This was my favorite book in all of middle school, and probably my favorite book of all time. It was also one of the only books I entirely finished in all of middle school. Animal Farm is the story of the Soviet Union and communism under Stalin’s reign represented by farm animals, with Stalin being represented as a pig named Napoleon. I did not know this however and decided to side with Napoleon and argue he is a great leader despite the book and my entire class saying otherwise. I even wrote an entire essay on why Napoleon is a great leader. When I learned later that Napoleon was based on Stalin, I kinda realized, you know what, maybe Napoleon isn’t a great leader after all. Despite this, I enjoyed this book a lot. It helped me get through middle school. The arguments I had with my class on if Napoleon was a great leader or not and whether what he was doing was right or wrong gave me so much joy and I have so many fond memories. I liked this book so much, as a gift when I graduated middle school, one of my teacher’s gave me a copy of this from 1946. I love this book and it will forever hold a very special place in my heart.
The book Code Talker by author Joseph Bruchac is a true historical story of Navajo soldiers who used their language as a secret code during World War II, helping the US military communicate without being deciphered by the Japanese. This is the first time I read this story, it brings me emotions and understanding the cruelty of World War II, the story can highlight the cherished spirits and the story brings a lot of regret, we have to ponder why America has peace like today and the hypotheses about the soldiers who sacrificed on the surface of World War II.
The story is about a boy named Ned Begay when he was living in his hometown, he was discriminated against by the US government and its assimilation policy, but because of his passionate love for his identity, he always kept his traditions and language, when World War II broke out, he joined the US army and became one of the The first Navajo Code Talkers. He made his mark on the battlefield, while in the army he and other Navajo warriors were trained in the most rigorous way, they always kept a fighting stance and they could use their own language to create a difficult code system that the Japanese army had no way to decode because they did not know the Navajo language. Ned and his teammates participated in many important battles in the Pacific, despite facing bombs and guns, hasty meals or hasty meetings on the battlefield, but Ned always kept an optimistic spirit, resilient and always responsible for his teammates, showing us that spirit is also a secondary importance in victory but still determines life on the battlefield.This team spirit helped them succeed in the mission of securing important messages and contributed to the victory of the US army in World War II. They always support each other when they have difficulties to maintain cultural values, Ned always keeps his language even though the world is changing. “Code Talker” is a powerful book, both historical and humane, praising the bravery and great contribution of the large number of Navajo soldiers in the war who sacrificed silently. The idea is only in a documentary that they are our heroes.
In addition, the book also reflects the complexity of indigenous life in a multicultural society, the discrimination of the regime at that time and the challenges Ned faced represent what they had to face in protecting their culture during the war. This is a book that helps us understand a part in resolving the war
The Black Kids takes place in Los Angles in 1992, right after the death of Rodney King. The story is from the main character Ashley’s perspective, her family lives in a nice neighborhood and she attends a private school. After Rodney King’s killing she doesn’t know how to feel. Everyone agrees that it’s messed up, and after the officers who killed him were acquitted the city was engulfed in the flames of the people’s anger. She is faced with opposing reactions, her sisters’ of going out and participating in the riots and of her white friends sitting by their pools getting drunk. During this period of six days where people protested and rioted, the story takes place.
Ashley has grown up in a predominantly white world, with the exception of her family and Nanny. All of her friends and most of her class mates are white, in someways she felt like she also came from a place of huge privilege and didn’t feel as though she could relate to the injustices she witnessed around her. This position leaves her wondering what it means to be a young black woman in the 90s. She has all the normal friend troubles that go along with adolescents, in addition to their covert racism, backhanded compliments, and use of the N-word. She feels as though they’ve been her best friends all her life but they don’t truly understand her. When she begins to receive attention from one of the few other black people at her school she begins to wonder more and more why she isn’t closer to their friend group. Along the way she makes new friends and attempts to becoming a more authentic version of herself, and to me that is what the whole story is about. Who is Ashley?
I personally really enjoyed this book, the writing style kept me interested while Ashley shared memories that carried both a deep meaning for her as a character and for the storyline. I would describe this book as a poetic telling of what was most definitely a very hard moment not only for the city of LA but more specifically for the people who’s lives were so tremendously impacted. For me who has comes from a very privileged background myself, this story and how it was written gave me a little peephole into the pain and difficulties of navigating the question of identity, how it makes you up and how others perceive it.
“I knew another women who lost as much as you. And do you know what she did with it-the loss?’ He could barely stop the words from pouring out, could barely think over the roaring in this head. ‘She hunted down the people responsible for it and obliterated them.”
“You don’t have to be a monster to fight one.” — Tower of Dawn
Tower of Dawn is the sixth out of a seven book series plus one novella in Sarah J. Mass’ series Throne of Glass. The series itself follows Aelin Galathynius, a long lost queen, through her journey to regaining her throne. Tower of Dawn follows two characters from earlier books in the series and one new character, Chaol Westfall, Nesryn Faliq, and Yrene Towers. Chaol Westfall, former Adarlanian Captain of the Royal Guard and current Hand of the King to Dorian Havilliard, is 23 years old. Nesryn Faliq, former city guard of Rifthold and current Captain of the Royal Guard of Adarlan, is 22 years old. Yrene Towers, a healer at the Torre, a place for healers to learn, live and find peace. She is 22 years old.
In a previous book Chaol suffered a serious spinal injury, leading to paralysis. In return him and Nesryn travel from Adarlan in the Northern Continent, which is called Erilea, to Antica in the Southern Continent, both for the healers and for an army to aid their war. The Southern Continent is ruled by the Khaganate, a dynesty, that has ruled for over three hundred years. Chaol is paired with a young healer named Yrene Towers she hails from a conquered kingdom in Eastern Erilea called Fenharrow, which is south of Adarlan. In the beginning of the story she has a deep rooted hatred of Chaol, since soldiers from his kingdom killed her mother when she was 11. Throughout the healing process the two develop a close relationship and heal their soul wounds. Nesryn befriends one of Antica’s princes, Sartaq, and eventually goes into the mountains with him to gain information regarding the people her own country is at war with. The mountains are where the rukhin people dwell, they ride beasts comparable to feathered dragons. It is there she begins to find herself and also gains valuable information. The end has some highly unexpected plot twists that help lead into the next book.
Overall I really liked this book, the beginning started a little slow. This was due to a couple things, one reason was that the book before this one is the series ended on a big cliffhanger, so the reader expects this book to pick up where that last one left off. It doesn’t, this book doesn’t follow the same characters. Once you get into the book it is a lot of fun to read and gets much more interesting toward the middle and end. The characters who seem shallow and vain are at the middle of some of the biggest plot twists. All of the characters are complex, none are as they seem in the end.
I would recommend this book to anyone who likes young adult fantasy. It is a long book with 663 pages in total so it can take a little longer to read. Also, since it is the sixth book in the series it won’t make much sense unless you’ve read the first books.
“There was no point in lying to a roomful of liars.”
Bride, is former fan fiction writer Ali Hazelwood’s 9th release. standing at 410 pages, Bride follows 25 year old vampyre Misery Lark, and her sudden arranged marriage to 29 year old Lowe Moreland, the werewolf alpha. The marriage is part of what the two groups call “collateral”, where a vampyre is sent to live with the weres and a were to vampyres.
While this book yields entertainment, there is very little substance to the book, and left me wishing the author used a less basic language. I often found myself laughing at just how absurd and comic the words Hazelwood chose to use, “Alpha”, which now has a comedic tone due to the rise of brain rot culture, and “Vampyre”, instead of vampire, which isn’t a decision that brought me out of the story, but, it gives off a going-against-the-grain attitude which is clearly forced as a stylistic choice.
Bride was not a good book, but, it was fun, with its media references and colloquial language. Bride had *SPOILER ALERT* quite a bit of smut in it! a surprising amount of smut for a young adult book, which if this is mild, then I don’t want to know what spicy is. The descriptions Hazelwood uses during the inter-species sex scenes had me questioning what exactly YA means, because this is not what I expected from a book categorization targeted at ages 12-18. Evidence of Bride not being a children’s story was evident in a very early section of the book when Hazelwood uses ‘MILF’ to describe a way a character was looking at another.
This book was made for people who live for books with little substance and a lot of sex, people who’s bookshelves are filled with pink, blue, and red books, which were all purchased first hand, for people who just want to have fun.
Nigeria Jones is a story about 16-year-old Nigeria Jones and her challenges navigating her beliefs, autonomy, and independence. She grows up in the world of her father’s Revolution, and his strong beliefs against white supremacy and the systems built by white people. Nigeria spent almost all of her life in her father’s world, and the communal home he had developed as a support system for black people who were struggling in their lives and needed a place to breathe away from their problems.
However, Nigeria is faced with her own conflicts regarding the disappearance of her mother and her growing discrepancies between her views and her father’s. And with the unveiling of knowledge that Nigeria had been accepted into a Quaker school with amazing marks, but that her father had hidden this information from her because he didn’t want Nigeria to be surrounded by the views and systems of white people. Behind her father’s back, her mother had gotten all the paperwork done for Nigeria to start her Junior year of the high school.
Nigeria was now faced with even more conflicting thoughts, she knew what she herself wanted, but was she willing to go through with them at the expense of her father’s beliefs for her? She was torn between what her father wanted for her, and what her mother had worked so hard to give her the opportunity to do.
I really liked this book, the characters were well developed, full of life and beautifully flawed. Nigeria was just a teenager struggling with navigating friendships, family problems, and her opinions about race, and it helped her feel very real and relatable. The book was full of an anticipation and desire to know how it resolved that it was hard to put down.
However, I do feel like the resolution was a bit too quick, it felt a bit rushed in my opinion, like there was a bit more that could’ve been explored at the end but just wasn’t, which was a bit unsatisfactory. There were also two separate explorations of Nigeria’s romantic life with a black boy and a white boy that felt a bit out of place, like the relationships were rushed and didn’t really develop enough, and then were kind of just dropped at the end, which I found a bit frustrating.
I’d recommend this book to someone who enjoys learning more about Black people’s histories, as well as a story that keeps you turning the pages, desiring an explanation for a mystery.
The Rose Wood Hunt by Mackenzie reed tells the story of Lily Rosewood who has had one dream her whole life, taking over her grandmothers spot at the family business, Rosewood Inc, as the head chair. When disaster strikes and Lily’s grandmother passes away, her fortune is left out of the will. Lily is then sent on a treasure hunt with the three people she would least expect to find the quarter of a billion dollar fortune her grandmother left.
I think this book was good. The plot was very interesting from the start and got better as the book went on. There were twists around every corner and even though the book was fast paced, information was packed into every page. the book had elements of action, mystery, and romance and was a nice break from the books that I usually read. the language and writing made the book a very light read, I don’t usually like that but I actually enjoyed it this time. I think I would definitely read the book again.
I feel that a lot of the characters are easy to relate to. Their problems seem very real and relatable to my daily life and what I worry about. I think there would be room for improvement however because I saw some stuff coming ahead of time. It could be on purpose but some of the ways the characters were acting made it obvious something was going to happen. That is really the only criticism that I have if it was not intentional.
Overall the book was pretty good. I would recommend this book to people who enjoy romance,mystery and adventure. I would also recommend it to people looking for something light to read right after a challenging book.
Freshman year, a book made by Sarah Mai is about a a woman named Sarah who has just finished her last year of high School and is starting to go into college. This book shows a lot about how life can be like at this time of anyone’s life, it shows the struggle of trying to find out what you want to be as an adult, it shows the troubles of stress from classes and personal life that can lead to anxiety, and it shows how friendships can be lost during this time of your life, but also made.
Freshman year is a book, from my point of view, a way to show Young adult or people who are going to be college students that the feelings that they are going through are perfectly reasonable to have. With not knowing what you want to do, or to even think about going to college to being with, this book is able to show that step that Young Adults can make, and for some its the right steps while for others it isn’t, and for many books I feel like they don’t get that sense.
There are many things that I like about this book, from the Art, to the relatable things that Sarah Mai Is able to write, but there are also things that I don’t like about the book. The biggest thing being the “transition pages” in some scenarios the story jumps from one thing to another without warning, in some parts it goes smoothly while in other parts it feels like a big stopping point, it threw me off most of the time and it made me confused as to what she was doing, there are other little thing that I didn’t like about the book, like the pacing of some parts or the vibe that the book gave me, like a sense of saddness in a happy setting, but in general this was a book that I highly enjoyed, it was more upfront with more serious topics, and with being a junior-almost senor, this book gave me a new way to look at how college is in general, and I highly recommend it to anyone who’s in the same boat as I am, or even if your not I still lightly recommend it.
When the Angels Left the Old Country is the story of two study partners, Uriel the angel and Little Ash the demon, who travel from their Shetl in Eastern Europe to America in order to rescue a young woman from their town who appears to be in trouble. Along the way they meet Rose, another young person seeking the famed golden streets of America. Ultimately, the lives of Rose, Essie, and other characters they meet intersect in occasionally predictable ways that make for a happy ending wrapped in a bow. The novel employs both historical fiction and magical realism and explores the themes of morality, human nature, and the evolving nature of personal identity. While the protagonists are not human, strictly speaking, they present two extremes of the human existence: the angel, unable to see sin and driven to help others, and the demon, who looks for mischief and evil. The casual reader may find that they identify with both the angel and the demon at various points in the story. At times the angel and the demon seem to switch places, and their reactions to this prompt questions about morality: is it possible to do something bad for a greater good; can something one personally believes to be the right choice be viewed as the wrong choice by other “good” people? The book included just enough magic that it remained grounded in reality and history. The angel and the demon are constantly in flux between their world and ours; their magic doesn’t envelop the plot because they don’t always rely on it for survival. As someone who doesn’t gravitate toward magic and world-building, I found I could enjoy the fragments of magic interspersed with the stories of other characters, whose experiences most certainly reflect the reality of Ellis Island immigration and life in early 1900s New York City. But for lovers of fantasy and fancy, it might not be quite enough. I’d recommend this book to readers who are more fluid in the genres they enjoy. When the Angels Left the Old Country is a coming-of-age story, especially for the angel, who is forced to reckon with the complexities of living as a human: making what you believe is the “right choice” will always have negative consequences for someone or something; making the wrong choice will burden your conscience. I enjoyed the complexity of the angel and the demon, but found the human characters to be insincere, inaccurate, and generally underdeveloped. Some of the plotlines felt forced or unrealistic. Additionally, I wish the glossary of Armaic, Hebrew, and Yiddish terms was at the front of the book, or even in footnotes, rather than at the back.
