I have mixed feelings about how to rate Jon Skovron’s Misfit. On the one hand, the writing isn’t good and the plot is predictable and not satisfying. On the other hand, I know a younger version of myself and at least one of her friends might have enjoyed it.
It’s been a long time since I read a fantasy book that included war and flight and that focused on women. I was more enticed to read Claire Eliza Bartlett’s We Rule the Night when it said one of the girls had been caught disguising herself as a man to join the military.
A year after the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history, the students and teachers of Marjory Stoneman Douglas share their stories of the shooting and its aftermath in Parkland Speaks: Survivors from Marjory Stoneman Douglas Share Their Stories, edited by MSD teacher Sarah Lerner. The book is a collection of….
Rachael Lippincott’s Five Feet Apart is adapted from Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis’s screenplay of the same name. It’s a love story between two teens who have cystic fibrosis (a.k.a. CF), and they must remain six feet apart to protect their health. One of them is a YouTuber who makes a video-diary of her life, and the other pushes back against his mom’s insistence on trying every possible treatment that could cure him. It’s a pretty good novelization of a movie.
Geekerella’s title is pretty clear that it retells Cinderella but makes her a geek, but it goes further by making her prince the star of the Starfield reboot, which is a space-adventure cult classic that Elle Wittimer was raised on. Elle is not thrilled….
I’ve tried time and time again to get into The Infernal Devices, the prequel trilogy to The Mortal Instruments series, but I haven’t been able to. So, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to get into Lady Midnight, the first in a different spin-off. I was pleasantly entranced by the setting and the characters of the novel.
Twelve-year-old Conor O’Malley must come to terms with his mother having terminal cancer and what that means for him. He’s an independent boy who has had to take a lot responsibility during his mother’s illness and after his father left them. He also has to deal with a strict grandmother and bullies at school. What sets all of this in motion is an old tree that hunts him down and forces him to face the truth through storytelling. The movie adaptation of A Monster Calls, by Patrick Ness, convinced me to read the novel, and both are beautiful.
I watch The Daily Show with Trevor Noah frequently, so I’ve been interested in reading about his life for a while and I appreciate Trevor’s brand of comedy. I was mostly convinced to read Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood after I watched one of Trevor’s old stand-up comedy acts. It’s an amazing and hilarious read.
I was interested in the concept of a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, and I hoped it would be good if Gregory Maguire wrote it. The result, Matchless, is not good. It’s barely okay.
The title, The Good Demon, is enticing enough on its own, which is why I stopped to look at it at the library. Then you find out that the protagonist, Clare, has been exorcised of her demon, the one known only as Her, her best friend. She’s devastated, angry and depressed. Then she finds a few clues left by her Only so that they can be together again, and it involves the reverend’s son. As she struggles with the boy being present as his father exorcised her of her demon and with finding her demon, she gets to know the boy and discovers the dark history….
Cat on the Bookshelf 