Fiona

I nearly gave up on this book several times; nothing really happens for the first two-thirds of the novel. And then suddenly! there's a story I could get my teeth into. Sadly, it was over just as it was beginning and never went anywhere. Also the main character has no personality which made me not care what happened to him anyway.

I received a free copy of this book for review courtesy of Candlewick Books.

Covers basic concepts adequately, slightly repetitive. Bibliography consists entirely of online sources, which irks me because urls change and info disappears.

I was really excited to read a choose-your-own-adventure type book as I enjoyed them so much as a kid. This, however, was not the enjoyable read I was hoping for.

The choice to write in second person is never, in my experience, a good one. The end result is either preachy or distanced emotionally from the reader and this book is both. The tale presents readers with puzzles to be solved and also asks them to provide dialogue; the interactive nature is reflective of the supposed setting and not a bad technique, but from a narrative standpoint it does nothing helpful. Ultimately, the book is closer to an activity book than a readable one.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Clear and concise.

Really basic info on marijuana, including terpenes, strains and how to roll a joint (with pictures!). Not primarily a grow guide, despite the choice of title; Weed for Newbies would have been more apt.

I would have given this book four stars but it lacks the sort of author note which I feel all historical fiction ought to be privy, a clarification for readers identifying which bits are historical and which bits are fiction. Overall, I enjoyed the story and I found it less laboured than the first book (a book I did not finish). It was a quick and easy read and probably a good resource for helping children understand the day-to-day lives of black folk at the turn of the 20th century (but it could have been great if it had the sort of author note it should have).

I received this book free from the publisher in exchange for review so thank you to Candlewick Press.

Wonderfully done. Despite being the first in a trilogy, I don't feel bullied into reading the second by an annoying cliffhanger.

It was so well done that I chose to buy the second one when I happened across it on sale years later.

Compared to the first book, this was a torturously bad read. I am left feeling like this was an analogy for losing a loved one to addiction and the author was processing some stuff.

As someone who read Archie comics as a kid, this was interesting from a cultural standpoint. I'm a fan of Fiona Staples and definitely enjoyed the artwork but ultimately, this is clearly crass commercialization and an attempt to keep the comic relevant and selling to a modern audience.

Lest this book be pigeonholed as “for girls”: I left my review copy on the table when it arrived and it was nicked by my 87-year old father. He devoured it quickly, declaring it, “very interesting” and that he was impressed by how dedicated the scientists profiled were. He is a picky reader so this is high praise.

My favorite part of this book is the science, where each subject's subject of expertise is explained; we learn about how video games are made, the role of 3d printing in medicine, the importance of pressure, tapirs, conservation, fission vs. fusion, exoplanets, microbes in space, human immunity, fertility after cancer, how light refraction effects colour, and the difference between qualitative and quantitative reasearch.

I wouldn't call it unreadable but its not worth reading.

There's a great deal of unnecessary contemplating in this book. Really impedes the narrative after a while.

Conceptually, this sounded promising. An alien who accidentally becomes a cat! There's all kinds of plot-fodder there but the author presents us with a rather tame tale of a girl who has internalized a random remark by her mother's new boyfriend before being sent to spend the summer with her grandmother. By the end of the book, said boyfriend and mom have magically broken up with no explanation given and the alien has decided it likes being a cat with fEeLiNgS and being part of a family is superior to the hive mind existence on his home planet even though a hive is just a really big family. Maybe kids who really like cats would be into this but its mostly boring; it never plays out like there's anything actually at stake for the characters.

I received a free copy of the book from the publisher for review.

Some of these are great and some suck really hard. The piece on Peggy Guggenheim is literally all about the men she came into contact with. Many are about the famous femme's influence on the writer which I found tiresome; the one on Misty Cohen is the most egregious example with a blonde ballerina inserting herself into the story. Overall, more misses than hits.

I am not a spiritual type and was expecting more metaphysics than soul. Still, I enjoyed this. Levy is a fine writer and manages to make a topic I usually find tedious worthy of deep consideration.

I'm a third of the way through this but just done; I do not have the mental energy to read about Emil Gerhardt's fictional thoughts on Petra Kelly's clitoris.

Some kind of gofundme self-published magic comic that I got from a neighbor. I can only assume it's a couple of teens and is the modern print-on-demand eqivalent of a zine because that's how the thing reads. All the hallmarks of youngsters developing thier craft are here: thin plot, cliched dialog, some bad layout choices, etc. But a nice effort in zine terms and not unreadable as the artwork is quite competent.

Very meh. There seems to be little value added by the graphic treatment to most of the ballads presented, although the artwork is nice overall.

Quick and enjoyable read.

DNF at 87 pages. Very little biography, mostly disjointed anecdotes told in a fawning style. Unsurprisingly, little objectivity is brought to the subject but that should have occurred to me without needing to read any of the book.

The author clearly has a lot of research they wish to share but hasn't managed to distill it into a digestable form. Also, the lack of data from Australia, where they have mandatory voting, confounds me. Interestingly, the author seems aware of some of the book's shortcomings as they are clearly outlined in the introduction.

This was due back at the library before I could read it all the way through so I won't comment on the structure (which had a lot of time shifts) or pacing. However the 2/3 of the book I plowed through elicited laughter and heart-felt empathy which is difficult to get out of me these days.

I'm a big fan of books where kids band together to make adults listen.

I get really bored about halfway through; Ms. Hillenbrand's second book is amazing but this failed to deliver the same narrative suction.

Clear, concise and informative information about the science and management of viral diseases.