Ryan
I am a teacher in a public school and have been for the past sixteen years. It is like someone sat in my school, every day, for all these years, and then wrote a documentary.
And this is fiction.
I can't rave about this book enough. I loved it. I hated it. I laughed out loud and quoted passages to other teacher friends and teared up at passages detailing the struggles of students.
Every teacher should read this. Everyone curious about the struggles of teaching in public school should read this.
Adequate Yearly Progress is set in a public school dealing with the myriad problems they face. It is written with rotating perspectives by chapter so you get to see things through the eyes of several teachers and administrators. And it treats all the players with respect while still showing the darkly humorous idiocy of many decisions. It shows admin struggling under missives of a board office and their series of initiatives that make little sense and shows how teachers try to follow all the rules while still actually educating. It shows new hopeful teachers struggling with the cynicism of some colleagues as well as helping students with family issues.
It shows everyone preparing for an outside audit and the fear that creates (while still trying to actually educate students). We see the struggle of maintaining a personal life and balancing work, worry about others, and the vying for funds with charter schools.
In short, it is the teaching experience. While it's fiction it is also, quite literally, the most accurate portrayal of teaching I have ever read.
Modern fantasy mashed up with Skyrim and a dash of erotica.
First off, I really enjoyed the book. It is totally an escapist romp that kept me from putting down my Kindle until I finished it. There are sex scenes but they are not super explicit which keeps it from crossing over into erotica.
The book is just packed with action. Bouncing scene to scene embraces magic, combat, shapeshifting, air combat, discovering secrets, and more combat. It is just a super fun and light book to read. Definitely recommend as a beach or pool book for the summer.
This is a fascinating YA book. It has the expected twists and turns but it is sharply on point with technology.
Staying vague in order to not spoil anything:
I am an educator and teach high school students. I have seen the struggles that, in 2017, they go through with social media. In their struggles I see the exact seeds this book explores. It takes the current problems being faced by many teens and then applies slightly more advanced versions of technology that we currently have... and makes for a delightfully believable dark mystery. I also appreciate that it isn't a paranoid cautionary tale trying to scare people away from social media. It instead is a “what if?” sort of scenario that is really fun to read.
I really enjoyed this book until the very last chapter.
The book had a little bit of that conspiracy feel that I enjoy. It had an almost Fight Club vibe with the secret organization. Most of all though, I enjoyed how it took general advice for maintaining a marriage that on the surface sounds great - and made it dark. It was an intriguing flip that had me super interested in the premise.
But that end. I really wish the last chapter had been different.
A surprisingly informing book. I often think of people going into the flavor profiles and notes on wines but had never had the chance to really delve into using much of the same vocabulary for beer.
The book steps the reader through the process and absolutely should be read with beer glass in hand in order to test oneself in picking out the notes. A very informative book!
This was very out of my usual wheelhouse of vegetarian and vegan cookbooks. That being said, there were veggie options.
First, the cookbook is beautiful. The recipes seem to have great flavor profiles and for someone wanting to learn to cook Thai food it is an easy 4/5 stars.
The only drawback is really only a problem if you live outside of an urban area with access to some of the more difficult to find ingredients. In most recipes there were a couple ingredients that would absolutely have to be chased down.
Admittedly that is an expectation when looking at learning to cook food specific from a region but it is something about which a reader should be aware.
Seriously good.
I have an extensive cookbook collection that focuses on vegetarian and vegan cooking and I literally have nothing like this. It makes fermented food easy to prepare and the recipes I tried turned out to be delicious. Some were spicier than I expected but all were delicious (even if they lit me up). This is an easy recommendation to make due to being so distinctive and easy to prepare. .
I enjoyed the writing but was turned off by some of the generalization of Mexico. It felt very focused on providing an outside perspective of life in Mexico but sometimes the “insights” cane across as wrong or stereotypical. For instance in the third or fourth story the line “the older men - say about fifty-five - they don't care about being faithful to their wives.” This is a sweeping generalization that is relatively problematic.
Books often get compared to the Dresden Files and often the comparison is tenuous as best. This though is a better comparison. Wizard, gets kicked around a good bit, scrappy as can be. A really good adventure story that starts with the action immediately.
Overall a good first book in a series in that it starts on world building with a neat magic system.
A decent beginning to a new urban fantasy series. It is a light read that feels like a role-playing game campaign in story form and I imagine many folks will draw inspiration from it to add to their tabletop campaigns.
What I most enjoyed was the fact that decent female characters were front and center. It is a book I could see my daughter enjoying (when she is a little older) for that reason alone. The fact that the characters also had some racially diversity made me even happier.
I went into this book expecting a thriller with some good plot twists. What I got was an absolute page turner that hooked me early on, had several twists, and was tight with suspense. It has been pitched as being similar to Gone Girl and I can see why people would name check that title. It has the drama, it has the sex, it has the violence, and it has the tension.
An absolute easy recommendation and a killer read.
Excellent introduction to a new series. It balances being a dark kind of gritty modern fantasy with a brighter magical feel. In general it sits squarely between Charles de Lint and Neil Gaiman.
I will admit a slight bias. For the most part I adore stories that go into the politics of the Fae and involve the courts. I like how the book evokes a feeling of a time when people feared the Other crowd and did what they could to prevent interacting with them.
An incredible end to the series. Like the rest of the books it has some parts that are pretty graphic but nothing seems thrown in for simply shock value. Everything leads to a story payoff. Overall I think the series started a little slow but got better as it went on and by the third book was extremely engaging from the very beginning.
An easy recommendation for anyone who enjoys suspense and can deal with a few graphic scenes.
If you aren't familiar with the custom if the coyotes and their traffic in humans then this is a book you need to read about. It gives some insight into how much people suffer to try to make a better life for themselves and their family.
This has been, hands down, the best book for girls nearing the middle school grades. As for my bias: I have a daughter who is starting middle school next year and my wife skates derby - so we are familiar with the sport.
That being said, this book was basically a love letter to the lessons kids this age need to learn and with which they will struggle:
Cliques
Bullying
Not judging someone by their looks
Standing up for yourself
Families with absent parents
Friends with different backgrounds (cultural or SES)
Being raised by a grandparent
Taking responsibility for mistakes
Perseverance
Being ok with being an outsider
Older siblings taking care of younger ones
Having an interest in a boy
Non-traditional families
Now whether a child of the target age would pick up on all the themes is something else entirely. But as far as I am concerned this is the best JF I have read in years. Highly recommended.