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Showing posts from August 4, 2019

The Year They Fell Review

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The Year They Fell  by David Kreizman TW: Sexual Assault, Grief, Loss of Parents, Drug Use Overview: Josie, Jack, Archie, and Harrison all lost their parents. Dayana was supposed to, but her dad forgot his passport, and her parents missed the plane. Nothing was supposed to go wrong. Their parents had left on their fun, annual friend group vacation. When their propeller plane crashes, the former friends have to come together to learn how to mourn. Overall: 4.5 Characters: 5 There are a lot of characters in this book, but they're all well developed and have their own struggles aside from the main line of the book. In a Breakfast Club like fashion, you have the jock, the popular girl, the outcast, the brain, and the loser types. Despite their archetypal origins, they each develop and find their own layers and struggles independent from their stereotype. Dayana deals with being half in half out of the group, as she has her whole life. When her parents immigrated, she couldn'

99 Days Review

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99 Days  by Katie Cotugno  Overview: Molly is back in Star Lake after running in the night in shame. Slut shamed within an inch of her life before she left for senior year at boarding school, the 99 days back home before college are not ones she's looking forward to. With an entire town aware of her love life thanks to her mom's thinly vailed bestseller, this summer proves to be interesting. Overall: 3.5 Characters: 3.5 I have a lot of mixed feelings here, as with the plot. I like a lot of Molly. She's very independent and strong. She's unafraid and after hiding for a little while, she's not afraid to confront things head on. My problem is, while I'm all for messy characters and human choices, there were more than a handful of moments where Molly was a straight up horrible person to the people around her for really no good reason. Reading her justification, I guess I could see it, but it's extremely weak for its costs. As for the two brothers that mak

My Safe Space Books (Part 2)

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If you missed Friday's post, I talked about why we need books that aren't afraid to ask tough questions and dive into realities that aren't always pretty. I also told a quick story about teen's reading choices being censored, and how that makes me sad because books are a safe place to work through trauma or understand another person's situation better. It's also a trial run for life as you question character's choices and decide what you might have done differently. Anyway, I promise a list of books that have been important to me because of their honestly. Originally, the book was filled with all super dark, gritty, morbid books (which I do love), but I also realized that there are many books that would fit that are more warm and fuzzy than midnight tears, so I decided to give this list its own post so that I could dive into why I chose each book. Also, I'm giving the main trigger warning I can remember under each title. So, in no particular order,