Reading, Writing, and Me

The Geography of You and Me  by Jennifer E. Smith (337 pages) Overview:  Owen and Lucy meet in the elevator of Lucy's New York City apartment building during a blackout. From the time they spend crammed in the stuck elevator together, they formed a bond that kept them together as they both moved around the country and the world. Through emails and postcards they kept the string connecting them together alive until the few chances they had to meet each other. In the ultimate in both long distance love stories and YA contemporary romances, this is a delicious story about two people willing to keep their relationship together over miles and miles and constant movement with no promise of ever being in the same place at the same time again. Overall: 4.5  Characters: 5 The two main characters this story follows are Lucy and Owen. Owen and his father are short of money and at a loss for a place to be after the sudden accident that killed his mother two months before the start of the

The Hate U Give  by Angie Thomas (444 pages) Overview: Starr and Khalil are driving home from the spring break party when he gets pulled over by a cop. They both know what can happen at traffic stops like this, so they both are nervous even though they've done nothing wrong. And even though they do everything right through the entire stop, Starr watches her best friend die in a shooting, and that isn't even the first time Starr has had to experience that kind of trauma. Before she can even sort out her grief, she's thrust into a new issue, she is the only witness. As her neighborhood of Garden Heights is thrown into a war zone of protests, riots, and heavy policing, Starr still has to navigate her life forty-five minutes away at her primarily white private high school of Williamsone were she feels like she must be a different version of herself than at home in order to protect her social standing. Overall: 5 Characters: 5 Angie establishes a real and phenomenal cast.