This is a beautiful tribute to "his noble-hearted brother/ Who he loves more than his own self", but both devastating and devastated.
...she remains fiercely committed to high standards, including the teaching of good behavior, but particularly to the Western cultural canon, the common vocabulary essential to all good education and the capable, dedicated teachers who can impart it.
Realistic portrayal of contemporary teens and their moral challenges breathes fresh life into well-worn themes of rebellion and first love.
The Fault in Our Stars is a love story, one of the most genuine and moving ones in recent American fiction, but it’s also an existential tragedy of tremendous intelligence and courage and sadness.
If you can see the end of the novel through your tears, you’ll find that the family Liesel had carefully crafted for herself is slowly torn apart, as Death claims the members of her family for himself. The humour in the novel stops it from being morbid, but it definitely leaves you feeling both raw and cleansed.
It’s a tender, honest exploration of identity and sexuality, and a passionate reminder that love—whether romantic or familial—should be open, free, and without shame.
Filled with sharp dialogue and detailed descriptions of how to counteract . . . tracers and other surveillance devices, this work makes its admittedly didactic point within a tautly crafted fictional framework.
Her successes are hard-won and her setbacks, such as her father's inability to forgive her, painfully true to life.
I honestly have nothing negative to say about this book, I enjoyed every single moment of it. The constant flashbacks into Mia’s life make you want to keep on turning the pages, to learn more about her...
Stiefvater, who has an assured and entertaining way with language, doesn’t talk down to her readers, and she ably blends the mystical and the earthly, the primitive and the contemporary...
Ketchup Clouds is magic, if you allow it to be, and don't look at it with a reviewer's critical eye, like I did. A 4/5 for this brilliant book. And, when reading, as Aaron says, "Just fly …"
Jazzy syntax and Forney’s witty cartoons examining Indian versus White attire and behavior transmute despair into dark humor; Alexie’s no-holds-barred jokes have the effect of throwing the seriousness of his themes into high relief.
If the latter sections don’t quite keep up with the thrilling revelations of the first, Lowry still ties together these stories in a wholly satisfying way.
An unconventional history of ballooning, this quirky, endearing, and enticing collection melds the spirit of discovery with chemistry, physics, engineering, and the imagination.
“Code Name Verity” is unlike any book I’ve ever read before. A good book is one I enjoy as I’m reading it. A great book is one that will stick with me and, in ways, haunt me. This is a great book.
The water horses are breathtakingly well-imagined, glorious and untamably violent. The final race, with Sean and Puck each protecting each other but both determined to win, comes to a pitch-perfect conclusion. Masterful. Like nothing else out there now.
Shadow Kiss is the longest of Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy books, and also the most complex in terms of plots and subplots...Shadow Kiss is another wonderful entry in the series, the best book so far in terms of depth, character development, and emotional investment.
In this 5th book, Richelle Mead closes off some plot threads and creates some crazy new ones to carry over to the final book in the series. So read Spirit Bound, start forming your conspiracy theories and get ready for the final installment...
There's no doubting Guantanamo Boy's integrity, nor its seriousness of purpose in documenting this shocking situation.