Book Reviews

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Book Review: Scythe

 

Scythe by Neal Shusterman is a dystopian novel that follows two teenagers named Citra and Rowan as they train to become Scythes. The World that they live in has conquered death, therefore, in order to combat overpopulation, Scythes are the only ones who can take life way. They are chosen to be a Scythe’s apprentice after they each have a remarkable and unpleasant experience with the honorable Scythe Faraday. He choses them both to train to become Scythes, but after their apprenticeship, only one of the them will receive the ring of the Scythe.

Pros:

  • page-turner
  • great character development
  • lots of great twists and turns
  • great villain with Scythe Goddard (corruption of main characters, reader feels hatred and fear towards him, set up wonderfully)
  • the supporting characters are intriguing just by themselves (ex. Scythe Goddard, Scythe Curie, members of Scythe Goddard crew, Scythe Faraday)
  • wonderful world-building
  • ethical dilemmas talked about (should you enjoy being a Scythe and take advantage of the position? or should you hate it and live in solitude?)
  • great contrast between Citra’s and Rowan’s life
  • makes you care about the characters
  • themes: right vs. wrong,

Cons:

  • doesn’t capitalize on talking about themes of overpopulation and how to deal with, which is what the summary makes it seem like it might talk about
  • ending is a bit anti-climatic, the climax kind of happens earlier in the story

My Rating: 9/10

In conclusion, Scythe is book that makes you think, but not too much. It goes into the ethical dilemma of overpopulation and how to deal with, but doesn’t dive into the topic too much. Hopefully it will do so in the sequel (Thunderhead). The characters and plot were also intriguing and the book kept you constantly hooked. I recommend this book to anyone who loves reading, dystopian novels, and are able to read violent books.

Have you read Scythe and did you like it? If not, are you going to add it to your reading list?

 

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Book Review: Tash Hearts Tolstoy

In Tash Hearts Tolstoy, a realistic fiction novel by Kathryn Ormsbee, a high-school girl named Tash works on a web series called Unhappy Families with her best friend, Jack. It’s a humble enough web series that serves as a modern adaptation of Anna Karenina, a novel by Leo Tolstoy, who Tash idolizes. However, when a popular youtuber gives them a shoutout, their project goes viral. Tash feels the effects of internet fame, from dealing with haters to how the fame impacts her friendships. She also develops a major crush on fellow vlogger Thom, who she plans to meet up with at the Golden Tubas. However, she even struggles in that asset of her life, where she is afraid to come out to others about being a romantic asexual.

Pros:

  • Great LGBTQ+ representation in this book, Tash isn’t the only character who is apart of the community
  • modern and up to date with what teens are doing in the world today
  • Youtube serving as a pathway to fame is realistic and fresh
  • themes of the damages of fame and growing up
  • great parallels between Tash’s Unhappy Families project and her own Unhappy Family
  • supporting characters are interesting and many of them could probably have their own book
  • Tash has impressive character development, along with other supporting characters, like her sister
  • the ending makes the long book worth the read

Cons:

  • Can sometimes be boring, especially when Tash is caught up on the hate, and that makes the reader want to tell her to stop worrying about it. Also when she spends all of her time daydreaming about Thom.
  • The character Jack, who serves as Tash’s best friend is hard to like. However, she is realistic of how someone in her situation would act like.

My Rating: 8.5/10

In conclusion, Tash Hearts Tolstoy is a fun and interesting read that made me more aware and knowledgeable about subjects like being asexual, vlogging, and web series. I would recommend this book to anyone who struggles with identity, likes reading, and is young enough to understand what vlogging and web series are.

If you have read Tash Hearts Tolstoy, did you like it? And if you haven’t, are you interested in reading it?

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Book Review: Red Queen

Red Queen is dystopian/fantasy novel written by Victoria Aveyard. It follows Mare Barrow, a young woman who pickpockets for a living and is from the lower class area of her society called the Silts. She lives in a world divided into two classes, people with Silver blood and people with Red. The Silvers are the ruling elites who have the gift of superpowers. The Reds are the impoverished, poor, unpowered common folk, who are sent off to war to fight for the Silvers and barely have any rights. Mare is a Red. After meeting a strange young man who she attempted to pickpocket, she finds herself working as a servant in the King’s summer home nearby. During the Queenstrial, a competition in which possible future queens (Silvers) show off their powers to the royals, Mare accidentally falls into the electric field guarding the arena while attempting to serve an upper-class Silver.

However, instead of disintegrating into tiny bits, Mare survives, only to realize that she is a Red with the the powers of a Silver. Now she has to navigate the volatile lifestyle of pretending that you are a Silver (when you are in fact, a Red) while being in the spotlight of someone who is betrothed to a prince.

Pros:

  • great plot twist at the end
  • lots of interesting world-building
  • interesting take on how to overcome you oppressors (is terrorism right if it is for the right reasons?)
  • interesting commentary on social class
  • compelling characters with lots of additional backstory for most of the characters that you have to infer to totally figure it all out
  • great villain and mysteries that have to be uncovered

Cons:

  • it’s concept and premise suffers from feeling unorginal
  • very similar to the YA novel trope of a young woman standing up against and starting a revolution against a corrupt and evil government (however, this book makes that government more human by inspecting them up close and personal)

My Rating: 8.5/10

In conclusion, go out and read it! Although it sometimes uses some overused tropes, it’s still a compelling novel with fresh elements to bring to the table.

If you have read Red Queen, did you like it? And if you have not, are you interested in reading it now?

 

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Want a Great Club to Join, Do Battle of the Books!

Battle of the Books is club at Dominion High School and many other schools in the county that read 10 books and then have a competition with trivia facts about the books in March. However, we also do mock-battle meetings and hopefully pizza parties with team bonding. Here are all the books that we read in the 2018-2017 season:

Highly Illogical Behavior by John Corey Whaley

Sixteen year-old Solomon is agoraphobic, therefore he hasn’t left his house in 3 year, 2 months, and 1 day, to be exact. Lisa is an aspiring psychologist who wants to ‘cure’ Simon so that she can win a Scholarship and enter the second-best psychology program in the U.S.

My Rating: 8.5/10

All American Boys by Brendan Kiely and Jason Reynolds

After Rashad is beaten brutally by a policeman because he thought that Rashad stole something—even though he clearly didn’t—a whole town must decide whose side they are on and whose truth they believe. The story is told from the perspective of Rashad and Quinn. Quinn is a family friend of Paul, the policeman who brutally beat up his classmate, Rashad. Both Rashad and Quinn must decide what to do about his horrible situation and see if they can make a change.

My Rating: 10/10

The Girl with all the Gifts by Mike Carey

In this seriously dystopian novel, Melanie is a prisoner in an underground facility where other little children eat, sleep and go to school. Guns are constantly trained on them, and Melanie knows that something is up, but she’s not sure what. The book follows Melanie and her teacher’s, Miss. Justineau, perspectives and the mystery behind it all is slowly unraveled.

My Rating 6.5/10

Gunpowder Girls by Tanya Anderson

This nonfiction story informs you about the many horrible tragedies that befell women working in arsenals during the Civil War. It highlights the dangerous working conditions that were present and how the mass deaths during the Civil War took place on and off the battlefield.

My Rating: 7/10

March: Book One by John Lewis, Nate Powell and Andrew Aydin

March: Book One is a nonfiction comic book that follows John Lewis, the book author, a civil rights activist, and a current day U.S. Congressman, on his journey during the Civil Rights movement. It focuses on his childhood and the segregation that he faced everyday. It also highlights him meeting Martin Luther King Jr. and organizing the nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins.

My Rating: 9/10

Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt

In this inspiring yet tear-jerking book, we see the story of Jacob, a young troubled kid who grew up in an abusive childhood and desperately wants to meet his daughter, Jupiter. Jacob’s quest to reunite with his daughter is shown through the eyes of Jack, his foster brother, who grows to form a brotherly bond with Jacob.

My Rating: 10/10

Prisoner of Night and Fog by Anne Blankman

In this historical fiction novel, the rise of Hitler in Germany is shown up close and personal, but with a twist. Gretchen, our protagonist, is like a niece to Hitler because her father sacrificed his life to save Hitler’s. However, Gretchen falls in love with a Jewish journalist by the name of Daniel Cohen and beings to questions everything she has ever known about Hitler and the Nazi Party.

My Rating: 8.5/10

Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard

In this fantasy/dystopian novel, Mare Barrow lives in a world where people with silver blood, who have superhuman abilities, rule over those with red blood. After Mare, a red blood, discovers and exposes that she has superhuman abilities in front of lots of prominent silvers in the King’s Court, she becomes a fake silver set to marry the prince. However, when Mare gets involved with rebellion and corruption, it all spirals out control.

My Rating: 8.5/10

Spare Parts by Joshua Davis

Technically called Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream, that title alone pretty much tells you everything that you need to know about his nonfiction book. It follows four undocumented high schoolers from Mexico in Arizona who create a underwater robot to enter in a robot contest, in which colleges like MIT will be competing it. It chronicles their struggles with racism and immigration, along with financial issues and education. It is eye-opening today because it focuses on the issues frequently in today’s media on a personal level.

My Rating: 9/10

What Can’t Wait by Ashley Hope Perez

This realistic fiction novel chronicles Marissa, a bright Latina high schooler, and her dream to go to college. Her home life is a mess due to her fighting with her father, who just wants to always stay at hope and support her family. However, Marissa’s dream is to leave home and go to college.

Rating: 8.5/10

Those are the 10 Battle Books this season. if you are interested please comment below!

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Book Review: The Dazzling Heights

The Dazzling Heights is the second book in Katherine McGee’s Thousandth Floor series. Therefore, in this review, there will be spoilers for the Thousandth Floor.

Following The Thousandth Floor’s steps, the book starts with a death scene and promises you that a character, probably one that you will grow to care for, will be dead by the end of this book. It follows a similar casts of characters (besides the one that died in the last book) and adds Calliope, a mysterious character with the background of a criminal.

In a far away future, a couple of kids are just trying to keep their secrets hidden, even though those secrets includes murder, an illegal supercomputer, romance with your sibling, and past criminal activities.

After the horrible events of the last book that the characters must recover from, it still provides fresh twists and turns, the forming of new relationships, and further world-building.

Never before has a book made me root for—and maybe even like—a character that I totally despised in the last book. Leda from the last book was horrible and I hated her, but I ended up rooting for her—even though she has done terrible things, which is pretty impressive writing on McGee’s part.

One of the areas where this book excels in is character development. Leda becomes a LOT more likable character. Rylin becomes a stronger character by no longer only being relevant as a love interest and actually doing fun and interesting things on her own. Watt and Leda’s relationships has some major changes—changes that are amusing to read about.

However, Avery’s character becomes slightly annoying and her relationship with Atlas is obnoxious and a little gross to read about. Calliope’s character seems like she is going to amount to something, but in the end she only slightly affects Avery’s relationship with Atlas. Her former cons are absorbing to read about, so I hope that she does more in the third book in the series, The Towering Sky.

Additionally, the book is an enthralling roller coaster ride that is a great guilty pleasure book. It’s a great book to read on the beach!

Rating: 7.5/10

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The Hate U Give Review

The Hate U Give is a young adult realistic fiction by Angie Thomas. This book is insanely successful as Thomas’ first novel, as it opened at number one on the New York Times young adult bestselling list.

It tackles the relevant issues of police brutality and racism through the eyes of Starr Carter, a 16-year old high school student, who goes to a high-end, mostly white school outside of the dangerous area that she lives in. Starr witnesses her childhood best friend get shot and killed right in font of her eyes by a policeman. She knows that he was innocent and that the police killed him for no reason other than that they were prejudiced against him. As the story gains national attention, Starr is the differing opinions of the two worlds that she lives in: her mostly-black home and her mostly-white peers at school. She is also faced with the question: Should she stay under the radar and be safe or stand up for her friend and face danger?

Pros:

This book tackled the issues, in my opinion, beautifully. As someone who does not live in the same situation that Starr lives in, it was eye-opening and important.

The characters that were supposed to likable were likable and the characters that you were supposed to disliked you disliked, so I thought that the characterization was great.

SPOILER: For example, Starr’s racist white friend gets what she got when she refused to have an open mind and change her obviously flawed logic. While Starr’s white boyfriend, Christopher, realized the two world that Starr lived in and supported her when she stood up to the police.

I also liked how the book branched out into other things beyond the core themes, like drugs and gangs, and how they impact the people who live near them.

The presence of family was another important facet of the book, showing that families aren’t just parents and their children, but whole communities and half-siblings and friends.

SPOILER: My favorite part of the book was when Starr took a stand and delivered a quick speech at the protest for her friend that was killed, Khalil. It gave me shivers and showed the impressive character development that Starr went through.

SPOILER: I also liked how the ending (with the police officer who killed Khalil not getting any jail time) was written. If the police officer had been prosecuted, it would have been out of line with the current events going on around in the United States. It also made the reader feel some very strong emotions of outrage towards the justice system, which helped the reader step into the shoes of the protagonist and the real-life people who are faced with the same experiences as her.

Cons: 

The only real problems that I found with this book was that it sometimes used topical terms used in current pop culture either made me cringe a little bit when mentioned in the story, or will with be outdated and not relevant in a couple years time.

Also, I had super high expectations for this book, as I had heard it mentioned on social media as a amazing book and had read a book with a similar content and LOVED it. However, my expectations were not totally met as the book wasn’t the page turner that I had wanted it to be, but it was still great.

Score: 8.5/10

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One of Us is Lying Book Review

One of Us Is Lying is the debut novel of Karen M. McManus. It’s a murder-mystery that follows a group of four teens who were present when a student dies during their detention, in which they are all suspects after the odd circumstances of the student’s death come to light.

The victim, Simon was widely hated throughout the school due to his gossip app that ruined many student’s lives.

The suspects:

Bronwyn is a straight-a student and future valedictorian who doesn’t break rules.

Cooper is a Ken-doll like baseball pitcher who is highly scouted by many colleges and MLB teams.

Addy is a homecoming queen beauty whose whole life revolves around the decisions her boyfriend makes for her.

Nate is on probation for drug-dealing who is constantly in trouble with the law and has fractured family.

These students, however, aren’t just one-note stereotypes, Simon was going to publish an article about them which would uncover all of the parts of them that they would wish to keep secret. When the Police find the archived article in Simon’s app, all of the students become suspects.

Bottom Line: I read this amazing book in one day, because I was so hooked and couldn’t put it down. Before that, I was in a major reading slump, and this book dug me out of that hole. I would recommend this to lovers to murder mysteries and YA readers.

My Rating: 9/10

Now, if you haven’t read the book, I would suggest that you stop reading here. I’m about to get into some serious spoilers.

The Ending:

Since this book is a murder mystery and a twist on the classic who-done-it, the ending can make or break the book. In my opinion, the ending fits the book nicely. None of the four main character are the murderer, which is proven through showing the action of the book from their alternating points of view and that none of the characters that the reader had grown to like turned out to be the murderer.

It also didn’t take the easy way out by pining the crime on a random minor character like Janae, Jake or the teacher. They were characters that didn’t carry emotional weight and would be an easy route for the author to go on. But no, she didn’t. The murder was Simon, in a twist that you could kind of see coming after they started to uncover the mystery, but seemed almost impossible to actually be true.

Simon’s suicide is a depressing outcome to a murder mystery, but it brings uncomfortable topics to light and shows how far a depressed kid with go to make sure that he makes as many people who wronged him suffer as possible. Additionally, it is also a cautionary tale about how the smallest actions can make the largest impact.

Character Development:

At the beginning of the book the characters seem to all be tropes that you see in your average YA novel, the nerd, the jock, the beauty queen and the outsider. Mainly, that’s because they are. To me, one of the best parts about this book was that you got to see the character grow into likable characters who change due to the events happening in the book.

Addy, for example, was a pitiful girl obsessed with her hair and her boyfriend. Her boyfriend, Jack, controls her life and even isn’t that nice to her while doing it. Her whole life revolves around him and she’s unlikable. However, by the end of the book, Addy has broken up with Jack, cut her hair short, and became a vital part in the investigation of finding out who really killed Simon. In detention scene, she is useless, scrambling around, freaking out, and ending up in a total meltdown afterwards. In contrast to that, in the end, she figures the answer to the murder mystery by going to Janae’s house and questioning her to understand who the true murderer was.

Nate also has lots of character development, which is shown when he sticks up for Cooper and falls in love with his polar opposite, Bronwyn. He stays out of trouble (for the most part) and tries to restart his relationship with his mom. At the beginning of the book, the rest of the three are sure that Nate is guilty of the crime, but when he is arrested towards the end of the book, they do anything in their power to prove that he is innocent.

Bronwyn probably evolves the least, but she still changed for the better. She kept most of her defining characteristics, like her intelligence and determination, but let herself go a little bit and stopped being super uptight. She fell in love with Nate, a “bad boy”, who she realizes actually isn’t that bad.

My favorite transformation, however, was Cooper’s. He starts out as a boring stereotypical jock who is destined for an even more mundane stereotypical life in the MLB. He is dating one of the prettiest, most popular girls in school and hangs out with the popular clique. For a while, it seemed like Cooper was going to stay that way. He was likable enough, being sweet to Addy after her meltdown and trying desperately to find an Epi Pen for Simon, but he seemed like a forgettable character that would disappear from your mind after you finished the book.

In one paragraph, Cooper’s character becomes a thousand times more interesting. We meet Kris, the guy that Cooper is in love with, and suddenly, Cooper isn’t a boring jock. He’s hiding the fact that he’s gay underneath a facade of perfectness. Cooper has to come to terms with his sexuality and stop hiding his true self from everyone. He has to come out to his homophobic dad, and his MLB and college offers disappear out of thin air. However, when Cooper finally comes to terms who he really is and a prominent figure stands up for him in the media, his college and MLB offers come back through the pipeline and his dad takes steps on the road to acceptance. Just to solidify Cooper development, he chooses to go to the college continued their offer with him when Cooper was under fire for being gay, even though that school wasn’t even in the top ten.

Those are the reasons why the book was impossible to put down for me, if you have read the book (and hopefully you have if you have gotten to this point), then what was your favorite part of the book?

 

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