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Showing posts from March 4, 2018

Movie Review: Lady Bird

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Lady Bird  by Greta Gerwig Overview: Lady Bird has given herself her own name, a step closer to living her own life, hopefully, complete with an acceptance letter to any liberal arts school in New York that will take her. Unfortunately for Christine "Lady Bird", life isn't as easy to change as you name. Even if her family doesn't have as much money as she would like and her mother isn't as supportive as she'd like and people aren't always as good as they seem, Lady Bird must get over the wrong side of the tracks in Sacramento to get on to the better things the world has to offer her. Overall: 5  Characters: 5  Lady Bird blew me away. I loved her, which is important considering how character driven this film is. She's witty and driven, and she, like all of us, wants things that can't exist and tries a lot of different ways to find that feeling of satisfaction. Even though she spends most of the movie fighting against the tide of the world, eve

Upcoming Spotlight Reviews

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Hello, everyone! I haven't done one of these update posts about the month ahead or what's going on with the blog in a while, so I thought I'd take a minute today to share a bit about what's coming up. There are so many amazing things, but, first, I wanted to thank all of you for helping grow the blog. It means so much to me that I am reaching my largest audience yet. Remember to click the subscribe button on the main page to get email updates about new posts and to follow on Instagram (@readingwritingandme), Twitter (@readwriteandme), and Facebook which I'll link below! One of the major things I'm focusing on going forward is giving you guys three amazing posts per week. Sundays will always be for Weekly Reviews and Recommendations while Wednesdays and Fridays will feature different reviews and articles. With Teen Book Con coming up, I'll be running a special series of reviews for all the books whose wonderful authors I get to meet! And, of course, ther

New Release Wednesday: The Dangerous Art of Blending In

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The Dangerous Art Of Blending In  by Angelo Surmelis (315 pages) Overview:  Evan Panos has a lot to hide at his small town Illinois high school. He only wears long sleeved shirts to cover the bruises on his body, though the cuts on his face are harder to hide. And he's gay, something that wouldn't go over well at school or with his deeply religious, first generation immigrant, Greek parents. Evan must learn that sometimes under the radar isn't the place to live while he grapples with his situation and wonders who could help him. Overall: 5  Characters: 5 I love Evan. He made a wonderful main character, mostly for his sincerity that just oozes from all his words, thoughts, feelings, and drawings. He makes the reader understand and sympathize with his choices at every turn. His voice is also wrung with a heartbreaking resignation that ebbs and flows with his rises and falls throughout the book. His family is interesting and stunningly real as well. His mother shows the

Nice Try, Jane Sinner

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Nice Try, Jane Sinner  Lianne Oelke (420 pages) Overview: Jane wants to forget the past. Forget the high school that expelled her. Forget the people that watched her fall from grace. Forget her family who thinks that prayer is the answer to everything. Facing community college at Elbow River as a last resort graduation option, she signs up to be on House of Orange, a new web reality show, to solve her housing problem. Though she knows to expect the unexpected, House of Orange and its inhabitants test Jane in ways she never imagined. Maybe the year won't be as bad as she imagined.  Overall: 5 Characters: 5 I LOVE Jane. There are very few main characters I can say that I appreciated more. Her sarcasm, dry humor, and outlook on life echoed my own thoughts, and I loved how she was so introspective. It is fascinating to listen to Jane work through her own thoughts and recognize her behaviors as masks for other feelings. I also thought that Oelke did a wonderful job with her depict