Still Alice and Al Capone Does My Shirts: two brief reviews

taken from Goodreads.com

I finished Still Alice sometime last week and meant to write the blog post about it, but time passed and I forgot. So here I am, writing another post with two reviews. Whoops.

I absolutely loved this book (and the audiobook, which was read by the author and was very well done). Alice Howland is an incredibly successful linguistics professor at Harvard University. With an equally successful scientist husband and three beautiful adult children, Alice enters her 50th birthday with pride. She blames lost keys and forgotten appointments on her stressful schedule, but when she gets hopelessly lost just two blocks from her house one day, she is forced to admit that something may be wrong. Alice is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, and the rest of the book follows her gradual mental decline.

This is a heartbreaking book, and scary in a way that watching The Notebook is scary, but it's also a great read. I enjoyed the relationships Alice had with the other characters (except for her stupid husband who I very much did not like) and I thought Genova did an incredible job walking us through the progression of Alice's disease. I'm excited to see the movie at some point soon; I think Julianne Moore will do/did an awesome job.

taken from Goodreads.com

This is another one of those books that has been on my radar for a long time; I first saw it (and it's companion books) when I was student teaching. When I was shopping for new audiobooks at the library a couple weeks ago I saw they had this one and I grabbed it.

Moose Flanagan's family moves to Alcatraz Island in the 1930s when his dad gets a job as a prison guard. Moose has a hard time adjusting to this new community, with world-class murderers and rapists living right next door to him. At school - across the bay on the mainland - the Alcatraz kids are like celebrities, and the overbearing warden's daughter soon has Moose wrapped up in a money-making scheme that has potential to get them all in trouble.

This book was super cute. It's not my new favorite and although I'm planning on reading the other two companion books at some point, I'm not feeling the need to rush right into them. That being said, I really did enjoy it. The shining star of the book - and probably the reason it won the Newberry Award - is the historical accuracy of the plot. I feel like I learned so much (confirmed as facts by the author's note at the end) about what life on Alcatraz was like: guards' families really did live on the island, and they really did go to school across the bay with San Francisco kids. The other interesting story line follows Moose's sister, who suffers from some sort of unknown mental disabilities (in the author's note, Choldenko explains that Natalie has autism, which hadn't been named at that point in history). The discussion about mental handicaps in the 1930s - and today, really - is a very interesting one that's handled well in this book. So even though it wasn't the most funny or endearing or sweet book in the whole world, it would be a great book (and, I suspect, series) to give kids some solid historical fiction and open up some dialogues about history.

Friends, just a little 2015 goals update: I'm currently reading my very last book on my list. Woot. 

The Graveyard Book: a brief review

taken from goodreads.com

About a million years ago, when I was a Graduate Assistant working in the College of Education's office, a sweet friend and fellow Graduate Assistant recommended this book to me. I've had it on the super long list of books that lives somewhere in the back of my mind ever since, and I snatched it up when I saw the library had it on audiobook. It did not disappoint.

When an assassin murders almost an entire family one night, he realizes too late that he's let the barely walking toddler slip out of the house and into the neighboring (locked up) graveyard. The ghosts who live in the graveyard decide to adopt the orphaned boy and raise him as their own. Meanwhile, though, the assassin spends the next 15 years searching for the boy who escaped from his grasp that night.

This book is very Jungle Book-like. I really enjoyed it, possibly because I really enjoy The Jungle Book. It did get a little bit more magical/fantasy than I anticipated but it wasn't too overpowering and it worked. I really liked the book overall; the sweet dialogue between the boy and his ghostly guardians is incredibly endearing. The opening scene is horrifying and the end does get a little hectic and scattered feeling, but all in all I enjoyed this one a lot. I'd definitely recommend it, especially to people who tend to enjoy fantasy more than me.

Crash and Monster: two brief reviews

Since I finished two books at the same time (one on Kindle and one on audiobook), I'm just going to write their reviews in the same post.

taken from goodreads.com

I picked this audiobook up from the library because Jerry Spinelli is a big deal and I thought I'd probably heard of the book before. I'd somehow only ever read Spinelli's Stargirl, and although I didn't hate it, I also didn't necessarily love it. Crash, though, I really loved. A lot. It was a really cute book, and the fact that the person reading the audiobook was incredible. Loved it.

Crash is your typical middle school bully/star of the football team. Pen is your typical middle school nerd/free spirit/star male on the cheerleading team. Crash makes it his life mission to make Pen's life miserable for years, but Pen's spunky, carefree attitude simply cannot be broken.

This book reminded me a little bit of a middle school version of something Laurie Halse Anderson would write. Reading a book from the perspective of a bully was really uncomfortable at times, but it also made a huge impact. I loved the characters, loved the dialogue, loved the little plot twists, and loved the heartwarming lessons learned. Plus, it's a very short book. I knocked out the audiobook in a day. That's always nice.

taken from goodreads.com

In contrast to the low expectations I went into Crash with, I went into Monster with super high expectations. Also in contrast to how much I loved Crash, I did not love Monster. It had been on my radar for years and I always thought it looked like such a crazy plot that I would love getting into. When it came time to read it though...eh. It wasn't. It wasn't a very crazy plot and I didn't love it. In fact, it was hard to get into at all.

Steve Harmon is a 16-year-old boy on trial for his involvement in an armed robbery that also resulted in the murder of the shop owner. He and two other boys were supposedly working together, and are all on trial. The book follows Steve through the trial, both in and out of the courtroom.

I love law and order-type shows and I think the ones that focus on younger people are especially interesting. Since the book is called Monster, I thought that this was going to be about a deeply troubled young man who had done some unthinkably awful things that have landed him on trial. I expected to be wowed by the horror of it all as I followed his trial through his eyes. This isn't at all what the book is about, though. It's also not the opposite of that, which would be a book about an innocent boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time because he has some of the wrong friends and is now just thrown into the system without thought because he's black and from the projects. That book would have also been an interesting read. It wasn't either of those things, though; it was a book about a boy who did in fact grow up in a loving family on the poorer side of town who definitely seems to be innocent but never actually explains what his involvement/lack of involvement was in the robbery, who does question how on earth he got into this mess but also calls himself a monster and wonders if everyone knows something about himself that he doesn't know.

This was really confusing, to be honest. I'm reading a book from this kid's own perspective, and I don't even know if he did it or not. I don't even know if he was minimally involved or if he was plucked off the street and put on trial despite the fact that he was nowhere near the store at the time of the robbery. I have a hard time with books like that, that don't just say what they mean and mean what they say. He certainly seems innocent based on how scared and confused he is by everything that's happening around him, but why on earth is he calling himself a monster and questioning himself so deeply? Why would anyone question their own moral standing if they knew they were innocent? I get that he's a kid, but...still. I would have been fine reading a social commentary on the injustices of life for black teenage boys, and I would have been fine reading a shocking and grim look inside the mind of a teenage sociopath, but this wishy washy, weird middle ground was boring and hard to get excited about.

Also, fun fact: it's written in the style of a movie screenplay, because Steve is interested in making films and is using his time in jail and at trial to document everything for a movie. Interesting approach...super sucked to read. Following stage directions and screenplay shorthand required much more effort than I wanted to give, and since I didn't know it was going to be written that way it kind of annoyed me.

When You Reach Me: a brief review

taken from goodreads.com

This is one of those books that I've seen around for several years, and it's always been associated with a lot of praise. I saw it at the library on audiobook and snatched it up. And truthfully...it is good. It's also a little weird, and there were moments when I thought it was confusing and a little too far out there for me, but in the end I enjoyed it.

Miranda lives with her single mother in their small apartment in the 1970s. She has a fairly normal middle school life (her childhood best friend has suddenly stopped talking to her and she doesn't know why, she starts spending time with some new girls who she has more in common with than she originally thought, there's a weird boy at school who she keeps bumping into, etc. etc.) until mysterious notes start showing up addressed to her. She has no idea where they're coming from or what any of them mean, until something horrible happens and she realizes what all the puzzle pieces look like together.

Like I said, there were times when I was a little annoyed with the book because I didn't think it was any good, and there were other times when I liked it a lot and thought it was super cute. Thankfully, it ended with me thinking it was super cute, and I therefore can say that overall I liked it. It's not my new favorite, but I definitely did like it. And since the only other book I've read by this author might as well have been written in a foreign language I hated it so much...we will see if I read any more of hers. I'm feeling like maybe it's a hit or miss with Ms. Stead. 

House of Hades: a brief review

taken from goodreads.com

Friends, I'm not going to lie to you. I didn't love this book and I'm not going to waste a lot of time writing a big long review. Basically: this is the ninth book in the Percy Jackson saga (if you count both series), and I feel like I need to finish the course and read them all even though I just do not care about Percy Jackson anymore. So I listened to the [TERRIBLE] audiobook, and it took forever because these books are just stupid long, and I can now say that I've read it. Yay.

The last book left off with Percy and Annabeth falling into a bottomless, horrible pit. This book bounces between them and the other five who are trying to find them; meanwhile everyone is simultaneously trying to close the Doors of Death. This one ends with them all reunited and deciding to move on to some battle that's going to take place in Greece. And there you go. I just saved you 600-some pages of reading/listening. But hey. At least I got to listen to it (or rather, kind of sort of half listen to it) on audiobook rather than actually read the thing. So there's that.