Month: February 2023

Three months have passed since Lily discovered her older sister Alice cutting herself during “The Night on the Bathroom Floor.” Since then, Lily has been frantically attempting to maintain order for her family and herself. But as Alice returns home from her treatment program, Lily finds it more difficult to deny the emotions she has been attempting to suppress. Here comes Micah, a freshmen at the school with a complicated past. He was in therapy with Alice, and he is committed to helping Lily understand both Alice’s and her own experience. She struggles with obsessions and thoughts that she is unable to block off. She discovers it’s the words she’s been swallowing that are frantically trying to break through when Lily and Micah start working on an art project for school that involves finding poetry in unexpected places.

The Words we Keep won the Schneider Family Book Award. This award is given to books that properly embody the image of disability and mental illness. I think that this was a perfect book to win this award because it truly does depict mental illness in a proper light. 

This book was heartbreaking and it eloquently illustrates how challenging it is to manage an anxiety while also coping with loved ones who have attempted suicide. Since Lily walked in on her sister Alice cutting herself, Lily’s world has changed, but she makes an effort to maintain a positive attitude at school. But as soon as Alice gets home from rehab, everything falls apart. During this time, she meets and develops feelings for Micah, a new boy who attended the same recovery facility as Alice did after attempting suicide. 

The reader can’t help but feel compassion for these incredibly wounded individuals and a deep want to see them recover and find some comfort in the gloom. 

This was a deeply moving book that I couldn’t put down and finished in two days since it was written from Alice’s point of view and featured her poems. If you want to read a very real yet ultimately inspiring story, I definitely recommend this book. I would like to put out a trigger warning due to mentions of depression, suicidal thoughts, self-harm, and anxiety.

Looking for Alaska is a very sad book. It follows Miles Halter as he navigates his new life at Culver Creek boarding school. Miles quickly becomes friends with Alaska Young, who introduces him to a new style of living he has never known; her style. Alaska is reckless, and Miles must be reckless too in order to keep up with her.

At Culver Creek Miles is thrust into a new environment and must adapt quickly. Quite different from the safe life he knew. Miles needs to figure out how far is too far, and when he has crossed the line into true danger. Only a death can bring Miles back to the brink of reality.

The ending is depressing. It is real, and depressing. Looking for Alaska brings forth the harsh reality of many people’s lives through a sad viewpoint. It is not the full circle, typical ending, it is surprisingly cruel. This is a good book for people who enjoy cruel realism.

Looking for Alaska is a winner of the Michael L. Printz Award. In my opinion it is an okay book. It is one of John Green’s better books for it was easier to disassociate myself from the ongoing situation. However, like many of his books I have read, it was just depressing. Looking for Alaska would not make my list of top books.

Iron Widow was written by Xiran Jay Zhao. It focuses on the life of 18-year-old Wu Zetian. Zetian starts as an ordinary farm girl living in one of the poor areas. She lives with her mother, father, brother, and grandparents and lived with her older sister. She signs up to be a concubine pilot and proves to be a mighty one after she takes over the Chrysalises and kills the boy that was supposed to be piloting it. She gets paired with the most powerful pilot after this incident and has a very complicated relationship with him.

I think that the book was very interesting and unique. There were multiple plot twists that weren’t predictable. The author’s style of writing isn’t distinctly different from others but the book itself was different. There is a stretch in the book about three-quarters of the way through the book that gets rather boring. It took me a while to get through it before it got interesting again. The characters in this book are all interesting and unique and all have their own stories. Yizhi is Zetian’s best friend and he is an interesting character. The man that Zetian is paired with is also very interesting and has a very dark past.

This book contains multiple genres. Some of the main ones are fantasy, young adult, fiction, and romance. A couple different genres come up later in the storyline, LGBTQ, and queer. This book is similar to the book War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi. People who would enjoy this are people who like to read about women in power and women who have authority and got it for themselves.

Aint Burned All the Bright is quite a fascinating book, it talks about the life of a black family living through the beginning of the pandemic and the significant BLM movement. It’s hard to summarize a book like this in such a way since if you wrote all the words down you would get a page, and the sentences all seem coded. Even though parts are hard to understand I feel that’s what adds to the look into the struggles of a black life, you try to explain these experiences through your eyes, but your audience doesn’t understand a thing because they haven’t gone through it themselves, it’s like reading in a different language. I personally would have to say I love this book, being a man of color I feel like I have a real connection with the book, it reaches out to me in a way the news can’t do, it doesn’t just tell a story it tells a library of them. I feel not many would enjoy the book because of the way it is written and the story being told, so instead of an age group liking it I feel it would take a particular type of person to really grab what this book is trying to say.

In Murder Trending by Gretchen McNeil, the reader follows the story of 17 year old girl named Dee, and how she has to fight to survive. This book is based in the future, where anyone who is a convicted murderer is sent to an island, Alcatraz 2.0. But there is a catch, that island is full of other murderers, groups of people who’s only purposes are to hunt you down and kill you. The whole island is filled with cameras, and the murders are streamed all around the world. The leader of this operation, The Postman, who has an app built for the streaming services.

You’re probably wondering how a 17-year-old girl became a convicted murderer, right? Well, Dee was falsely accused in the murder of her stepsister and was sentenced to Alcatraz 2.0. This book has a small amount of romance in it, but it is a very intense thriller/page-turner. In the beginning of the book, there is a moment where one of the prisoners on the island tries to escape by swimming away. The main character notes that there is a big guard tower on the edge of the island to prevent this. While the man is swimming away, he is shot, and killed. The thought of escape is very enticing because you can still see the coast of San Francisco off of the island.

The type of writing the author uses is more so targeted towards younger age groups, and it can be very cringeworthy. The responses and dialogue from the characters are very unnatural and it makes it sound like the book is just meant to be funny. It can be pretty predictable at times, especially the ending.

“I’ve been screaming for years and no one has ever heard me.” – Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

Tahereh Mafi’s Shatter Me is a captivating novel set in a dystopian future where the world as we know it is dying, and nature and wildlife are now just a memory. Just as all hope is lost, a group known as the Reestablishment emerges, claiming they can fix everything as long as they are given power. A couple of years later, the world is under a police state, with the Reestablishment going to any means necessary to stay in control.

The plot follows Juliette Ferrar, a teenage girl with the power to take all energy from any living organism, killing them in the process. Unable to control the power, Juliette finds herself in an asylum where her lethal touch is rendered useless. Day after day, she is left alone in a cell only with her thoughts, questioning if her power is a gift or a curse. Two hundred sixty-four days of solitary pass until one event changes everything in her life, whether she wants it to or not.

Shatter Me was a book that I just couldn’t put down. Tahereh Mafi created a new world, immersing readers like myself. Even with designing a fantastic descriptive world, Tahereh Mafi was still able to create characters developed enough to enable readers to put themselves into characters by using diary entries. Shatter Me is an excellent option if you are looking for a fast-paced dystopian series. I have no complaints when it comes to this book.

Wolf By Wolf is the story of a young Jewish girl working with the rebellion to assassinate Hitler at the end of a grueling cross-continental motorcycle race. At the same time, she struggles to uphold an alternate identity. Yale was taken to a concentration camp as a young girl where she was taken to be an experiment. Over the years these experiments changed Yale’s very genetic makeup until she was able to alter her appearance at will. With the ability to “Skin Shift”, Yale escapes the camp and finds herself in the rebellion. After years of training, she is sent to assume the identity of Adele Wolfe, the first female victor of the Axis Tour, a rugged motorcycle race across the Natzi Empire. She knows in order to complete her mission she must find a way to navigate the road ahead and the mysterious past between Adele and a fellow racer and somehow come out on top to secure an invitation to the Victors Ball.

Yale can live as anybody she wants and can change it at will but with the ability to be anyone, the biggest challenge Yale faces is trying to be herself. The only things that ever stay the same for Yale are her tattoos. “Four memories and a reminder.” Yale keeps these wolves, her own “lonely pack.” These wolves are the only attachment Yale has to her true self and even so, she has to keep them hidden from the world. Yale is constantly second-guessing her choices when they don’t have to do with her mission. Yale slowly begins to develop feelings for her biggest competitor, Victor Luka Lowë, and even though he stays by her side when he knows she isn’t actually Adele Wolfe, Yale struggles to think that she is human enough to be loved.

Yale was only seven years old when she was taken to a Jewish camp. At such a young age she was experimented on, starved, overworked, and exposed to the harsh climate and the tortures that many endured. After years of being experimented on, Yale managed to escape leaving behind her barracks, her mother, her friends, and a set of Russian nesting dolls that had been made of her by an older woman who took care of Yale until the day she died. Yale blames herself for leaving and constantly reminds herself of these memories. Not only does she use the tattoos as memories but she keeps these small tokens of others close to her through everything to remind herself of everyone she has lost. Despite the fact that Yale is incredibly closed off to the world, she seems to live in one all of her own which revolves entirely around her past that she can’t let go of, and in order to complete her mission Yale needs to let go of her past and uncover what is lurking in Adele’s.

This is one of my all-time favorite books Ever. I love the story and I love the way the author portrays the characters. I enjoy that just because Yale is lonely, she still is mission-oriented and everything she does has a purpose that leads back to her overall goal. I also appreciate that although there is a romantic element to the story, it doesn’t become the whole point of the story and it really fits the characters because they are brought together out of a shared need to help each other but they both would pull apart from the other if they began inhibiting their end goals. I HIGHLY recommend this book to anybody. The book can get a little gruesome and it gets quite sad at times but although it’s a historical fiction book there are some fantasy, adventure, and thriller aspects and even if those stories aren’t your thing they book is just so enjoyable to read for the characters and simply the way the author writes in general.

The Hazel Wood is about a mix of fairytales and how they came to be, but they’re not your typical fairytales. There’s Twice-Killed-Katherine who kills men to keep herself alive. There’s also The Door That Wasn’t There, which is about two young girls who are abused by their stepmother and eventually locked in a room, left to rot. The older of the two ends up killing her sister in an attempt to get out and then ends up terrorizing her father who was the one that let all those terrible things happen to her. Our story sets off with seventeen-year old Alice Proserpine who lives with her single mother. Alice and her mother, Ella, have traveled all over attempting to escape the bad luck that seems to follow them everywhere. But when they recieve a letter that Alice’s grandmother, Althea Proserpine, is dead, Ella is relieved. Ella believes that the bad luck will simply just disappear. Alice, however, is curious about her grandmother. Alice has never met her grandmother, a reclusive author that lived in the Hazel Woods, and wrote a set of fairytales. These fairytales are ones that Alice’s mother forbid her from reading. When Ella is kidnapped, Alice goes to the one person who she thinks may be able to help her, a boy her age named Ellery Finch. Ellery Finch once possessed the very book that Alice wasn’t allowed to read and he believes that the Hinterland from the stories has Alice’s mother. Alice and Ellery set out to find her mother but along the way they stumble acrossed characters from the Hinterland, like Twice-Killed-Katherine. The Hinterland is hurding Alice somewhere, but she has no clue where or why. As she travels to find her mother in the Hazel Woods, the Hinterland pushes her closer and closer until she is accepted into the Halfway Woods. From there, she is tormented by creatures of all kinds and she must journey further to find her mother and perhaps even the story behind her family.

I really loved this book. I have always been a fan of fairytales and fairytalesque writing. This was similar to that kind of writing but it had a twist to it where the fairytales weren’t your typical Disney stories. These fairytales were new and something dangerous that really hooked me and pushed me to read it quickly. There was a lot of death in this book, but none that was graphic enough to turn anyone away from it. The fairytales also felt a lot more grown up and mature. Melissa Albert wrote The Hazel Woods in a way that showed you small details about Alice’s past without giving away how it totally matched up to the present. This made the book really suspenseful for me. I thought each character was written nicely. They each had their own story line and their own motives for why they did what they did in the book. I also enjoyed the pacing of the book. It didn’t feel like it moved too quickly so that the story was rushed but it also didn’t drag on and feel like it wasn’t going anywhere.

I would recommend this book to both people who like fairytales but also those who don’t. Those who like fairytales get to read about new ones that are more mature and at a better age level for them. For those that aren’t a fan of fairytales, the ones in The Hazel Wood are new but also aren’t the cheesey stereotypical ones. I think anyone who leans towards works of fiction would really enjoy this book.

Liv Rodinsky had her life on track, until she punched another girl on the rival softball team. With the loss of her scholarship as backlash Liv is suddenly forced to switch to the rival school, Northland High. Already on bad terms with her new coach, Liv needs to show she can be a team player, and who better to help her than the coach’s son, Grey.

Grey is suffering an injury and is sidelined to start his senior football season. Along comes Liv, and Grey can’t help but think her arm could save the season. As Liv and Grey navigate their newfound alliance turned friendship, they must determine if it can lead to more or if it will hurt them both.

Throw Like A Girl follows Liv and Grey as they navigate high school, sports, and romance. It is a good book that handles serious topics such as lies and injuries. Henning made Liv a relatable character who can appeal to many people. Both Liv and Grey are relatable, realistic high school characters.

Henning ended with a full circle moment that brought Liv back to where it all started. Only this time she is playing against her old team. It was a very satisfying ending as both Grey and Liv ended up happy and winning in their positions. It was a typical romantic ending for all.

I would recommend Throw Like a Girl to anyone who enjoys a well-written sports romance novel. Mostly focusing on the sports aspect of the story line, the romance part doesn’t overtake the whole book. It is a good balance between reality and the forbidden romance trope.

Love Radio is not your typical toxic YA romance novel, and it follows two teenagers, Dani and Prince, as they learn how to love each other and themselves.

Love Radio begins with Danielle and Prince processing a previous relationship. Prince’s was long term and Dani’s lasted only an evening, but both weighed down the characters in different ways. Prince has been crushing on Dani since middle school, but the first chance he gets to talk to her, he fumbles badly. In an effort to redeem himself, Prince offers Dani three dates and bets her that he can make her fall in love with him in three dates. Dani agrees, and throughout their relationship they push each other to fix their relationships with themselves and with their friends. Prince helps Dani write her college essay with a hat, so she can live out her dreams in New York. Dani gives Prince an opportunity in his career as a DJ, which helps him come to term with his mom’s MS.

This book is well written and authentic. It shows healthy relationships with real world problems. Such as dealing with a new relationship after sexual assault and saving the worthy friendships after losing the toxic ones. The problems that each character has are legitiment and they struggle to overcome them. However, I hated this book. Maybe it’s because I disagree very strongly about getting silk wet, but Dani in particular fell flat. She struggles all throughout the book about whether or not she loves Prince, but by the end I don’t feel like she grew as a character at all. I was not sympathetic to her either, which I find odd because stories about sexual assault usually hit close to home. I don’t know what it was that put me off of this story, but reading it, I could not help thinking about how wrong it felt. The romancy parts did not effect me as they should have. The only part that pulled on me emotionally was the twist at the end before the book had another twist to end happily. I did not like the ending either. It felt like it lost the emotional residence because Dani and Prince ‘overcame’ their problems, but they didn’t heal in any way and they healed very quickly. The only character I truly like is Mook, because he ignores nuns to read books.

I would recommend this book to anyone who reads romance novels. Fans of Twilight, The Hunger Games, any book that focuses on unhealthy relationships. Teens in particular need to read a book like this one, because it is starting the conversation about health relationships and we need more of that. Love Radio is a good place to start, but you might leave disappointed. Read Tamora Perice instead.

“We all deserve a big love story,” Mom says as the love scene fades out. “There’s nothing better.” 
― Ebony LaDelle, Love Radio