Week #4: The Red Pony

          Book: The Red Pony
          Author: John Steinbeck
          Genre: Historical/Realistic Fiction

     This is a fantastic and classic book about a boy named Jody Tiflin and a red pony on a ranch. It is told in four main sections of Jody's life on on his father's ranch, and his interactions with a red pony that he loves.
     Even if you don't enjoy to read old novels because of the writing style (being generally hard to understand), this is an amazing book filled with great descriptions and real-feeling characters. I love John Steinbeck's books like Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, but this one is by far the most heartbreaking and powerful.
      I have never understood how John Steinbeck fits so much power into his short books, and this is anther great example.
       

Week #3: One Came Home

            Title: One Came Home
            Genre: Young Adult Mystery/Adventure, Western
            Author: Amy Timberlake

            One came home is a refreshingly different young adult book about a girl named Georgie in 1871 Wisconsin. Georgie has two unique skill-sets, one being her sharp-shooting, and the other being able to argue and make points against people she really shouldn't. In one of these instances when she spoke a bit too much led to her sister going missing and turning up as a corpse. Georgie is unbelieving of this and sets out on a Wild West adventure to find out what really happened to her sister.
 
            As I said this is a really refreshing book, and is actually quite fun being that it is set in the Wild West. It was well written and had a very good story (not much inappropriate content) which ended up being a very different and fantastic book. I highly recommend this book for everyone in our class!

           TBR:

• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
• When You Reach Me 
• Neverwhere
• The Tipping Point

Week #2: Okay For Now

    Book: Okay For Now
    Author: Gary Schmidt
    Genera: Drama   

In this weeks book reading I read "Okay for Now," which is connected to "The Wednesday Wars" but not totally a sequel. It is told from the view of Doug Swieteck in the late 1960's, a seventh-grader who has an abusive father, and mostly hates being near his family (besides his mom who is sweet and nurturing) because of it. The story continues with school and meeting a friend named Lil' Spice (a girl), who gets him a job at her dad's shop. I have like Gary Schmidt's books, because his writing style is fun and interesting at the same time.
          It is a seemingly easy read, but it is about three-hundred-sixty pages, so for some people it might a two week book. If you have read the Wednesday Wars (I would recommend this book) you would know what genera it is (maybe drama, but it is  mostly just 'life').

      Next Three Books:

• When You Reach Me
• Neverwhere
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Week #1: The Impossible Knife of Memory

      Book: The Impossible Knife of Memory
      Author: Luarie Halse Anderson
      Genre: Realistic Fiction

      Hayley Kincian is a senior in high school, and is battling all of the normal teenage crises, but her home life is far different from other kids. Her dad is being torn apart from his past when he served in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and continually gets worse as he digs deeper into the past. She too is desperately searching for distractions from her unhappy past, but cannot resist the memories, and needs to live with them and accept them as part of herself.

      I really loved the writing in this book. Obviously, I found it hard to relate to the situations that Hayley is going through, but the author was so well-spoken that I found myself in the situations myself. The characters were very real, and there was a fair amount of character development, but as the book went on I realized that there wasn't much of a story and it was more like a lot of diary entries. This isn't technically a bad thing, but it did make the book seem a bit repetitive and drawn out. I recommend this book to anyone in AS, because I believe that we can all deal with the adult situations described in this book. It is very well-written as I said, which definitely makes it worth it read.

      Next week I will read "Okay for Now"      

                 TBR List:

• Unbroken
• Neverwhere
• The Tipping Point
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
• The Maze Runner