Kate's Tales of Books and Bands

By John Green              I was so excited when I found out the library had gotten this book.  I have heard a lot of good things about it since it came out. This novel is about a sixteen year old girl named Hazel who is dying of cancer. At the support group her mother makes her attend because she seems to be depressed (a side effect of dying) she meets a cute boy named Augustus Waters. He invites her to see a movie with him, and the rest is basically obvious. Except, of course, that Hazel is dying of cancer, and desperately wants to make him not like her so she won't hurt him when she dies. It was wonderful,  I was crying so hard by the end, so it was exactly what I had hoped for.              This novel was like brownie pudding. Rich, fudge-y brownie layer at the top, and a pudding or half baked batter layer underneath. Yum! Like brownie pudding, this made me so emotional. If, however, you can not imagine ...

Jeremy Barker lives by a personal zombie survival code. #1 Avoid eye contact #2 Keep quiet #3 Forget the past #4 Lock-and-load #5 Fight to survive An aficionado of zombie films, Jeremy understands the nuances of survival. The code guides him through the halls of his all boy private, Catholic high school. He relies on it to help him navigate life with his angry father, his absent mother, and his long-gone brother. It helps Jeremy with love, and in a shocking turn of events, it will help him with quite a bit more. Part Lord of the Flies , part Catcher in the Rye and part Prayer for Owen Meany , this extraordinarily well-written coming-of-age story is pitch perfect, and will be particularly appealing to male teens. Fast paced and punctuated with the daily, casual brutality of boy-on-boy violence, Jeremy’s resourcefulness and intelligence glow on the page, even as he gets sucked deeper and deeper into a chilling and increasingly horrifying mystery. I couldn’t put it down. And when ...

First, let me say that I love the cover, despite (and perhaps because of) the obvious frothiness and the girl standing awkwardly in the back. Turquoise is one of my favorite colors, and I love dresses with ruffles and mirrors. Okay, so this book is about a girl musician in a dystopian society. She's in a lower caste, composed of artists, which means she must work very hard every day to eat food. She is then selected because she's pretty and accomplished. Excuse me, she was selected via "random lottery", along with 34 other girls, to compete over the prince. She wins, but not really, because she loves someone else, and is only competing for the free food. Story in a nutshell. In all honesty, I really thought this was going to be a wonderful book, but no. It truly wasn't. First, the girl. Her name is America Singer. I'm pretty bothered by the name alone (named "America", she's a singer), but it was the plethora of nicknames she had. She was called ...

by Julie Hunt I'm surprised no one else has reviewed a picture book yet. I can't be the only one following the new publications of children's books, right? 'Take the Hope or the Dream or the Song or the Dance. You might choose the Joke. You might take the Chance. Take the Risk or the Scare or the Stunt or the Rip. What prize will you pick from today's lucky dip?' Precious Little is a circus hand who wishes to be a trapeze artists. She usually sits "backstage" and sews spangled stars and roses on the leotards. She takes the circus's famous Lucky Dip - and it appears that she is shot off into the universe. It's hard to tell. The summary calls it a " heart-stirring story about the rewards of perseverance, friendship and taking a chance." I saw no such thing while reading. I must make clear that this is not a children's book, by no means. This is certainly a young adult to adult book, cleverly disguised beneath fanciful illustrations...

Lucky isn't that Lucky. He is relentlessly bullied and his parents are powerless to intervene and advocate for him because they are paralyzed by their dysfunctional marriage. A social studies assignment to design a survey and chart the results goes horribly wrong when Lucky decides to poll students about which method of suicide they would choose. Not a good idea. After a particularly brutal attack, Lucky's mom takes him away to visit family in Arizona, and give them both a break from the pressures of home. Three weeks lead to a lot of self-discovery, and a highly satisfactory conclusion. A.S. King , author of the Printz Honor Book Please Ignore Vera Dietz , took a lot of risks with this novel. The ants serve as a comic Greek chorus and work well in providing a counter-balance to the bleakness of Lucky's life. The dream sequences in which Lucky tries to free his long lost grandfather from a Vietnamese prison camp are also effective, if a bit of a stretch at times. However, ...

A National Book Award finalist, How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr , is simply stunning. Jill is a senior in high school still reeling from the tragic death of her father. She has emotionally closed herself off from her friends, her boyfriend, and her grieving mother. She is stuck in her grief, and is horrified when her mother announces that she is going to adopt a baby. Mindy has dropped out of school and agreed to give her baby up for adoption. She climbs a bus in Nebraska and arrives to meet Jill and her Mom in Colorado. She is carrying more than an unborn baby. She is also running from a past that includes secrets she can never share. Through two very distinct voices, details emerge and eventually, the pair establish a rapport. Friendship, romance, and the meaning of family are all explored in a fresh and authentic process. The conclusion is exceptionally satisfying. Emotionally complicated girls with messy life-situations is Zarr's strength, as she displayed in her 2007 book  S...

By Mary Losure This is the charming story of a little girl who sees fairies. However, her mother and her aunt and uncle don't believe her. Her cousin Elsie does. So they make a couple of paper cut outs of pained fairies (Elsie's an artist). It follows the story of the pair as the pictures they took took with their 'fairies' are taken too seriously. Several important people including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, believed in fairies and at that period in time, people wanted to try and prove the existence of fairies. As the whole deal got more and more out of control, they get really guilty and don't like the direction their joke went in. It was a really interesting book overall. I would not have imagined that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have believed in fairies. Also, I thought it interesting that scientists wanted to classify fairies into a species and such and document them. I think that this book should get a 3.5 or something a...