This book is a kind of bittersweet, in that it’s the last one in the main series. It’s a crazy long four books (well, five if you count the spinoff**) and it truly is the end of a journey. We’ve seen these characters grow from immature teens to adults who are willing to make tough decisions, and who are tangled in things far beyond them. The four years (or more) you spend at college change who you are as a person, and we get to […]
They way this one ended, the next is going to be one hell of a show
Aw man. Trying to review this without spoilers is going to be kind of hard. We’ve entered into junior year, and things are going to be way different now! At the end of last year, Nick was far too clever for his own good, and now everyone is paying the price, in a way. We learn about everyone’s eventful summers and we see how it was an important one for each person’s growth. While we tend to focus on our main cast of characters, others […]
It’s time to step up the game
So our lovable band of misfits is back for another year at Lander University. Now that they’ve made it past freshman year they have a lot of work to do. One of the things I like is that they are realizing that they are not as powerful as they think they are. They’re strong supers, sure, but they aren’t the strongest out there, and they still have a lot to learn. Mary, for one, was seen as almost untouchable, and she gets her ass handed […]
A buzzing sound began in my brain
This book came to me by way of Amazon Prime’s First Reads program, so it was free, which was the correct price for it. I did keep wanting to love it, but fundamentally I hated it. Here is what it had going for it: it was a very fast read. A Small Revolution is the story of a young Korean-American woman – our narrator, Yoona – who does a program in the summer between high school and college that brings Korean-Americans to South Korea for […]
If you are different from a person everyone agrees is wonderful, it means you are somehow wrong.
This was a tough one, emotionally. One True Thing is the story of a brilliant young woman “with her whole life ahead of her” who is guilted by her controlling and emotionally-arrested father into leaving her life behind to come home and care for her dying mother. And it covers so much ground in a very gentle but sad way: gender roles, parenting, family dynamic, literature and poetry, agency, friendship, romance, and ultimately, euthanasia. At the very beginning of the story, Ellen tells us that […]
Believe women.
There was no way this was going to be an easy read; listening to it on audiobook was downright chilling. I’ve gotta hand it to Krakauer for treating this topic and these women with the consideration and respect they deserve. This book is meticulously researched, and Krakauer’s forthright prose style works tremendously well when examining the testimony and transcripts that make up the evidence in the presented cases. Krakauer himself must needs very little editorializing to get the point across, because the documents speak for […]