Trigger Warning: this books contains sexual assault I just finished The Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis and I’m honestly gonna admit it’s now one of my favorites. The writing was absolutely awe-inspiring and often left me closing the book for a few minutes to ponder a thought presented by the main protagonist, Alex. 17-year-old Alex (my fave) suffers from a lot of mental issues after the murder and subsequent finding of her horribly mutilated and, as she discovers, sexually assaulted older sister. Her thoughts and feelings discussed throughout the book are incredibly insightful and full of a kind of child-like innocence, but coupled with the outlook of someone who knows and has seen first hand the horrors of the world most people never get to know about in their whole lives. McGinnis portrays this beautifully, so much so that I slowly fell in love with a character you learn in the first page of the book has killed someone and felt no remorse for it. Yes, it’s worse than it sounds. The book deals HEAVILY with themes of sexual assault and rape culture, so if you’re not cool with reading 300-400 pages of that sorta thing, then I’d say this book is a no-go, but if you want to see heroic female characters fighting rape culture and objectification from their male counterparts, as well as an adorable romance and a main character whose lesbianism isn’t mentioned more than three or so times throughout the book (because she’s there for plot development not queerbaiting), I HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone who would like to read it! To find out more about the author, visit her website: http://www.mindymcginnis.com/index.html Julia T., EO Blogger
0 Comments
There’s a pause on the other end. Suddenly, I realize that I’m mouthing off to one of the world’s most powerful people -- to my idol, someone I’ve watched and read about and obsessed over for years, someone who had changed my life. Across from me, Keira watches the phone intently as if she could see what Hideo’s expression looks like. I swallow in the silence, afraid for a moment. “I have a job offer for you,” Hideo replies. “Would you like to hear more?” When hacker/bounty hunter Emika Chen is offered a job as a professional player in Warcross, the virtual reality video game played by almost everyone in the world, she has no idea what she is in for. The game’s creator, Hideo Tanaka, confesses he wants her to be a player so that he can use her skills to weed out another hacker, one that has been causing some problems in the game. She’s overwhelmed by the Tokyo scene, fame, money, the adrenaline rush of the game - and a little romance, too. However, as the game progresses, she realizes she’s in deeper than she thought. More information is uncovered, leaving her wondering who the bad guys really are and what is actually going on in Warcross. Navigating power structures, sleazy deep web encounters, and her own emotions, Emika comes to a startling discovery and makes an even more surprising decision. NY Times bestselling author Marie Lu’s Warcross is an intense, fast-paced read that keeps the reader on the edge of their seat, but also asks some important questions. In a world where technology is becoming more advanced and all-encompassing, what are inventors’ ethical obligations? Are ethics objective or subjective? When faced with a decision between someone you care about and a moral you hold, what should you choose? What would you choose? Readers will find themselves mulling over these dilemmas and more long after they finish the book. Damien D., E.O. Smith Blogger “it’s dark now, & not just because my visor is misted; when u turn at 17,500 miles an hour the night comes on u like a switch, & now i’m in a total absence of light that feels metaphorical in a much more horrible way.” Moon 2 is a space station that orbits approximately 250 miles above Earth. It travels 17,500 miles an hour, making one full orbit every ninety minutes. It’s also the only home that fifteen-year-old Leo and two other teens have ever known. Born and raised on Moon 2, Leo and the twins, Orion and Libra, are finally old enough and strong enough to endure the dangerous trip to Earth. They’ve been “parented” by teams of astronauts since birth and have run countless drills to ready themselves for every conceivable difficulty they might face on the flight. But has anything really prepared them for life on terra firma? Because while the planet may be home to billions of people, living there is more treacherous than Leo and his friends could ever have imagined, and their very survival will mean defying impossible odds. Satellite is a real masterpiece. Nick Lake’s use of text speech instead of proper grammar in writing the entire novel is a distinctive literary choice, shows the reader how the main character thinks and feels. Not with proper punctuation but how we naturally talk. In doing so Lake takes a completely unrelatable situation in which Leo is presented as an experiment, and uses his writing to make it feel relatable. Not only through the text speech style does Lake convery that extreme reliability however. Leo’s quest into breaking out of the box he had been put into, that experiment forced upon him at birth, it makes his character seem real, it makes him seem like everyone else just trying to be himself in his own special circumstances. In making Leo seem like all of the rest of us despite his unusual circumstances, Nick Lake successfully makes the reader feel connected to a completely obscure character. The other characters also make a great addition to the plot. Each character has their own level of reliability and with that their own level of importance to the story, but one thing is for sure, every character has a purpose, they are not just unnecessary plot devices but real characters with real feelings and a real importance in Leo’s overarching story. It is true that the unusual writing style and the initial slow pace does make the novel hard to read at first, but the well-woven plot and the amazing characters really makes Satellite a book worth reading.
“There is no divine plan, no destiny, no life after death, and no compensation for what you lose. There is only here and now. There is only what you’ve done and what you are going to do. And if you can own up to every moment and take responsibility for your life and shape it into something beautiful and kind and generous - if you can do that, you’ve discovered what it means to be strong.” The only thing 17-year-old Jane Sinner hates more than failure is pity. After a personal crisis and her subsequent expulsion from high school, she’s going nowhere fast. Jane’s well-meaning parents push her to attend a high school completion program at the nearby Elbow River Community College, and she agrees, on one condition: she gets to move out. Jane tackles her housing problem by signing up for House of Orange, a student-run reality show that is basically Big Brother, but for Elbow River Students. Living away from home, the chance to win a car (used, but whatever), and a campus full of people who don't know what she did in high school… what more could she want? Okay, maybe a family that understands why she’d rather turn to Freud than Jesus to make sense of her life, but she'll settle for fifteen minutes in the proverbial spotlight. As House of Orange grows from a low-budget web series to a local TV show with fans and shoddy T-shirts, Jane finally has the chance to let her cynical, competitive nature thrive. She'll use her growing fan base, and whatever Intro to Psychology can teach her, to prove to the world—or at least viewers of substandard TV—that she has what it takes to win. This is Lianne Oelke’s first novel and I really liked it. It was very different and original. I thought it was cute and exciting and it also touched in on some deep and important topics which can be hard to successfully fit into one novel. The main character Jane has left her high school and now has to complete her senior year at her local community college and decides to move out of her parents' place. Jane has been raised in a devout Christian household, and recently Jane has been having doubts about God and struggling. She signs up for an advertised small campus reality show that’s being produced by a student for a project. I really liked that it was set in a college setting instead of a high school setting. I thought it made the story already different compared to a lot of other YA novels and brought more diversity of ages and people to the story. The Reality Show aspect, I admit, I had expected to be kind of cheesy. But it actually ended being exciting and interesting and bringing a lot to the story. It was called House of Orange, it had a bunch of different little challenges and had some really cute and funny moments that lightened up the story. I wish there had been a few more challenges, though. This story touched on some very sensitive topics along with having many light-hearted scenes as well. As I mentioned before it talks a lot about how Jane lost faith in God, but it also discussed a lot of other mental health subjects like suicide, depression, etc. So I think that’s something to be aware of going into reading the book. The character Jane was witty and completely hilarious. The story was full of dry humor. I quickly and easily connected with her as a character. I thought she was very well portrayed and that she was an interesting character. Her love for psychology was a super interesting part of the book. I wish there had been more of it! The characters other than Jane were hard for me to connect at first, but after a little bit they developed more. I wish the beginning had been a little less slow and that I could of got into it a little more quickly, but that doesn’t last too long and was far from unbearable. By far my favorite part of this book was its format. It was written as Jane’s journal and though it can be a tough way to write, it was executed very well. I think that it made many characters, especially Jane, a lot more accessible. Even though this book started a little slow and had a few chunks of text with little development or excitement, they were mild and overall didn’t effect the story too much. I think this book was excellent and a great read. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a YA novel that deals with more mature topics or a novel that feels a bit more polished and structured than other contemporaries out there. Grace C., EO Blogger |
AuthorsBlog authors are students at EO Smith High School in Storrs, CT Archives
December 2022
Categories |