The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

This is an amazing book. I love the hard topics discussed like race, education, poverty, and community. Coming from an early childhood background, I appreciate any book that shows how your childhood affects you in ways you could never imagine. I love all the race relations and observations throughout. Jeff Hobbs isn't scared to make the difficult statements that could come across as racist at first. But once dug into deeper, you see it differently.

The biography is the best bio I've ever read. Hobbs does a great job in putting in facts and figures that matter to the overall story in such a way as to not be overwhelming. I didn't know anything about the book when it was recommended to me. And while it wouldn't have ruined anything to know details, I was glad I didn't know. It was a great surprise to see the connection between the author and Robert Peace.

I highly recommend this book to any and everyone 18 years and older.

Palace of Lies

This is the third book in Margaret Peterson Haddix's Palace Chronicles series. I've reviewed the first and second books.

So, the 13 princesses are ruling together when their enemy strikes again. Desmia is the main character in this book and she is having a hard time determining who is telling lies and who is on her side. This book in the series is good, but a little forced and not as good as the other two in the series. Very little violence and appropriate with adult themes, language, and sexual content for an elementary aged student.

Hacker

I loved this book. It's a YA novel about a girl, Nyah who is a prodigy hacker and in order to get hired by a big corporation, she hacks into their system. Once she presents the CEO with their own info, they hire her to fix their problems.

She and her friend hacked into Blakbox system and end up in a heap of trouble. The files they hacked ended up being illegal, so they sent a henchman to kill the girl.

At the same time, one her good friends, who also happens to be a genius, has advanced brain cancer and is trying to invent a machine to hack into his brain in hopes of changing the hard wire in there to fix the cancer. I know, this sounds a little dumb. Trust me, it's not.

It has very technical medical terminology and hacking terminology, so I got a little lost in that. But, that's part of what makes it a great book. The science fiction is believable because of all the details.

It's appropriate except, there is some violence. Nothing that a mature 4th grader can't handle.

Overall, a great book and I highly recommend this quick read.

This is Where We Live

This was an interesting book. I didn't like it at first, but then it got interesting and better as it went along. It's a good commentary on love and commitment, as the world sees it and how it should be; love as emotion versus love as commitment.

Claudia and Jeremy are a young married couple who are seeking their dreams in art and film in LA. Jeremy's past girlfriend, Aoki comes back into the picture and Jeremy has a choice to make. At first, I thought this was your typical run of the mill story of temptation. The kind that makes you want the affair to happen. The bad kind. But the book has more layers than that. It's not just a story of "do what feels right and good". It's about the definition of love and what it means to make sacrifices for someone else. It's about how people react when life doesn't go the way you foresaw it.

Best quote of the book was on page 308:

"Everyone pretends that their lives exist in a vacuum, she thought, but the truth is that our individual lives exist in an intimate relationship to the rest of the world.  Our actions have consequences in place we are too willfully blind to imagine. Everyone was interconnected after all and only now was the world waking up to that fact and realizing that this collectively self centered state of perpetual adolescence - the gimme gimme era- might actually be ethically flawed." 

I didn't enjoy the ending though. usually, I think books with question marks are great. This one, felt rushed and almost like the author just didn't have a good ending so she left it off. But overall, this is a good book.

Austenland

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Stupid book. But, I will admit that I wasn't tempted to put it down; I did want to finish it and see what happened.

It's about a woman who loves Darcy from Pride and prejudice so much that all other men fall short. She ends up going on a 3 week trip to Austenland - a resort where the women pretend to be in Austen's England. It was a weird book. But, sweet ending.

Fail by Shannon Hail. She should stick to YA.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Yes, yes. I know. I'm really late reading this. Most people read this book 4 years ago when it came out. My list of books to read is about that long, so if I ever read a book the year it came out, it's a miracle. By the way, that happened with All the Bright Places. Which means it's a great book and you should read it.

Mindy Kaling is really funny and I like her a lot. She is real and approachable in this book, unlike the last memoir I read, Yes Please by Amy Phoeler.

Mindy comes across as an actually real person. Making mistakes and laughing at them. The format of the book is fantastic and this was well worth the read. Another miracle will occur if I can find time to get to Tiny Fay's book.

River Secrets

This is another YA novel in one of Shannon Hale's series. Once again, I read it to make sure it's appropriate for my 4th grader. Although there is lots of talk about violence and some romance, there's nothing I deemed inappropriate for her. I was on the fence about it though since the themes are more mature. Ultimately, one of the reasons I love Hale is that her books are an in between of traditional YA and Juvenile Fiction. It's not as graphic and mature as The Hunger Games, but it's no Percy Jackson either.

The war between Tira and Bayern is over and in an effort at promoting peace, ambassadors were exchanged from both countries. Tira did not accept the Bayern as well as hoped for and there is an attempt at a coop and a restart of the war. Each one of Hale's novels has most of the same main characters in them, but they all focus on one of the characters in depth. This one is about Razo and why he is valuable to the Bayern army when he's so physically weak and small.

The story was great and believable. I enjoyed this one as much as the others.