I would recommend the book Life as We Knew It written by Susan Beth Pfeffer because it is practical and heavy-hearted. The story begins with a meteor unexpectedly crashing onto the moon and knocking the moon closer to the earth. It might’ve seemed negligible, but according to the book, this caused tsunamis and floods, earthquakes, and volcanoes, which caused the ashes to block the sun. The blazing hot summer suddenly turned to Arctic winter, and people died from freezing temperatures, diseases and starvation. This horrific situation forces Miranda to grow up quickly to save her friends and family, and she inevitably discovers what is truly important in life.
Most of the story was practical because of the procedures they took to survive this disaster, such as gathering as much food and supplies (candles and batteries), filling up the gas, chopping wood and restricting daily spending. This book is heavy-hearted because most of the story is depressing and despairing. The characters had to sacrifice a lot while struggling to physically and mentally keep going and survive to the very end. “Life as We Knew It” is told in a form of journal entries, and I found it a unique way to narrate the story. Since it’s told in a first-person perspective, it is easier to understand and “experience” the story.
First of all, I apologize for the weird picture/amazon purchase thing, I don’t know how to work this website and this was the closest thing I could find to a URL hahaha… if any of you know how I could find a book cover picture next time, please let me know. Now after my summer vacation, I am finally ready to post my first book review! I’ll try not to include spoilers!! (ill try to summarize my review ahhaha)
1. Age-wise, it’s perfect for all you teen readers! Okay, Red Queen was awesome. Especially if you’re a preteen-early teen, and starting out on some teen books, then this book is perfect. It doesn’t have too many romance-y moments (ahem) and the plot is fairly easy to follow. I am 14 and recently read this book over my vacation, and I really enjoyed it.
A Winter’s Promise by Christelle Dabos is a dystopian fiction novel that was translated from French by Hildegarde Serle. This book is from the point of view of Ophelia, the main character. She lives on an ark called Anima, and these arks were created after the Earth had exploded and broken into these floating islands called arks. Ophelia has special powers, which are travelling through mirrors and reading objects. Due to political reasons, Ophelia got declared to marry Thorn, who is from an ark called The Pole. Ophelia and Thorn are opposites as Ophelia is tiny and shy, and Thorn is rude and keeps to himself. Ophelia has been accompanied by her aunt, Rosaline and lives at The Pole with Thorn’s grandmother and aunt, Berenilde. At The Pole, no one should find out that Ophelia is Thorn’s fiancé, and a lot of planning had been done to keep her identity hidden even when the ladies move into their enemy’s house to live. This book revolves greatly around a fantasy world and how Ophelia is surviving in it.
Until now, this summer, A Winter’s Promise was probably the book I had the most time finishing, and as I progressed, my interest in it slightly started to become less and less. This book disappointed me greatly as BookTok hyped it up so much for me. I pushed myself so much to read this book, which sucked because this was one of the few fantasy books I had read, and it has pretty much scared me away from fantasy and dystopian fiction. I expected a bit more romance in it and just hoped the plot to flow more smoothly than it was. I couldn’t connect to any of the characters except for Ophelia. I feel like too many things were happening at once, and not explained adequately, or it took a long time to figure out what was happening. The plot, in general, was plodding, and a few things were pretty annoying and repetitive. As much as I wanted to love this book, I had to force myself to finish it and had a hard time even looking at the second book I still haven’t started. On a more positive note, many readers did not like the first book but liked the series because things started progressing after the first book. Hopefully reading the second book might make me change my mind but for now I’m not too impressed.
One thing that did satisfy me about this book was the writing style was really unique which is one thing that really kept me on track to finish it. I also think towards the ending of the book it made a bit more sense and in a way started to tie things up. Hopefully in the second book there’s a bit more romance and affection shown between Ophelia and Thorn and maybe that is why readers enjoyed the second book more and really got hooked. Oh also the covers of this book is so pretty and even the rest of the book covers in the series look so gorgeous.
Rating: 5/10 (Ophelia’s scarf and Ophelia herself really deserve at least five stars).
The Giver by Lois Lowry is about Jonas, a 12 year old boy, lives in a community of sameness. There is no pain, fear, conflict, or hatred, actually, there are no feelings in this society. Everyone basically looks and acts the same, they act as if they are robots sometimes. There is no things such as racism, discrimination, homophobia in this community. Everyone loses their individuality, but don’t question it because they don’t remember their life before moving into the community. In this place, they have ceremonies every December to celebrate the children’s birthday, and on their 12th ceremony, they get assigned a job. Jonas gets assigned to be the new receiver of memory, which is the only person in the society that has memories of things that don’t exist in the community. His trainer, the receiver before him, the giver, transfer memories to Jonas every training session. During their training, Jonas starts feeling feelings for the first time, and he thinks that the rest of the community should have these memories too. He also realizes that all the strict rules the society has enforced isn’t a good thing since it removes freedom from others.
Animal Farm is one of the only classics I have enjoyed reading because of its satire and witty reflection on our history. The fable accurately depicted how corrupted our society has become and the mindset the public has about our government. I would recommend this novel to more mature teens because you need some historical and background knowledge before you will find this interesting.
I was first motivated to read this because my peers in school were forced to read it for English class. However, I set aside personal time to read it because I was actually interested in its plot. Although I haven’t studied the Russian Revolution, which the book is supposed to be a parallel to, I still noticed the hints and clues that George Orwell included that really made the story relatable. For example, the “Seven Commandments” are the laws that govern their farm, but the pigs in power kept breaking the rules and manipulating the other animals to believe they were righteous. I laughed at their infamous quote: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” because this resembles politicians SO MUCH in their sly ways with words to cover the truth and fake the justification. This ironic statement is just so ridiculous.
Anyways, I’m glad to have finally read a classic that wasn’t boring and tedious throughout the story (I used to hate classics for that). Overall, I would give it 7.5/10, and I hope other people will enjoy Animal Farm too.
Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness is the third and final installment to the series, Chaos Walking. This book follows both Todd Hewitt our protagonist, and Viola, a girl he met along the way. In there, it wrapped up the questions of the Ask and the Answer and from The Knife of Never Letting Go. It also showed why Mayor Prentiss acted so insane for some reason and why he kept training his men to say, “I am the circle and the circle is me” as an exercise.
I really liked this book, but the cliffhanger at the end kind of threw me off since I thought that everything would be wrapped up. I would recommend this book to anyone who had read both the Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer because it would be confusing without the previous information.
Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card isn’t exactly a sequel to Ender’s Game. It’s more of a parallel to the book, filling in its gaps from Ender’s friend, Bean’s, point of view. It covers Bean’s backstory and how he got into the space program along with how he eventually got put into Ender’s team. It even covers a lot of coincidences that Ender had been to naïve to realize until too late.
I really enjoyed the book because it had a lot of interesting information that paired well with Ender’s game. I’d recommend this book to whoever who likes Sci-fi with a lot of adventure. Reading Ender’s Game beforehand is optional, since most of the necessary information from Ender’s Game is covered in Ender’s Shadow too.
Supernova by Marissa Meyer is the very epic conclusion to the Renegades. Although the first two books of Renegades were pretty nicely paced, this one was one action-packed book. Each event happens quickly yet is explained quite thoroughly. I think the most thrilling part was when Adrian uses the branding iron on himself in order to remove his abilities of drawing to get rid of Phobia once and for all. In the book, a lot was covered and it filled up a lot of loose ends such as how Max’s power was removed and also who Phobia actually was.
I would recommend this book to the people who have enjoyed Renegades and Archenemies. The conclusion was truly fascinating since it wasn’t like the other generic hero books where one side just wins and the other side is declared as “right.” Once you pick up this book, I can tell you that you are not putting it down until you finish it.
Archenemies by Marissa Meyer is the second book of the Renegades Trilogy. In here, we meet the Sentinel again and find his real identity as nobody other than Adrian. In here, we still follow Adrian and Nova’s story, with Nova trying to keep her hero identity while helping the Anarchists and Adrian trying to do his work as Sentinel while not being found out.
I enjoyed this book a lot and read it roughly three times. It tackled many of the questions about each of the hero’s powers such as if Donna didn’t get all her butterflies, could she still turn human or can Adrian bring a tattoo to life and still have the tattoo. I would recommend this book to anyone who has read Renegades and liked it. It still has the great fight scenes.
Renegadesby Marissa Meyer is a series about a world with powers and heroes that call themselves Renegades. There are also villains called Anarchists and despite their name, their goal isn’t to bring anarchy, it is just to get rid of the Renegade council because they found it corrupt. This story follows a girl called Nova Artino, also known as Nightmare as part of the Anarchists. She is used to infiltrate the Renegades by posing as Nova McLean in order to become a Renegade herself to spy on them and cause havoc. She falls in love with a boy called Adrian, who is known as Sketch as part of the Renegades. The story follows their love and how Nova will manage her split identity.
I enjoyed this story despite the many loop holes such as Adrian never creating a gun to fight with and instead using small gadgets. I would recommend this book to people who like love stories intersecting with cool battle scenes. As I read this, I could feel the excitement of the battles flowing through the pages.
