Reading, Writing, and Me

The Me I Meant To Be  by Sophie Jordan (January 1) Overview:  Girl code means don't date your best friends ex. Even if you've loved him longer than she has. Even if he's your next-door neighbor. Even if he's finally interested in you after all these years. High school code means that you don't date the dorky Merit Scholar when all your exes wear football pads and are on a winning team. These are the problems that cellist, Willa, and popular girl, Flor face. Their friendship hangs between their relationship problems, and it's in danger of dying out.  Overall: 4  Characters: 3  High school stereotypes abound in this book. It made it really hard to get through the opening because the characters felt flat and lazy. The only character injected with an ounce of charm was football star, Zach, but that's not to say it isn't out of character for the football star. Luckily, as Willa gets closer and closer to Zack and their relationship progresses she starts ...

I've noticed that every time I talk about how schools make poor choices in their reading curriculum on Twitter, I get like twenty more likes than usual (which means I get twenty likes), and so I thought I'd bring it here to spread the conversation some more. I'm finally in my final year of high school English, so I'd say I have a pretty broad feel of what the general curriculum looks like. Mostly, it's books written by older white men from the distant past writing for adults from the same distant past. And, for some reason I haven't quite figured out yet, some governing body took a select few of these novels published for adults of the time, dubbed them "classics" and proceeded to shove them down the throat of every American teenager. I'm not sure what they were trying to accomplish with that plan, though. You're giving a book to the wrong audience. While thrillers like Steven King might have crossover appeal, most adult books are marked t...

The Astonishing Color of After  by Emily X.R. Pan (472 pages) Overview:  Leigh's mother dies by suicide. The image haunts her mind. She and her father grapple for why as the grief sets in. All that she left behind are crossed out lines, an attempt at a note, and one mentions wanting her to remember. Remember what, Leigh doesn't know. But when a giant, red bird that must be the next incarnation of her mother delivers a package full of relics from her mom's family in Taiwan, she knows that she has to go visit them. Her father, an scholar in East Asian studies, arranges a trip for her to meet her grandparents for the first time, and, despite the language barrier, Leigh begins to connect with her mother's parents and heritage all while trying to piece together what her mother is trying to communicate before time runs out. Overall: 4  Characters: 4 Leigh sees and communicates with the world with colors. Emotions are not happy or sad but parrot green and magenta. The ot...