queer chaos has been an accidental theme in my entertainment lately and I am absolutely here for it. It’s not every day I start a romance book where the main character is actively working to break up a couple right before they walk down the aisle. Like I said it’s chaotic and queer but not without Puck learning some things about friendship, romance, and that life should not emulate the reality show they work on.
The pacing I want in a crime book that actually delivers on the setup. This blends a few tropes well: return home to a small town; the main character out to prove a family member is innocent of murder; a missing person in the present day may tie to the past murder; the main character wrote a book about the crime. It’s a very good debut, and I’ll read any followup work.
Evergreen: I could have done without the copaganda woven through.
Past and present suspense novel where the reader is told from the opening that there are 5 people on a train platform and one will be dead by the end of the book. The present timeline has the automatic tension of “who is going to die?” and the past chapters keep the pace on par because it focuses on the dramatic and problematic aspects of the characters’ lives. What kept me from 100% enjoyment is that even though this took the route of nuance, I just don’t like the “sociopath/psychopath kid” trope. Don’t worry, that's not a spoiler.
This is one of those crime novels that is best to jump in not really knowing anything, which is what I did. You’ll know from the very opening that the narrator isn’t making great choices and soon you’ll find out her horrific plan. It is very well paced and even though I was certain how this would end (this is the case 99% of the time) I still inhaled this in a day to “find out”. In the same universe of my not being a fan of the sociopath/psychopath child trope, when it comes to the adult version I just feel it’s a bit of a writing cheat for a person’s “bad behavior” to never need any explanation beyond “they’re a sociopath”. Even so I’ll be making my way through Torre’s backlist.
I love when graphic novels use color as the mood, in this case sometimes an entire storyline will be in all blues or all reds. Tara is thirteen when she is told by the school that she’ll be skipping a grade. She doesn’t want to but suddenly she goes from the 7th grade to the 9th grade. She’s freaking out and feels like a baby compared to everyone else. As she learns to navigate her new school —thankfully she has her older sister—she also has to figure out that the reason she likes her new classmate so much is more than a friendship and actually a crush on a girl. I especially loved the sibling relationships in this, and watching Tara have to deal with anxiety. There were a couple blips that she felt too naive for a 13-year-old but I had to remind myself that everyone’s experiences growing up are vastly different and happen at different ages.
This is a dark comedy memoir that changed the landscape of what people could imagine graphic memoirs/nonfiction to be. It’s very literary and emotional as Bechdel is grieving her father (accident or suicide?) and trying to make sense of her childhood as she learns that her father was gay, all as she recounts her own coming out. It’s a complex work befitting the complex topics and themes.
I remain obsessed with this reimagined love story between Hades and Persephone.
I love social horror and this was a good blend of tropes from the mystery/horror genre — true crime podcast, missing person, writer residency—that was exploring African history and culture.
This is a solid fantasy novel that scratches the itch for a group of adult friends battling evil over a long period of time. I love Joe Hill’s imagination, and he’s clearly gifted at observing people because his characters are always the exact type of person he’s writing. I think what left me liking this but kept me from loving it was 1. It’s too long and 2. At no fault of the actual book, I love Joe Hill’s brain when it comes to scary/creepy horror and I think I needed to have read this before having loved Heart-Shaped Box and the license plate book (I will never remember the title NOS4A2).
I have remained wanting “to dragon” since reading Kelly Barnhill’s When Women Were Dragons so when I discovered that she also wrote middle grade novels I quickly added them to my TBR. The Ogress and the Orphans is a fun and thoughtful novel that reminded me of the big feelings (including scary) of childhood books I grew up with like Stuart Little and Roald Dahl’s work. The book has dragons, and orphans, and ogres all in a tale about a once beloved town where everyone is now disconnected and unfriendly. It’s about the importance of community and how pitting people against each other is the oldest trick in the book to divide people so they can’t actually have the power that comes with unity.
Thanks for reading!
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