Teen Book Reviews: The Unhoneymooners and Eleanor & Park

October 4, 2022September 28, 2022 / cheshirelib / Leave a comment

Teens: did you know that you can earn community service credit for writing a book review and submitting it to us? Today, we’ll hear from someone who did just that. Find out more about how to earn community service hours from home at cheshirelibrary.org/teens/.

The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren. Reviewed by Caroline O.

Meet Olive, a nerdy science loving girl who is shy and awkward. Olive has a twin, Ami, and even though they are total opposites, they still have an unbreakable bond. That is, until it is broken. Olive has the worst luck and everything that can go wrong, goes wrong. On the other hand, Ami gets everything to somehow go her way and she may be the luckiest person on Earth. Any contest that Ami has ever entered in, she has won, so it is no surprise when Ami wins a free, non-refundable honeymoon trip to Hawaii. This luck seems to last up until her wedding day when everyone that ate out of the free, buffet style meal that she won, gets food poisoning. Everyone, that is, except for Olive, who has food allergies, and Ethan, who is a germophobe and refuses to eat out of buffets.

Ami and her husband suggest that Olive and Ethan go on the trip together, since it is non-refundable and the newlyweds are too sick to go. This sounds like a great plan, besides the fact that Ethan and Olive hate each other! Not to mention that these two would have to act as if they had just gotten married. Ethan is the groom’s brother, who can come off as being cocky and arrogant. This was exactly Olive’s first impression of him when they met at a family event awhile back. With Ami being the pushy older twin that she is, Olive and Ethan reluctantly board the plane. Bickering of course. The trip is going somewhat smoothly until Ethan realizes he may not hate Olive as much as he thought.

This book is an amazing read, especially during the summertime. The author does an exceptional job at using imagery and emotional appeal to drag the reader further and further into the book. Not to mention that the book never gets old, and is never boring. The book starts and ends with pure chaos, which is unlike a lot of books that I have ever read. I personally like how the Christina Lauren duo writes their books. In their pieces, they tend to write at least an excerpt from every single character in the book, whether it is a small character or a main character.

5 stars.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. Reviewed by Caroline O.

Eleanor & Park is a phenomenal book that captures the life of two characters, Eleanor and Park. Eleanor is someone who is not as comfortable in her body as most of her sixteen year old peers at school. Eleanor also has an unstable home life with an abusive step-father and a mother that has no control. Eleanor’s family is quite large, including her four little siblings, three of which are biological siblings and one step-brother. This does not seem to be an issue except for the fact that they live in a 2 bedroom apartment, meaning that all of the kids have to share a bedroom with one bath. On the nights that Richie, the step-dad, gets extra abusive and wakes up the kids, with the excessive crashing of objects getting thrown outside their bedroom, Eleanor has to sit there and comfort every one of them. To escape her reality, Eleanor loves to read, but this only makes her an outcast at school. Will she ever find somewhere safe where she can be herself?

Park lives down the street from Eleanor which means that they are on the same bus, where he notices and later meets Eleanor. Park finds that he is actually quite similar to Eleanor. Despite the differences in home life, they are both misfits in their school and begin to bond over that. Park begins to look forward to talking with Eleanor on the bus until there is a period of time when Eleanor does not come to school. This raises Park’s curiosity and he asks his parents if they have ever heard of her family since they had to have lived near each other. Both his parents look at each other and tell him how her house is not necessarily the safest place. Park immediately puts the pieces together and is determined to find her. Through this journey he learns that he may like her more than just in a friend way.

I enjoyed this book a lot because of how quickly the audience can feel as if they are there and in the same room as the characters. The book also is not a hard read, I have found that certain books can be hard to get into for the first few chapters, but this book is different. I was able to enjoy the story very early on in the book and it was upsetting to learn that there was not a sequel to go along with it. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a romance novel that will take you through all of the emotions including guilt, happiness, sadness, and curiosity.

4 stars.

Bridging the Gap

August 23, 2022July 7, 2022 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

Bridge Books.

No, not books about bridges. Bridge Books are those that carry a child over from picture books to early chapter books.

Picture books are often beautifully illustrated and tell a story a young child can relate to. The picture holds their interest while they process the story about the picture. The elaborate illustrations can fire their imaginations and make them howl with laughter. No one expects a preschooler to read them by themselves.

But by the age of four or five, the simplicity of a picture book story may bore a child. They want more, but sitting and listening to a long story with no pictures is also not the solution. Enter the Bridge Books, short, easy-to-follow stories that are more involved, but still full of captivating drawings and pictures that keep a child’s attention. Like a picture book, no one expects an emergent or new reader to read these books on their own, but they provide a deeper and longer story than a picture book, and it’s no stretch to finish a chapter or two before bed every night.

Bridge books come in a wide range of abilities for both the very beginning reader and the more advanced. Perhaps the very first one to start with is Baby Monkey, Private Eye, by Brian Selznick. My four year old couldn’t get enough of Baby Monkey, and still loves to carry the book around, even though she can now decode the words. Baby Monkey, though shelved in with the graphic novels, is the perfect first reader – simple repetitive words, very short sentences, and full illustrations which are loaded with easter eggs. From Baby Monkey we went right to Selznick’s more famous story, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which is much longer but just as beautifully illustrated with pictures that capture the imagination – and ties into actual film history that you can find on YouTube for added bonus. The movie version of the book, Hugo, is just as wonderful.

Every child learns and processes information differently, and there is a bridge book for almost every type of learner. Some have color illustrations as clear as a cartoon, others well-rendered pencil drawings, to simple outline drawings or comic-book style artwork. Some are in full-color, others just black and white. Some have illustrations on every page, others every 2-3 pages. If your child is bored by one, let them choose the style of illustration they prefer. As always, nudge your child to go a little deeper into the story – can they predict what will happen on the next page? What would they do instead? If they were best friends with the character, what would they tell them? Draw a picture about the story. Make some toast for Mercy.

For early reading practice, give your child easy readers such as Elephant and Piggie by Mo Willems, Dr. Seuss, or Pete the Cat, but for lengthening that attention span and jumping to the next level of story depth, check out these series of early Bridge Books to read with your child. The picture content is large and frequent, and unlike some of the more advanced bridge series, will not leave you weeping from unbearably painful story lines and prose (You know I’m talking about you, Purrmaids). You might just find yourself sneaking a read on your own!

Quick Reads for Your Fast Paced Life

August 16, 2022June 25, 2022 / Louise / Leave a comment

Lots of people start the summer with impressive reading plans. But as we know, life is busy, and finding time to read can often be a challenge. If you think it’s hard to find something of quality to read that’s under 200 pages, you’re not alone, but guess what? There are a lot of quick reads at CPL that are also good books. You could read any of these in a weekend, keep a few on hand to read when you get a few minutes of downtime. Summer Reading for the win!

The Grownup by Gillian Flynn (63 pages). No time for Gone Girl? This Edgar Award winning short story by the same author is creepy goodness, compacted.
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (116 pages). Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West, this book captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.
The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka (129 pages). Follows the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco.
Heather, the Totality by Matthew Weiner (138 pages.) The story of a collision course between a dangerous young man and a privileged couple who compete for their daughter’s attention.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (146 pages). A deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. A classic.
Sisters by Lily Tuck (156 pages). A new wife struggles with her unrelenting obsession with her husband’s first wife.
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (163 pages). A Japanese woman who has been working at a convenience store for eighteen years finds friendship with an alienated, cynical, and bitter young man who becomes her coworker.
Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf (179 pages). A bittersweet yet inspiring story of a man and a woman who, in advanced age, come together to wrestle with the events of their lives and their hopes for the imminent future.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang (188 pages). A darkly allegorical tale of a woman who decides to stop eating meat, is denounced a subversive, and becomes estranged from those closest to her.
Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong (196 pages). Newly dumped by her fiance, Ruth moves back in with her parents, whose decline is both comical and poignant.

Teen Book Reviews: Warcross & Call Down the Hawk

August 9, 2022June 25, 2022 / cheshirelib / Leave a comment

Teens: did you know that you can earn community service credit for writing a book review and submitting it to us? Today, we’ll hear from two teens who did just that. Find out more about how to earn community service hours from home at cheshirelibrary.org/teens/.

Warcross by Marie Lu. Reviewed by Ella K.

Warcross is a book perfect for teens and young adults who enjoy science fiction and future societies. The story is set in a world where a young fourteen-year-old boy, Hideo Tanaka invents a pair of highly sophisticated virtual reality glasses called the NeuroLink. The glasses work by tricking the brain into thinking what it is seeing is real. In order to market the product, Tanaka also creates a video game that can be played within the virtual reality construct. This game, called Warcross, involves two teams battling to steal the other’s gem, called an Artifact, while avoiding a series of obstacles and the other team.

Emika Chen, a struggling hacker makes money in the only way that she can with her criminal record, as a bounty hunter. After failing to get a $5000 bounty that would have saved her from eviction, Emika turns to that fake reality to escape her problems. In the process, she accidentally hacks her way into the Warcross international tournament and makes the news worldwide. After this display of talent in hacking into one of the world’s most secure systems, Emika is invited by Hideo Tanaka himself to visit his headquarters in Japan. He offers her a ten million dollar reward to discover the identity of a hacker, nicknamed Zero, who he believes is a threat to the entire NeuroLink system. Emika has to use her hacking abilities, wit, and deception skills in order to remain undercover and thwart Zero.

The creation of this science fiction world is a shift away from the dystopian works that most know Marie Lu for, specifically her work in the Legend series. In this story, Lu showcases her writing and world building abilities by creating a world that many video game players dream of. The book’s plot is enticing outside of the new society that the reader gets to experience. While the betrayals and spy work that the reader gets to experience is captivating, the addition of a romance seems cliche in the midst of the situation that Emika finds herself in. It is well written, but Emika has been a powerful and independent person for most of her life. Her troubled childhood ensured it. Her interest in a powerful man takes away from that aspect of her character in a way. Overall, this hardly takes away from the book, and some readers, particularly those interested in romance, will enjoy the addition.

4 stars.

Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater. Reviewed by Mia V.

Call Down The Hawk, the first book in the Dreamer Trilogy by Maggie Stiefvater, is a spin-off from the Raven Cycle series, following Ronan Lynch. The original Raven gang has all been split apart due to college, with Adam studying at Harvard, Gansey and Blue taking a gap year to travel and Ronan going off on his own. In the second book of the Raven Cycle, we find out that Ronan can pull objects and creatures (such as his pet raven, Chainsaw) out of his dreams. This power is incredibly rare and powerful, which makes Ronan vulnerable to being killed by those who don’t approve of his power or captured in order to make use of this power.

In Call Down The Hawk, however, Ronan’s power seems to be acting strange. Ronan feels as if he is dying if he is not near the ley lines, or the Barn at all times. Ronan also finds he is being hunted again, as threats loom from all different directions. Ronan meets other people with similar dreaming issues as himself, such as Jordan Henessey, who battles her own fears and nightmares which manifest themselves in real life due to her powers. As Ronan runs from those who want him dead, he also tries to help Hennessey deal with her own issues with her power. Call Down The Hawk takes a break from the search for Glendower and instead dives deeper into Ronan’s power and his own personal struggles both with himself and with his family.

I would definitely recommend this book. I would especially recommend it to someone who has read the Raven Cycle and has loved Ronan. Ronan was one of my favorite characters in the Raven Cycle, so I was very excited when Maggie Steifvater’s new Dreamer Trilogy was released and was set to focus more on Ronan. Although I was expecting the book to take a different direction, I still found the plot interesting and exciting.

4 stars.

Short Stuff

August 2, 2022June 25, 2022 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

“I’d like to read more, but I don’t have time to read a long, involved story.“

There’s a solution for that. It’s called a short story.

Short stories are those that can be read in under an hour – often not more than 5,000 words (beyond 7,500 is called a novella, and they are often published alone in little books, like Stephen King’s The Shawshank Redemption, J.A. Jance’s The Old Blue Line, or Sh irley Goodness and Mercy by Debbie Macomber) and they are often grouped together in anthology volumes, anthology meaning, literally, a collection of stories, the same way a CD album is a collection of individual songs.

Short stories are an art form of their own, still carrying the same structures of their longer novel cousins (plot, themes, metaphors, etc) but in a very short package. Some are complete stories (think of Ray Bradbury’s All Summer in a Day, or Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery) while others might just give you a slice of life, a few hours in the life of an individual with no clear beginning and no clear end, leaving you to wonder what might come next (some stories by Anton Chekhov, or Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants). They can be happy or sad, comic or dramatic, or full of irony (The Necklace, by Guy de Maupassant). Sometimes an anthology might consist of short stories on a single theme (love, loss, westerns, adventure), or they could be a mix of anything. And the beauty of an anthology is you can read one or two stories, or the whole thing, depending on your time and interest.

But short stories don’t carry the same weight as novels.

Of course they do! Many writers are known more for their short stories than for their novels – Alice Munro is considered one of the premier short story writers, having won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature in part for her short stories. Ray Bradbury is another prolific short-story writer, not quite horror, not quite science fiction, not quite fantasy, just imaginative. His philosophy was to write one short story a week, because out of 52 short stories, you were bound to have three or four that were really good. Short stories are easier to sell, if not to anthologies then to magazines – many a writer got their start in The New Yorker, Collier’s, or Atlantic, let alone Good Housekeeping and Readers’ Digest. Some of the most popular authors – Isaac Asimov, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler – carved their name writing for pulp fiction magazines.

Short stories don’t always stay short, either. Many popular films started out as short stories – The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (published in The New Yorker) (Did you realize this one takes place in Waterbury, Connecticut?), All About Eve, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 3:10 to Yuma, Shawshank Redemption, Minority Report, Brokeback Mountain, Rear Window, Total Recall, and many, many others.