Johanna Florez
Saw it in the grocery store and needed it, as one who has suffered Zoom school from both the student and teacher ends.
Helpful read in digestible chapters. It affirmed a lot of what I intuitively did with adolescents and was full of practical advice for families and younger children.
Spotted in a gift shop and bought it just for myself. Maybe eventually I'll read it to a little one. On my own I enjoyed how it summarized and simplified the key plot points, quoted some iconic lines and included interactive components in the lovely illustrations. Just a fun board book for a grownup.
Felt less like a book and more like a long string of sermon illustrations. Final chapter is quotable and disjointed.
I love the interactive aspect of this book, spinning the wheels to match the colors. It's fun to revisit multiple times to see how toddlers get the hang of it.
1.5 rounded up because it (mostly) didn't make me regret learning how to read. I think it had a decent outline, besides failing to consider social media until 97% through the story (in my digital version which was obviously missing chunks early on).
I never bought in to the believability of the central relationship. I have no idea why they're together. All I got was mild grooming vibes every time the age gap came up, and remembering how the boyfriend fixed the devastatingly shy girlfriend's extreme touch aversion in a couple days. The kissing scenes were genuinely yucky. Not romantic at all. Incredibly incredibly awkward.
Overall this book did a lot of telling rather than showing and came across in places as the math professor's diary. I found numerous elements of it annoying, but the ending managed to avoid frustrating me, so it wins a little credit there.
I'd read this before in a short story anthology. I found an 1888 edition (handwriting inside the cover from 1890) at a thrift shop last week and tenderly re-read it. The story still made me laugh at the sweet little girl's absurd decisions.
Read for work (love that for me). Cute story about true art history, told through barnyard animals.
Also the book is literally a day younger than me. God saw a universe with me but not this book in it, and fixed it.
In the spirit of summer reading programs counting a significant number of pages read as one book, I'm officially marking myself done with this. I slogged through well over a hundred pages (the last chapter number I confidently remember is 19), and I don't think I even got to the story's main conflict. It was a good book to read at bedtime. Girl lives in wilderness. Wilderness is nice. Wilderness can be hard, but always nice.
I loved revisiting LaVaughn, a couple years more mature with a long way left to go. The end of Make Lemonade gave me goosebumps; the end of True Believer leaves me hopeful.
Cute. Disjointed, but brings it back together with the Suessian bedtime prayer: Today is gone. Today was fun. Tomorrow will be another one.
I found this book pretty engrossing. (But maybe I'm just like that :P) I stayed up past midnight to finish it in one sitting.
While I felt like it was a good book, I also thought that it seemed an awful lot like other books I've read more or less recently. A lot of the ideas of this Society echo concepts found in Lois Lowry's books The Giver and Gathering Blue.
For example, just like in The Giver, people who apply to get a spouse are matched up with someone based on personality, skill, and other factors. The people have no choice. Yet the main character finds himself (or in Matched, herself) wanting to be able to choose.
Also, for the elderly, what other people think of as peaceful, natural processes turn out to really be the government's way of controlling who lives and who dies. When their time is up, the old are poisoned.
In Gathering Blue, those few artists who create things are taken away. They are forced to use their skills to create what the leaders want them to make. This is what I thought of when I read about Ky being the only person who knew how to write. He could make swirling cursive, but everyone else only knew how to tap letters on a touchscreen.
The love triangle of Cassia, Xander, and Ky reminded me a bit too much of Katniss, Gale, and Peeta in the Hunger Games. The whole best friend/other guy conflict. Whether to choose the one the government wants her to marry, or the one she currently has feelings for. However, I was relieved to find that Cassia's outlook on the love was very different from Katniss's. I can't really describe exactly how it was different... but it was refreshing, really, to see a different spin on the love triangle.
Having said all that, the content still somehow felt original. It seemed like the author did have her own story to tell. It only reminded me of those books because I'd read them recently and thought about them a lot. I was the one drawing similarities, not the author stealing ideas. Still, I'd recommend reading all these books far apart in time. They each have their own merits but they'll sound too similar if you read them one after another.
I don't know if this is a new style among authors or what. A lot of books seem to end leaving the reader with more questions than they had at the beginning. This one did for sure. It seemed that everyone had dozens of deep, dark secrets. But it also made sense- they were realizing that there were some things they simply could not tell each other.
So there you have it. A decent read. As tired as I am, I don't regret losing several hours of sleep over it.
Holy Cow, this book was intense, in part because it really seems like something that could happen in America's future. Loved it.
The Soul of C. S. Lewis: A Meditative Journey through Twenty-Six of His Best-Loved Writings
I appreciated the readability of each one-page reflection. I could read one or twenty in a sitting. I am also glad it included a wide variety of Lewis's works - it exposed me to some themes and genres he wrote on that I want to explore more. The final chapter, based around The Last Battle, got a little weird and touched on issues that need far more than one page to address with any nuance. But the Bible references after each reflection offer an opportunity to read more in context, if someone chooses to.
While I really loved this book and thought it ended the trilogy well, I felt that it could have been better written. One of my friends gave this plot synopsis: “Get hurt, pass out, wake up on drugs, get hurt, pass out, wake up on drugs.” That's what the book feels like sometimes. However, the repetitive injuries didn't keep me from reading this book over and over.
"it's like, you know how sometimes you see a really sexy baby? wait, that sounds f***ed up."
This quote is almost all you need to know of this book. It's ridiculous. It's hilarious. It made me laugh out loud many, many times with how zany the characters are. It also contains tons of foul language. Like, an inordinate amount of swearing. This is the kind of book you get censored from a friend.
Will Grayson, Will Grayson alternates between two narrators named Will Grayson. The first Will (capitalized Will) has two rules: don't care too much, and shut up. He will adore a girl and flirt with her, but he will not kiss her or ask her out because, oh wait, he doesn't actually like her. That's against the rules. will #2, who doesn't use capitals, is clinically depressed and gay. He is perfectly okay with being gay, he just doesn't feel like letting anyone know. Anyone, that is, except for his online boyfriend Isaac. He's never heard Isaac's voice but has definitely been talking to him long enough to know that he is really a teenage boy.
The Wills run into each other by a crazy coincidence one night. Both of them become caught up with First Will's [quite a bit]larger-than-life and immensely gay best friend Tiny Cooper and his magnum opus- a musical about how gay he is. This book really spares no stereotypes, no truths, no gayness. Somehow there's enough openly gay guys in Tiny's high school for him to fall in love with a new one at least once a week. The whole idea of being a homosexual teen is treated humorously, sensitively, and mockingly all at once. The book sort of pokes fun at those who would be okay with being teased, and also respects the frustration of those who don't really feel like coming out of the closet yet. It ends with everyone loving each other as Just Friends, except for the one straight couple. First Will finally gets over his idiotic rules and they get together.
ALSO
NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL IS A REAL BAND
HOLLAND, 1945 IS AN ACTUAL SONG YOU CAN LISTEN TO
IT'S VERY WEIRD
Message of the book: You can't usually pick your friends, you can't always pick your nose, but sometimes you have to pick your friend's nose. Also, triple-check the birthdate on your fake ID.
Loved how funny this book is, stars knocked down for the profuseness of obscene language. Up to you to make your own choice.
As a homeschooler walking through the teen section of the library, this book caught my eye. Yay! A book about other homeschoolers! Finally, something good that I can relate to!
Not so much.
Maybe my Christian homeschooler experience is a little too narrow. But nothing in this book was at all relatable to any part of my education. It's not like the girl, oh, hmm, maybe DISCUSSED her education with her parents. She was enrolled in middle school, but she just walked out on the first day of eighth grade. Because it felt right in her little hormonal heart.
So she wanders around instead of being in school. While foraging for food she meets a boy who is playing his violin, outside, in his pajamas. And we know how it goes with thirteen-year-olds, they know everything there is to know about the world and relationships so they fall in love and start going out. Things don't stay quite as sweet as you'd like. I definitely remember the scene with hands in each other's back pockets, then hands going up the girl's shirt.
The characters are also very disrespectful. Sure, no kid is perfect, but this girl decides to stay at home when at the same time it seems like all she does is complain about how her mom is doing things. There's some swearing among adult characters. They all act stupid! Like, we could go about this like adults, thinking and planning and sharing opinions and making compromises, or we can scream at each other while our young girl goes into the woods to make out with her boyfriend.
If you like this kind of book, the useless sort of book that doesn't really teach or entertain, the kind of book that's mostly good as a time waster and as kindling, then go ahead and read it. Be aware that this isn't even close to what homeschooling is like. I would strongly recommend against reading this book.
Contrary to the complaints in some negative reviews, this book is very upfront about being based in Christianity. It is openly targeted at people of color and also remarkably gracious towards white people. It is structured around anecdotes retold by someone educated in trauma recovery who finds Christian faith to be, overall, a source of strength. I do agree with reviewers who note that this is not the book for anyone whose church experience has been a source of trauma (racial or otherwise). Rowe speaks to those seeking healing inside the church. I found this book informative and encouraging.