Kate's Tales of Books and Bands

By Kerry Wilkinson Despite the extreme popularity of the Hunger Games trilogy there were some serious flaws.  This book, Renegade , played into several of them.  One of my biggest problems wight his book was the extraordinary resemblance to Catching Fire , the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy.  In order to fully explain my problems with this book I will be giving away part of the ending.  So there will be SPOILERS. Ok, I'll start at the beginning.   Renegade is the second book in the trilogy.  I read the first one, Reckoning , probably over a year ago.  I found it extremely similar to the Hunger Games when I read it for these reasons.  There is something called the Reckoning where everyone takes basically an aptitude test that nobody really understands how it works.  They get a status as a result of this test: Elite, Member, Inter, or Trog.  That's not the important part though.  Then, there is the Choosing.  It is basi...

by Jennifer Richard Jacobson Normally when books are about elementary school children, they show how stupid some people think these children are.  Even when these characters are supposed to be "smart" the book portrays them as stupid and overly proud of dumb achievements.  This book was different.  Ari, the main character, is a smart, thoughtful fifth grader.  Ari's brother, Gage, is 19 years old and he doesn't get along with their guardian Janna.  Gage decides to move out and Ari moves with him.  Janna was their mother's friend from high school and when both of their mom dies four years previously, their last living parent, they had to move in with Janna.  Gage tells Janna that he has an apartment set up for him and Ari, but it isn't until after they leave that Ari finds out this isn't true.  Ari's mom's dying wish was that Gage and Ari stay together always and that Ari go to Carter Middle School, a competitive school to get into.  Ari is ju...

By Courtney Alameda Micheline Helsing is a tetrachromat, she can see ghosts, and she uses her abilities to hunt ghosts with her friends Oliver, Jude, and Ryder. Micheline is the only heir to the Helsing corporation, a business that goes after the different kinds of ghosts and hunts them down before they can kill anyone. When a ghost hunt goes wrong, Micheline and her friends are infected with a soulchain, a ghostly disease that is slowly killing them from the inside. Now Micheline has to go against her father's wishes in order to save herself and her friends before they all die. The way this book was written was not what I expected. There was a lot of detail and description and while it did show instead of tell the amount of descriptive words really threw me off of the actual plot that was going on. For instance: "I followed Damian out into the anemic, waning night. Spindly trees lined the wide avenue, shedding the gangrenous leaves of fall." (p 62). Read that sentence. T...

By Delilah s. Dawson Patsy is an indentured servant of the United States government, which has turned into the Valor National government. Valor National was a bank that got the United States out of debt by adding a clause in a credit card application which allows them to demand all the money owed on the spot, have them be killed, or have them be turned into a hit man. Patsy's mother had taken out a huge loan and now Patsy has to either kill ten people in five days or her mother dies. This book had a good idea, but the way it was executed was a little boring. The entire book focused on Patsy and Wyatt, the son a man she just killed, riding around in a van and killing people. Their relationship was very implausible, considering Patsy killed her father and they met when he was about to get revenge by killing her, and a chapter later they were making out. Overall their relationship was not very fleshed out, and the pretense the book was set in was a little implausible. On one hand, wha...