When one of your favorite people (Anne Lamott) tells People magazine that she, “gobbled it up in one sitting” and you slogged through the book trying to figure out what “good writing” Lamott was talking about, you feel badly about things. I feel badly about myself. It’s like why do I suck so much? But hey, maybe this book isn’t for me. Maybe the movie coming out with Nicole Kidman will strike the nerve that the book did not do for me. Maybe. Maybe I’m […]
I Want to Give This To Everyone Who Needs It
I’ll Give You the Sun is a book that is going to stick around with me for a long time I think, maybe forever. After I finished reading it, I cried because I was done reading it. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before with a YA book, not trying to knock YA too hard but it’s sometimes hard to find the “literature” part in some of the YA lit I’ve been reading. Not so here. Jandy Nelson’s writing is amazing, the word choice, the […]
I Wouldn’t Survive the Two Minutes
When you think of fairies you think of Tinkerbelle, don’t you? Sometimes I do, but sometimes I think of the fairies that my Irish grandmother would talk about, beautiful but deadly, who would steal babies and get humans to enter into impossible bargains. These are the fairies found in both The Call and the Invasion. Kids no longer get to experience childhood, instead, they begin training as warriors waiting for the day that they will be “called” from our world to the fairy world. […]
There’s a Monster at the End of This Book
Life is a balancing act. We have to balance what we want to do with what we have to do. We have to balance our comfort with our risks. Eliza Mirk has lived a mostly anonymous online life where she has created one of the most popular stories on the Internet. Written and drawn in installments, Monstrous Sea pretty much consumes Eliza’s life. When she is first introduced to a new student named Wallace, she thinks he’s just another jock who will make fun of her, […]