Icon: AR Test

The Hide-and-Seek Ghost

Kaz is an ordinary ghost who hasn’t figured out how to glow. When the house that Kaz and his family live in is torn down, the wind scatters the ghosts and carries Kaz to a library. While at the library, Kaz meets Claire—a human who can see him. Together the two look for Kaz’s family and solve ghostly mysteries in the process.

One of Claire’s classmates, Eli, is known for his pranks. So when he asks Claire to help him rid his family home of a ghost, Claire isn’t sure if Eli really needs help or if he is just trying to pull another prank. Can Kaz and Claire discover if Eli’s home is really haunted?

The Hide-and-Seek Ghost brings Claire’s world and the ghost world to life with black-and-white illustrations that will help readers visualize the characters and actions. The plot focuses on an argument between Kaz’s parents and another ghost as well as the mystery of Eli’s haunted house. The multiple plots make the story choppy and may cause some confusion. Readers will enjoy following the clues to the mystery and looking at the many illustrations that show the characters’ emotions.

The ghosts in the story are not scary; however, there are several scenes where ghosts are separated from family when they leave a building and the wind blows them away. The idea of being accidentally separated from family and not being able to return may frighten some readers. A glossary of ghostly terms helps readers understand those that are used in the story.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • None

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • Many of the characters are ghosts who can choose to be seen and heard by “solids” and who can glow, shrink, expand, and walk through walls.

Spiritual Content

  • None

 

Lilly and Fin: A Mermaid’s Tale

Two merpups, Lilly and Fin, love to sneak out of the mermaid city to explore caves. Adults have warned about the dangers of Two-Legs and the Kraken, but surely, they are just stories. Then one day, Lilly and Fin decide to go to their favorite cave. What they don’t know is that there is a couple of Two-Legs that are hiding in the shadows. Will Lilly and Fin fall into the humans’ trap?

Beautiful full-colored illustrations are sprinkled throughout Lilly and Fin: A Mermaid’s Tale. The illustrations of the characters, ocean creatures, and the submarine help bring the story to life. Readers will smile at the comical illustrations of the humans. Another positive aspect is that the larger illustrations have hidden pictures that give readers another fun way to interact with the story.

The easy-to-follow plot of Lilly and Fin: A Mermaid’s Tale cleverly weaves in the adults’ stories of the dangers of the Kraken and the Two-Legs. In the end, the merpups discover that the adults’ stories were not merely made up to make them behave. One negative aspect of the story is that Lilly and Fin lie to their parents on a regular basis. In order to sneak out of the city, Lilly tells her parents she is going to Fin’s, and Fin tells his parents he is going to Lilly’s. Lilly’s love for adventure shines throughout the story, but she isn’t the best friend. She completely ignores Fin when he suggests they do not go to the cave because his scales itch, which means there will be trouble. However, she does convince the Kraken to help free Fin.

The beginning of the story starts out slow, but once Lilly and Fin get out of the mermaid city, they meet interesting characters. The reader knows that Mr. and Mrs. Snorkel are on the hunt for mermaids, which adds suspense to the story. Although the book is written for younger readers, many of the pages only have text, with long paragraphs, which may intimidate some readers. Lilly and Fin: A Mermaid’s Tale would be a humorous story for confident readers of chapter books. The story would also be fun to read aloud for those who are not yet ready for chapter books.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • When Lilly and Fin tried to swim past Neptune, “the fat king grabbed them with his fingers and held them in front of his red eyes.” When the two talk disrespectfully to Neptune, “the fat man howled, shaking his fist, and the merpups with them.”
  • Mr. and Mrs. Snorkel capture Fin. When the submarine is close, Fin’s “wide eyes were just staring at the terrible pinchers, and before Lilly knew what was happening, one of them had sucked up her friend. It closed with a loud clang. And Fin was gone.”
  • In order to free Fin, the Kraken grabs the submarine, and it “began to shake as though it was in the grips of a mighty storm. Mr. Snorkel and Mr. Harkenear were rolling around the floor like marbles.” The group escapes in a pod.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • “Darn” is used twice.
  • The Kraken calls Lilly a “dimwit.”
  • Lilly refers to Neptune as “the fatso.”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

Escape to the Above

Wily has spent the twelve years of his life underground learning how to be a trapsmith. Wily makes traps to keep invaders from the cavern mage’s treasure. Even though Wily wonders what life in the Above would be like, he knows he can never leave.

Then a group of treasure hunters appears—an elf, a moss giant, a warrior with a magic arm. They want the caver mage’s treasure, including Wily himself. With the help of Wily, the group can invade every other dungeon and flee the Infernal King’s realm. Wily is about to go on an adventure, which will lead to a battle against the Infernal King, who uses gearfolk to terrorize and imprison the innocent. But is there any way this diverse group can work together and escape the Infernal King’s gearfolk?

A fun fantasy, Snared: Escape to the Above starts strong from the start. Wily’s underground world comes alive. When Wily leaves the cave he has lived in, seeing Wily’s perception of everyday things, such as a butterfly, is interesting and brings humor. Although Wily and his group must flee from horrors, the violence is not graphically described. Through Wily’s experience, he learns that “a prison doesn’t need cages to make you feel trapped. If you take away a person’s choices, they could be in the most beautiful place in the world and still be caged.”

Advanced elementary and junior high readers will enjoy the quirky characters and the interesting traps that Wily encounters. Although the plot is a bit predictable and the Infernal King is defeated too easily, readers will enjoy the adventure along the way. Full of humor and lessons about friendship and doing what is right, Snared: Escape to the Above will please adventure-seeking readers.

Sexual Content

  • None.

Violence

  • When invaders go into an underground cavern looking for treasure, they must go through various traps. Hobgoblets attack a knight from behind, but “the furious hobgoblets were both knocked unconscious by the flat side of a sword . . . The third hobgoblet was struck in the back of the head by the blunt end of the weapon.”
  • When a group of treasure hunters meets the cavern mage, he tries to stop them from taking his trapsmith. The mage throws magical bolts, but they do not hit anyone. Then he “snatched a quill . . . and used it to scribble ancient hieroglyphs in the air. A small tornado formed around the symbols, sweeping them up and churning them like dirty undershirts in the laundry cauldron. The blast of air struck the moss giant—and did nothing at all.” There is a fight that takes place over three pages.
  • When guards try to stop the group from leaving the underground cavern, the moss giant, “swiftly grabbed the guards in his large earthen hands and smashed their heads together. They both slid to the ground, unconscious.”
  • The king sends snagglecarts to round up citizens and put them in prison, even though they have done nothing wrong. Wiley watches a “dragon-size snagglecarts was rolling toward the mother and children with its mechanical mouth open, hungry for more prisoners. . . the gearfolk prodded the mother and two daughters, forcing them to walk up the ramp and into the jaws of the snagglecart.” A person wrapped in a cloak attacks the snagglecarts and gearfolk and “the front of the snagglecart exploded into a twisted mess of metal.” The humans are able to escape.
  • When the gearfolk try to capture Wiley and his friends, they fight back. A bounty hunter “Grabbed a wooden billy club from his rob and charged the gearfolk. The gearfolk was about to scream again when his head was knocked off by a trident. Someone is hit in the chest with a “crackling black energy,” but was uninjured. The battle takes place over a chapter, but Wiley and his friends escape unharmed. A baby crab dragon grabs the knight, “a giant claw clamped down on his leg, squeezing so tightly it was bending the metal armor around the knight’s thigh . . . The baby crab dragon made a playful click before lifting Pryvyd up and smacking him against the ground again.” Wiley is able to talk to the crab dragon, who then lets the knight go.
  • Wiley and his friends try to sneak into the king’s dungeon, but they were captured in a never-scape that was “submerged into ankle-high water.” The never-scape was slowly being submerged in water, but one of Wiley’s friends is able to help them escape.
  • At the end of the story, there is a battle between Wiley’s friends and the gearfolk, mechanical soldiers, and the cavern mage. The battle is not described in gory detail, and no one is injured.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • When invaders go into the underground cavern looking for treasure, the “ale cellar reeked of stale mushrooms and alcohol. Gigantic wooden barrels lined the walls, each big enough to store ten thousand swigs of ale.”

Language

  • When a fairy is caught spying, someone said, “Damn rust fairies are all over the city.”

 Supernatural

  • A knight has an enchanted floating arm that helps him in battle.
  • When going into a destroyed forest, ghosts appear. “Out of the mist, a stampede of spectral elk burst forth, beating their hooves against the ground. Their twisted antlers and hooves glowing a pale green like a bat’s eye while their chests were a deep emerald like the moss on Moshul’s knuckles.” When the Elk struck Wiley, he feels pain but is physically uninjured.

Spiritual Content

  • None

This is Where It Ends

No one ever thought this could actually happen to them. Not here. Not in Opportunity, Alabama.

It is just a normal morning at Opportunity High School when a frightening series of events forever alters the lives of all who are inside. At the conclusion of Principal Trenton’s back-to-term speech in the auditorium, the exit doors fail to open as thousands of students frantically attempt to exit. Two minutes later, someone starts shooting.

Lasting only fifty-four minutes, this harrowing story is told from the perspectives of four different students, each of who have personal connections with the shooter. Those minutes are packed with enough action and tension to feel like a year. This suspense-filled novel dives deep into the emotions of high schoolers and examines the complexities of a murderer’s personality. Riddled with guilt and fear, the characters of this novel make the tragic and once so seemingly impossible situation relatable for the average teen reader.

As the subject matter of this book is very mature, it is not recommended for younger readers. It deals with content such as a school shooting, the passing of a parent, violent deaths, and homosexuality. The author suggests it for readers 14 and above, but some teens may still be disturbed by the novel’s contents. Nevertheless, This is Where it Ends is a well-written and compelling book that examines a topic that has become increasingly important in modern teens’ lives. It allows readers to ponder the intricacy of teen relationships and the value that we place on social acceptance.

Sexual Content

  • There are several references to a romantic relationship between Claire and Tyler, the shooter.
  • Autumn and Sylv are dating secretly. They often hold hands and Sylv, “wanted nothing more than to kiss her, but instead, we held hands.” In another scene, they kiss, “I leaned in, cupped her cheek in my hand, and kissed her,” but as Autumn is afraid of what people will think, she does not “come out.” Facing death, the two admit their feelings in front of the entire school.
  • One of the murdered characters is “Kevin Rolland, one of Opportunity High School’s only out-and-proud students.”
  • At junior prom, Tyler corners his sister’s girlfriend, Sylv, and attempts to kiss her. This experience is traumatic for Sylv and leads to the breakup of Claire and Tyler.
  • During the shooting, Claire and her track teammates are locked out of the school, and they try to get help. As the crisis continues and deaths are discovered, Claire realizes that she is in love with her best friend, Chris, and acts on her feelings. It begins as “I curl my fingers around Chris’s and lean into him” and escalates to, “I look up and touch my lips to Chris’s . . . It’s as if I don’t know where he ends and I start . . . He leans in and kisses me again as if the world were ending. And actually, it has.”
  • Sylv mentions that Tyler raped her. It is not described.

Violence

  • Autumn’s father abuses her. She mentions that he hits her and shows her bruises.
  • Tomás constantly beats up and bullies Tyler for threatening his sister. Tomás thinks, “The one time his eyes weren’t glossed over with contempt was when I slammed his head into a locker. My fingers itch to do it again.”
  • Tyler enters the auditorium and shoots many people; he “picks them off methodically.” He shoots the principal first. “All I can see is Principal Trenton’s surprised smile as she was shot and the horror of the people around who rushed to help her . . . There’s death, there’s dying, and there’s blood everywhere.”
  • The bodies of two victims are described. “Two students . . . are splayed across the chairs in front of Tyler. The boy still has his bag half slung over his shoulder as his blood mixes with hers.”
  • Tomás is frustrated with his inability to be helpful during the shooting, and “I turn on my heels and ram my fist into one of the supply cabinets. The thin board splinters on impact, cutting my knuckles, but the pain offers no relief.”
  • During the shooting, Tyler threatens Sylv. “He placed his hands on my shoulders again, his thumbs digging into my neck . . . When I tried to roll over and crawl away from him, his boot found my stomach, and I doubled over. He pinned me, his knees on my arms and his hands on my shirt.”
  • When attempting to find the janitor to help unlock the auditorium doors, Tomás and Fareed find him dead in the supply closet. “His hands are bound together with a cable tie pulled so tight his fingers have gone black. Cable ties circle his neck, and he is gagged. His eyes are empty; his face is as discolored as his hands. Bloody scratches mark his neck, as if he tried to rip through the plastic with his bare hands.”
  • The shooting of students and teachers is described in detail. “The first bullet buries itself in the teacher’s arm. The second bullet drills a hole through his chest.” In another scene, “A freshman beside us stumbles and trips, sliding against the seat when a bullet perforates her neck. I almost join the screaming as blood splatters my face.”
  • Some bullying boys set fire to a student’s locker. Another student’s tires are slashed for revenge.
  • Because her brother is the shooter, Autumn feels grief and responsibility for the deaths of others. She thinks, “Every time I blink, I see Nyah’s face being torn apart by the bullet . . . Ty is my only brother, but right now, I want him to die. To take the gun and shoot himself.”
  • Autumn gets hit with the barrel of the gun while she is trying to stop Tyler. “His arm snaps back and the barrel of the gun bashes my cheek. Spots of light burst in my vision. Pain blossoms over my face. Blood pools in my mouth.”
  • Near the conclusion of the novel, Tyler shoots Autumn and then kills himself, “When he pulls the trigger, I feel the shot rather than hear it. Pain overwhelms me. The floor opens up around me. The last thing I see before I fade is Ty turning the gun on himself . . . Then he blows his brains out.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Tyler and Autumn’s father is an abusive alcoholic. “Mr. Browne drowned his sorrows in alcohol.”
  • Tomás describes what usually follows an assembly as, “So everyone pushes to leave, then strolls, dawdles, sneaks out for a smoke and some air (the two aren’t mutually exclusive, thank you very much).”
  • Claire thinks of the track runners’ get-together at the end of the school year. The event has “no alcohol until the JV athletes are asleep, but then we’ll drink. We’ll toast our four years together.”

Language

  • Profanity is used fairly often throughout the novel. This includes: dammit, hell, fuck, and fuck off.
  • Claire describes the re-built version of Opportunity High School as, “state of the art—larger sports fields, fancy equipment, right in the middle of fuck all.”
  • “Oh my God” is said once and “God” is said once.
  • The people who are around Autumn in the auditorium are described as, “no longer pitiful, no longer worried about my poor, fucked-up home.”
  • Tyler rants to Autumn in between shooting people. “You know how much it hurt to find out about you and that—that slut?”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • After hearing the sound of the first bullet rip through the air, Claire and Chris decide to run for help. Before running, she chooses to “whisper a prayer to anyone who might listen.”
  • Upon seeing the mutilated body of the dead janitor, Fareed, “mutters something, but I can’t make out the words. It sounds like a prayer of sorts in the language of his parents.”
  • When Sylv comes out to her family as gay, she mentions that “Father Jones preaches about sin, hell, and damnation.”

by Morgan Filgas

Tales from a NOT-SO-Popular Party Girl

Middle school can be traumatizing for any girl.  But for Nikki, middle school is a nightmare. Nikki dreams about going to the Halloween dance with Brandon, but so does popular mean girl MacKenzie.  Then in a strange turn of events, MacKenzie resigns as the dance chairperson and so do all of the cool kids, leaving Nikki and her two friends in charge.  Now Nikki and her friends must decide if they should cancel the dance or if they can plan it all on their own.

To add to the drama of Nikki’s life, her little sister has a tooth fairy phobia that has become Nikki’s problem. Her parents drag her to a funeral where she has an uncontrollable fit of hiccups. And to cap it all off, she has to dress as a rat at a little kid party and paint faces—on the same night of the Halloween dance.

 Dork Diaries is written in the form of a diary, which allows Nikki’s thoughts and feelings to take center stage.  The diary contains a lot of text talk such as BTW and OMG.  Plus, there are many references to pop culture stars such as Jessica Simpson and Tyra Banks. Although Nikki’s days are filled with funny events, the books show a stereotypical junior high full of mean girls, boy drama, and cool kid drama.

Throughout the book, there are cute drawings that add to the storyline.  Because the story is written in diary format, most paragraphs consist of one to two sentences and the vocabulary is typical of a preteen. Although the story is entertaining, there is no educational value.

Sexual Content

  • When Nikki thinks Mackenzie is going to the dance with Brandon she says, “She was buying a new lip gloss JUST for Brandon. I knew what THAT meant.”

Violence

  • When Nikki was embarrassed she thinks, “I was so angry I wanted to grab them both by their necks and squeeze until their little heads exploded.”
  • A cool girl purposely bumps Nikki’s food plate, which splashes chocolate onto Nikki’s dress.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • The narrator uses words like crud, craptastic, dagnabbit, darn, OMG and what the . . .”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

 

CRIME BITERS! It’s a Doggy Dog World

Jimmy Bishop has a story that he doesn’t think anyone will believe, not even his best friend Irwin. Abby, Jimmy’s new dog, is a crime-fighting vampire dog. It’s true.

The other crazy things that happen to Jimmy are just as true.

Jimmy Bishop is obsessed with Stop Police—a TV show about a vampire detective. He has an older sister who teases him, two parents, and a best friend. His life appears to be pretty normal, but trouble seems to follow him.

Jimmy wakes up with a strange blotch on his face just days before school starts. Then his father has a series of job interviews and his parents hire a strange babysitter who tries to feed him fried beets in pea sauce. Then a new girl moves next door. But the most exciting and strangest event of all is when Jimmy brings home Abby, a new dog.

Crime Bitters is full of suspense, humor, and adventure. As Jimmy’s day-to-day life unfolds the reader will be captivated by the realistic characters as well as the illustrations. The story is easy to read, fun, and full of interesting facts. For example: “Fact: There are a lot of great bald people in the world. But unfortunately, none of them are in this book.”

Because Jimmy tells his own story, the reader gets a glimpse of how it feels to be bullied, how even relationships with best friends be full of strife, and how talking to a girl can be the scariest thing of all.  Crime Bitters has a fast-paced plot that will keep younger readers enthralled.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • When the babysitter swats Abby on the nose, Abby goes into attack mode.  “She (Abby) crouched down, like you see on one of those nature shows, where the panther suddenly spots the defenseless gazelle . . . Then Abby jumped, right onto Mrs. Cragg’s shoulder.” Jimmy’s mother appears and grabs the dog.
  • When a man tries to take Abby, Mrs. Cragg’s tries to stop him. “Then, without another word, Mrs. Cragg suddenly ripped her own hair off her head . . . and wrapped it around Mr. Bratford’s eyes, like a blindfold.”
  • When the kids discover that Mr. Bratford is a thief, he chases them. “He pinched my cheek so hard that tears came to my eyes then put one of his pimply hands on Abby and started petting her fur. . . The next thing I knew, Mr. Bratford had picked me up by the shirt and was carrying me over to Mrs. Cragg.”
  • Abby attacks Mrs. Bratford, “In one split second, she jumped out of my arms, bared her teeth, leaped onto Mr. Bratford, and clamped her jaws around his neck . . . Mr. Bratford screamed and feel down. Abby clamped harder, and they started rolling around on the ground.”
  • Jimmy hits Mr. Bratford in the knees with a cane.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • Abby is a “superhero crime-fighting vampire dog” that has fangs.

Spiritual Content

  • None

The House on Stone’s Throw Island

Eli isn’t happy when he boards the ferry to go to Stone Throw’s Island. He’s not looking forward to his sister’s wedding. Even though groom’s sister, Josie, is his age, he doesn’t want to meet her.  In fact, Eli can think of a million things he’d rather do than spend the weekend on a remote island.

Josie feels the same; she doesn’t want to spend time with her soon-to-be brother-in-law. But when a ghost girl enters her room, Josie decides that Eli might be the best person to help figure out who the ghost is and what she wants. As the two try to figure out the secrets of the island, they soon discover that when the dead want revenge, there is little anyone can do to stop them from getting their ghostly desire.

The House on Stone’s Throw Island grabs its readers’ attention in the very beginning and captivate them until the end. Poblocki weaves a wonderful mystery using suspense and vivid descriptions to keep readers wanting more.

Though the story deals with the ghost of a World War II German spy, most of the violence is hinted at rather than described in detail. This allows readers to use their imagination to create their own images of what happened. The story is well crafted and the two main characters, Josie and Eli, are compelling. The House on Stone’s Throw Island is a perfect book for both older and younger readers who want a good scare.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • Someone tries to kill Margo while she is asleep. “A hand came down over her face. It covered her nose and her mouth with a sweat-slick grip and squeezed . . . She pushed at the figures’ chest, but the attacker managed to slap her hands away before pressing against her face even harder.” She hits the person with a lamp and he runs off.
  • Josie reads a diary entry that describes how a German spy was, “standing over my brother with a rifle.  He used it to strike Frankie in the face.”
  • A possessed wedding guest hits someone across the face.
  • A ghost explains how he and his friends died. They were locked in a cavern and, “a storm rose up and flooded the cavern. Despite our cries for mercy, the savage siblings allowed the seawater to fill our lungs.”
  • A possessed wedding guest captures Josie. “But Bruno squeezed her tight.  Tighter. So tight, she could no longer move. So tight, she could barely breathe.”  Josie, “snapped her head forward as hard as she could, making contact with his sternum . . . She wasn’t sure if she had broken something in him or herself.” As she tries to escape his grasp, they fall down the stairs and he is knocked unconscious.
  • The skeletal remains of a German spy try to get Josie and Eli to help him.  “Here was the sallow skin, the collapsed nose, the empty eye sockets.” The ghost wants them to give them a wedding guest in exchange for Eli’s father.
  • A U-boat rams the Sea Witch. The Sea Witch crashes, but everyone survives.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • When discussing WWII, one of the wedding guests says, “Screw Hitler.”
  • Before one of the guest reveals a secret, she says, “I think now is the time to tell it. And I don’t give a good-gosh-darn about the repercussions.”
  • When being accused of being negative, one of the guests says, “Negative? Are you freaking kidding me?

Supernatural

  • Three dead German soldiers from World War II take over the bodies of the wedding guest.  The ghosts want revenge for their deaths.
  • The ghost explains what happened to him. “Our souls have been trapped here. Trapped until you arrived on this island, Madame Lintel. Your presence woke us up, and we slipped inside the skins of these men.”
  • An old U-boat and a ghost crew come up and claim three of the wedding guest.  “The three reached up, claiming the help that was being offered to them. . .the men climbed aboard the sub and stood with their compatriots, reunited in spirit at long last.”
  • Eli thinks that, “each of their souls must have been cracked just enough to let in the bad spirits. Or maybe it hadn’t been anything like that. Maybe Eli had merely been lucky they hadn’t crept inside his own head too.”

Spiritual Content

  • None

I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have To Kill You

Cammie doesn’t just feel invisible, she is trained to be invisible. After all, when a girl goes to spy school, blending into a crowd is an art as well as a talent. However, when Cammie catches the eye of a gorgeous boy—a normal, not-spy boy—being invisible isn’t an option anymore. Cammie quickly discovers that navigating the world of romance and relationships is much harder than mastering fourteen different languages and advanced encryption at school.

Cammie puts all her spy skills to the test as she tries to keep her true identity hidden from her boyfriend and her boyfriend a secret from her spy school. She knows that she will never be able to reveal that the Gallagher Academy, which most people think is a school for rich snobs, is really a school for spies. Yet for the first time in her life, Cammie is getting a glimpse of what it means to be normal.

Although Cammie and her friends are geniuses when it comes to chemical warfare and breaking CIA codes in computer class, they are completely clueless when it comes to boys.  A new roommate, a new teacher, and a covert operation class lead to laugh-out-loud situations that are simultaneously filled with suspense. Through first-person narration, Carter creates a fun, sweet story and a unique setting in which to explore the well-known troubles teens have in understanding the opposite sex.

Carter successfully creates a believable world where girls can accomplish just about anything. The characters are lovable while still being grounded in reality. Additionally, the story is full of action and explores teen romance in a wholesome way that is perfect for younger readers.

 Sexual Content

  • When talking about an attractive teacher’s tone of voice, the narrator said, “We all heard, I think you’re the most beautiful woman in the world, and I’d be honored if you’d bear my children.”
  • A CIA member, “once sweet-talked a Russian dignitary into dressing in drag and carrying a beach ball full of liquid nitrogen under his shirt like a pregnant lady.”
  • The girls wonder if the gorgeous guy is a “honey pot” and then struggle to explain what a honey pot is.
  • A friend asks the narrator if she has, “been to second base yet?”
  • The narrator receives her first kiss, and then later kisses her boyfriend so he will stop talking.
  • A boy talks about mooning the girls at the Gallagher Academy.

Violence

  • A teacher throws a letter opener at another teacher’s head, which they stop with a book.
  • In a fit of anger, a student grabs a classmate’s arm, puts it behind her back, and rips out her diamond nose ring.
  • During a mission debriefing, a student is shown a picture of her friend’s bloody and swollen face. The teacher explains that during torture, what hurts most is, “listening to her friend scream…she will be screaming for about six hours, until she becomes so dehydrated she can’t form sounds.” After the lesson, her friend walks in unharmed.
  • As part of a final test in the covert class, Cammie is “kidnapped” and a fight ensues. She is locked in a room, blindfolded, and tied to a chair.
  • When the narrator meets a girl who she thinks might be her competition, the narrator thinks about her ability, “to kill you in your sleep and make it look like an accident, you silly vapid, two bit. . .”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • It is mentioned that as part of an interrogation tactics class, the students are, “under the influence of sodium pentothal,” and Cammie mentions being a wiz at poison-concocting.
  • A student smokes a cigarette.
  • When her friend announces she has bad news about Cammie’s crush, the narrator wonders if the bad news is that, “he’s taking drugs that will prepare him for a sex change operation.”
  • A student wonders if her first covert mission is going to be, “busting up a drug cartel that’s operating out of a night club.”

Language

  • A class is described as, “damn hard.”
  • When getting assigned a mission, the narrator said it’s like getting, “a gold-freaking-star.”
  • A student uses the phrase, “bloody hell.”
  • A student calls another student a “b—” and mentions the “B word.”  The B word is implied but never spoken.

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • Although religion isn’t discussed directly, Cammie pretends to be homeschooled for religious reasons. Cammie also wears a cross and carries a What Would Jesus Do? ink pen in her bag because it helps her cover story.
  • There is a conversation about how the Bible says people have free will, but a character doesn’t feel like that applies to his life because of his parents’ expectations.

The Sin Eater’s Daughter

As a young girl, Twylla is brought to live in the castle because she is the Daunte Embodied, daughter of two gods. As Daunte Embodied, it is Twylla’s duty to bring justice to the kingdom. She is the executioner; anyone that she touches, dies.

Twylla thought life in the castle would be different. But the privileged life she leads is lonely and becomes more a prison than a home to her. The kingdom’s people fear her. The queen demands absolute obedience from her. And Merek, Twylla’s betrothed, confuses her.

Twylla believes her life is set in stone until she is appointed a new guard. This guard doesn’t fear her as so many others do. He sees past her role as Daunte Embodied, and sees her as a person. As they spend more time together, Twylla begins to wonder if there is a different path she could follow. But such a path would go against her loyalty to Merek and the kingdom.

Confused and lonely, Twylla soon learns that the queen has a deadly plan of her own—and Twylla is in the way of the queen getting her desire. Will Twylla be able to survive long enough to choose between two men—one who needs her, and one who claims to love her?

The Sin Eater’s Daughter takes the reader into an interesting world ruled by an evil queen. The queen is the strongest character in the book. She is willing to kill anyone, including her best friend who dared to become pregnant while the queen could not. The king, who appears infrequently, is seen as a kind, but powerless man. Merek, who does not agree with his mother’s cruel ways, seems desperate and unkind, which makes it difficult for the reader to feel sympathy for him. Even Twylla, who is the heroin, is difficult to relate to. Although her situation is difficult, she seems to be content to sit in her tower and feel sorry for herself.

Although the world created in The Sin Eater’s Daughter is interesting, it is often violent and disturbing. Death is seen often and is described in graphic detail. There are many adult topics that appear including the mention of incest, killing a child in the womb, and seduction.

Sexual Content

  • During a sin-eating ceremony a woman’s father, who is under the influence of poppy tears, confesses that “she said no but he [himself] put a baby in her.” The Sin Eater says that when the man dies she will not “take that sin.”
  • Twylla and her guard kiss often towards the end of the book. In one scene she tells him that she loves him and then, “he devours the words right out of my mouth, pressing his own against mine and swallowing my worries. I let him, willing to sacrifice my questions temporarily for the taste of him, for his hands on my waist.”
  • Twylla and her guard plan to run away together. They again kiss. “Our mouths move gently, brushing together, our lips opening and closing against the other’s, our eyes locked. It makes me dizzy and I allow mine to flutter shut, concentrating on the feel of him against me, his tongue dancing gently with mine.”
  • Twylla and her guard have sex several times. The act is not described, but afterward they, “lie with our legs and arms twined, breathing softly, his breaths becoming my breaths. Our skin is damp and we stick together, as though nothing could separate us.” After one time together, the queen finds them in bed together and has them both thrown in jail.
  • The tradition in the kingdom is for the queen to give birth to one boy and one girl, and then the two children are married when they are adults. The goal is to keep the bloodline clean. Because the current queen has only one living child, a male, she plans to kill the king and marry her son.
  • At the end of the story, Twylla discovers that her guard was hired to seduce her.

Violence

  • One of the rituals in the book is when Twylla, as Daunte Embodied, kills condemned people with a touch. “Moments after I’ve touched them, they are slumped against the top of the table, blood streaming from their noses and pooling on the already-stained wood. I watch as thin red rivers flower over the edge, spattering the bolts that pin the chairs to the floor. . .”
  • When the guard and Twylla are found together he is clubbed in the back of the head with a sword. When he falls down, “two of them begin to kick him, bringing their boots back and swinging them into his ribs and spine.” The queen orders the beating to stop when the guard “has stopped moaning and grunting, finally unconscious.”
  • The queen has people killed throughout the book. Her favorite way to have them killed is to send the dogs to rip them apart. In one scene, the queen tells Twylla, “I have a mind to make you watch the dogs eat your lover first . . . Do you think he’ll try to shield you from their jaws when they tear your heart out . . . Do you know what my father used to do? He used to slice across the ankles of the wretches we were hunting. He’d cut them and leave them in the trees. He’d give them an hour to try to escape . . . it might be time to bring it back.”
  • The queen backhands Twylla across the face and threatens to kill her, “for opening your legs to another man while my son planned to wed you.”
  • In the end, the prince tells his mother, “I sentence you to hang by the neck until you are dead.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • At dinner, one of the lords becomes drunk and upsets the queen so she has him killed.
  • When someone is sick, they are given poppy tears to help control the pain.
  • When a woman wants to “lose a child” they take an herb that will make them “lose a child.”
  • The queen uses poison to kill her husband.

Language

  • The queen calls Twylla, “a little slut,” a “whore” and a “harlot.”

Supernatural

  • There is a tale of a Sleeping Prince who is an alchemist. The prince was put under a spell that made him sleep forever. The queen has a totem that can call the Bringer, who is said to be able to bring the prince back to life with the death of a young girl. The queen believes that she can control the Sleeping Prince if she has the totem.

Spiritual Content

  • Twylla is told she is Daunte Embodied, the reborn daughter of the Gods. “The world has always been ruled by two Gods: Daeg, Lord of the sun, who rules in the day, and his wife Naeht, Empress of Darkness, who rules the night. . . She (Naeht) hatched a plan and seduced her husband, tiring him so much he couldn’t rise. Then she took the skies for her own and ruled alone, plunging all the world into darkness. Nothing lived, nothing thrived, and death was everywhere without the Lord of the Sun to light the world and give warmth and joy.” The God’s daughter was said to bring Daeg from his sleep and whenever Lomere needed the daughter, she would return as a symbol of hope.
  • As Daunte Embodied, Twylla is taught that she must, “strike down those who would hurt us. You will go and do your duty. You don’t want to anger the Gods do you?”
  • Twylla believes the Gods have chosen her path, and she must, “obey the Gods.”
  • When someone dies, a person’s soul, “will linger near the body for three days and nights after a death. During that time, the Eating must take place so the soul can ascend, otherwise it will drift to the West Woods to join its damned brothers and sisters in the trees. . .” During this time the sin eater must eat a particular food for each sin the person committed.
  • When Twylla’s mother talks about a woman taking an herb to lose a child, Twylla, “shook my head, not understanding. Losing a child wasn’t a sin; everyone knew the Gods could take away as they saw fit and sometimes they called an unborn back to the Eternal Kingdom.”
  • Twylla’s guard tells her that the religious rituals they perform are all lies and that her beliefs are, “just to scare people into obedience.” He explains that “We used to have Gods, too. And now we don’t and yet the country doesn’t falter; it thrives without them…It’s all made up. You are not beloved by the Gods—there are no Gods.”
  • Twylla tries to figure out what she believes and she thinks, “Neither my mother nor the queen have ever said they believed in the Gods. My mother needs them because if there are no gods, then there is no Eternal Kingdom and that makes the Sin Eater nothing more than a prop for mourning. The queen needs them because the fear of death is what makes people obedient, and kind, and good, and sorry.”
  • Twylla’s guard tells her that, “I don’t believe there are any [Gods] at all, but I believe there are men and woman whose lives are made easier by believing someone is watching over them.”

Blood Red Road

The Dust Lands are a post-apocalyptic world where written language has been forgotten, civilization has collapsed, and the strong rule through fear. Saba has grown up in a shack in the middle of nowhere with her twin brother, her sister, and her father. She rarely sees other people and has never been to a town.

Then Tonton soldiers come. They kill her father and kidnap her brother. For the first time in her life, Saba can’t follow her brother’s lead. Now she must be the leader because her brother’s life depends on it. Saba leaves the only home she has ever known and sets off in search of her twin.

Adventure after adventure follows. Saba’s path is not a straight one, but she never gives up hope. She knows what she wants and will do anything to get it. Written in a regional dialect, this first-person narration shows Saba’s strong will and determination. Even when sold into slavery, Saba is never the victim. She is never weak and her spirit is never broken.

Blood Red Road is fast-paced and exciting. A large cast of characters adds to this richly developed world of droughts and ruin. What sets this novel apart is that Young effortlessly turns the traditional damsel-rescuer model on its head. Saba is a wonderful role model for teenage girls that proves girls can be strong heroes too. Because of the sexual content and the violence, Blood Red Road is best suited for high school readers.

Sexual Content

  • Jack gives Saba “a quick hard kiss” after she saves his life.
  • When Saba is sold to the Cage Master, he “licks my ear slowly.”
  • Jack comes to a river where Saba and Maev are bathing. “Jack nudges our pile of clothes with his foot. Grins. Well, ain’t this an innerestin sitchation? he says. Two girls naked in the water an me with all their clothes.”
  • After rescuing Saba from a river, Jack kisses her. She pushes him away. Later Saba thinks Jack is dead, so she gives him mouth to mouth. It turns out he was faking.
  • Saba finally gives in and kisses Jack back. “He pushes me aginst the wall. Then his mouth is on mine an he’s kissin me like he’s starvin or dyin of thirst or somethin. He kisses my lips, my face, my neck, then back to my lips agin. He lips is smooth. Warm. The smell of him fills me.”

Violence

  • Saba’s neighbor and father are shot and killed. “The man slides a bolt shooter from his robe . . . He pulls the trigger an shoots Procter. Hob rears in fright. Proctor slides off an lands in a heap on the ground. He don’t move. . . He raises his bolt shooter. He fires. Pa cries out. His arms fly up in the air . . . the bolt’s gone right through his heart.”
  • Saba slaps her nine year old sister. “She gasps an sobs an screams an screams an screams . . . So I slap her. An she stops.”
  • Rooster’s hands are covered with burn scars from a hot poker, given to him by his abusive wife.
  • Saba is sold and forced to become a cage fighter. When a fighter loses three times in a row, they must run the gauntlet. “He sprints up the center path. Hands reach out, hit him, grab at his tunic, trying to pull him down…the crowd surges forwards onto the path, howlin like wolves at a kill, an bodies close over him. Waves pullin down a drownin man. Artashir disappears.”
  • During a break-out of the slaved cage fighters, bombs and weapons are used. “She lights her bottle. We toss ’em down the stairs. Then we run like stink. Two seconds later, there’s a huge bang. The ground shakes unner our feet.”
  • A landboat crashes, killing all aboard. “Blood covers his face. His right leg splays out at a strange angle…I fit a arrow to my bow. Take aim. This is fer Emmi, I says. Then I shoot her (dead body) in the heart.”
  • A mass grave is dislodged during a downpour; Saba ends up in a river surrounded by the dead. “I look down. It’s a human leg bone. I gasp. All around me, the dead are risin. Another leg bone bobs to the muddy surface. Then a skull. An arm bone. They swing lazily. The current grabs ’em an carries ’em away.”
  • When traveling, Saba sees four hanged men on the side of the road. “That’s when we come upon the hanged men. Four of ’em. Danglin by their necks from nooses tied to the branches of a big, lightnin-black tree. They turn gentle in the breeze, their faces an hands gray where they bin covered with wet ash that’s dried.”
  • Saba and her companions fight hellwurms. “The hellwurm’s on top of him. It rears up to its full height. It lashes out, swipes at him. Jack’s thrown into the air, like Emmi’s peg doll.”
  • Epona is captured. In an act of mercy, Saba shoots and kills her. “Suddenly Epona spots me at the edge of the trees…I lift my bow. I take aim. Epona smiles. She nods…That’s when I shoot her.”
  • There’s a battle between Saba’s people and the King’s. “Pinch lunges at me. A arrow whistles through th’ air. Hits him in the chest. He screams . . . There’s blood gushin outta his neck. The bolt’s ripped through it.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • An addictive drug named chaal is very popular. It is chewed and makes the consumer relaxed. The King is basically a drug lord who rules via chaal production.
  • Saba and her sister’s food is drugged. “You put somethin in…the food…My hand drops down. My knees buckle unner me. I fall to the deck.”
  • Saba drinks too much grog and gets a hangover in the morning. “I cain’t move, I says. There’s somebody poundin on my brain with a hammer . . . you drank too much of Ike’s hooch.”
  • Jack offers Saba vodka when she has to have a wound stitched up. She refuses, and he drinks it instead.

Language

  • Profanity is used rarely in the story. However, the following words are used: bloody, holy crap, sonofabitch, bastard, gawdammit, and gawdsblood.
  • Damn, hell and ohmigawd are used many times.

Supernatural

  • Saba’s father is a star reader. He can see the future, and tries to bring rain (without success).
  • Saba has a pet crow, named Nero, who can understand people talk.
  • Saba is given a heartstone. “It stays cold until you get close to your heart’s desire. Then the stone becomes warm. The closer you get to your heart’s desire, the hotter the stone burns.”
  • The crazy king demands an eighteen-year-old boy born at midwinter be sacrificed by being burnt alive every six years. He believes when the “boy dies, that boy’s spirit, his strength moves into . . . the King. An his power’s renewed fer another six years.”

Spiritual Content

  • Saba discusses the afterlife with her brother. She thinks they’ll become stars. He thinks “you jest . . . stop. Yer heart don’t beat no more, you don’t breathe and then yer jest . . . gone.”

by Morgan Lynn

A Breath of Eyre

Going to an exclusive prep school isn’t a dream for Emma. Instead it’s a lonely existence. With no friends, a father who is distant, and a step-mom who thinks she needs therapy, Emma doesn’t think life can get worse. Emma escapes her dreary life by reading Jane Eyre and dreaming about her crush on her English teacher.

As her sophomore year begins, Emma gets a new roommate, Michelle, who offers friendship and relief from her loneliness. However, when Michelle is accused of setting a barn on fire, Emma must decide if the friendship is worth fighting for.

Then a bolt of lightning hits Emma and sends her into the nineteenth century and the body of Jane Eyre.  As a governess, Emma finds peace and soon finds herself attracted to Mr. Rochester. Soon, Emma isn’t sure if she wants to live in Jane’s world or her own.

A Breath of Eyre has Emma jumping for her prep school to the world of Jayne Erye. The premise behind the book is interesting and will keep the reader wondering what happens next. Although A Breath of Eyre referes the book Jane Eyre, it is not necessary to read it to understand A Breath of Eyre. However, the book may be more enjoyable to those who have read Jane Eyre.

Many of the events in the book are typical of a teen novel. Michelle goes to a prep-school and is an outcast because she is on scholarship. The prep-school girls are vicious, but the teachers are afraid to discipline them because their parents have money. There is also a love triangle.

Mont throws in an interesting twist when Michelle travels between worlds; however, the book still lacks loveable characters that draw a reader into the story. The reader will smile because of the sweet conclusion of the book, but getting there will take some effort.

Sexual Content

  • One of the girls at school talks about her father who was a rich man who “took a liking” to her mother. When the man’s wife found out, the girl’s mother was fired.
  • Emma is at a party when Gray tries to kiss her. “I’d always imagined my first kiss being in the middle of a meadow under starlight . . . Not standing drunk with Gray Newman at the side of a building.”
  • Emma thinks back to when Gray almost kissed her. “The heat from his body had felt like fire. His lips had been inches from mine.” She then thinks, “I would have given anything for him to try to kiss me now.”
  • Emma and Gray talk about the problem with dating someone and then being friends afterwards. Emma wonders if Gray has slept with another girl, and then she imagines him with another girl, “her head on his shoulder, his hands running through her hair, and thoughts of being ‘just friends’ a distant memory for both of them.”
  • When Emma and Gray dance she, “wanted to bury my head in the warm hollow of his neck.  His hands gripped my hips, while his lips grazed my hair . . . I was in intoxicated by the moment, by the promise of something I’d only imagined before.”
  • Gray tells Emma that he slept with a girl who he had been going out with for six months.
  • Emma and Gray are parked in a car when he pulls her towards him. “. . . I was straddled across his legs . . . His shirt was open a little . . . I slipped my hand inside and pressed my palm against his heart, where his pulse beat hard and steady against my fingertips . . . The kiss grew deeper, warmer and wetter and more intense until I wasn’t thinking about anything other than the kiss. Letting myself fall head first into the white-hot madness of it…Other parts of my body began to engage, and I was all heat and light, tugging at his shirt, digging into his back, burrowing myself into the hollow of his neck.”
  • Emma has a daydream where Gray is kissing her and “There is a moment of unbearable tension as we hover mere centimeters from each other—waiting, wanting—and then pure release as our lips collide, sending sparks of heat and light through every limb down to our fingers and toes.”
  • Emma and Gray kiss often throughout the book. The feelings of the kiss are described in detail.  One scene describes it as “blistering hot.”

Violence

  • A man is attacked by a woman. His arm was, “soaked in blood.” The man said, “She tried to suck my blood. She said she’d drain my heart.”
  • In a dream world, Emma’s mother throws herself off of a roof. “I watched as this dark-plumed thing descended, wings outstretched, then shielded my face to avoid seeing her smash against the stones.” The building is then engulfed in flames.
  • Emma’s father talks about when his wife, “came here to this beach and she walked right into the ocean with her nightgown on.” He then tells Emma about how her mother left a suicide note.
  • Gray talks about when he got into a fight and hit his friend in the face.
  • A girl’s mother, “slapped her hard and quick against the cheek.”
  • Gray tries to commit suicide. Emma saves him, but in the process almost drowns.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Emma asks her friend if he stopped lifeguarding because he’s been, “too busy doing keg stands and scoring with the fraternity chicks?”
  • Emma’s grandmother drinks old-fashions and doesn’t like it when her drinks get low.
  • Several of the girls smoke pot in the school’s barn.
  • Emma and Michelle go to a party and, “slurp wine coolers like they were Gatorade.” Other students were, “sniffing out alcohol and drugs.”
  • Emma tells Gray that she is not interested in him because he spends his free time with his “head in a beer bong.”
  • On the way to a dance, Michelle and her friends drink champagne out of the bottle. Michelle encourages the driver to drink because he has to drive, “less than half a mile.”
  • Gray tells Emma about when he went to a party with his best friend’s sister. They both had been drinking, and the girl decided to go skinny dipping. The girl went into the water and never came out. Her body was never found.
  • When Emma is upset, her grandmother gives her a sip of tea with liquor in it.

Language

  • Elise says, “The new girl must be lesbo, because she can’t stop staring at us.”
  • Hell, ass-hole, damn, hell, pissed off, and shit are used in conversation.
  • Two roommates tease each other about getting, “enough Johnson.”
  • Michelle says, ‘I need to get away from these Lockwood bitches.”
  • Emma thinks about going into the hallway but is afraid it is, “occupied by a pissed-off ghost.”
  • A teacher is discussing a book and tells the class, “every once in a while, nature has to kick our ass to show us who’s boss.”
  • Gray is upset that a teacher wiped a tear off of Emma’s face. “He’s a teacher for God’s sake.  What’s he doing touching you? If I was your father, I’d kick his ass.”
  • Michelle ask Emma, “Why are you being so nice to me? I’ve been such a bitch.”

Supernatural

  • After Emma is struck by lightning she becomes Jane Eyre and lives her life for a short period. Later in the book, when Emma is stuck in a burning barn, she again begins to live Jane Eyre’s life.
  • Emma’s grandmother said, “your mother called out to me the night she died. I don’t know how, but somehow, her voice reached me . . . that night I woke up with this panicked feeling, like someone had just taken out a giant chunk of my heart.”

Spiritual Content

  • Emma thinks about her body and lack of curves. She thinks, “Despite nightly pleas to a God I only half believed in, I remained a disappointing five foot three.”
  • One of the characters believes in Voodoo and tells Emma about papa Legba’s vẻvẻ, which is a symbol to attract spirits to earth. Emma has a necklace that looks like a vẻvẻ.
  • Emma uses an incantation and ask Papa Legba to. “open the door for me. Father Legba, open the door to let me pass through.” Emma then goes to a “dream” world where she meets her dead mother.
  • Emma’s friend tells Emma not to mess with voodoo. The friend says she doesn’t believe in it, “but it’s kind of like God. I don’t believe in him either, but he still scares me.”
  • Emma thinks, “I had not been raised in a religious household, although my father did believe in giving thanks and asking forgiveness. Now I said a simple prayer for help. I don’t know who it was intended for—was I praying to a great Christin God to send me a guardian angel?  Was I praying to Papa Legba to guide me back though the door between worlds? Or was I praying to the Universe to help me find the path of my own destiny. I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I just knew I couldn’t make it on my own.”

A Touch of Scarlet

Emma’s life is a mess. Her boyfriend Gray broke up with her. Her roommate, Michelle, isn’t talking to her. She is lonely and isolated at her exclusive prep school. Then things get even stranger when she goes into a trancelike state and enters the world of the novel The Scarlet Letter.

In a moment of weakness, Emma kisses her roommate’s boyfriend, which causes her classmates to exclude Emma even more. Emma wants to feel brave, but instead, she’s heartsick over her breakup with Gray, worried about her estranged relationship with Michelle, and wishing her life didn’t parallel The Scarlet Letter.

When Emma finds out that Michelle is gay, Emma tries to help Michelle come out into the open and stop hiding her secret. The second half of the story follows Michelle’s struggle with discrimination and fear.  However, as the story is told from Emma’s point of view, the reader doesn’t get to see Michelle’s emotions. Although it is clear that Emma cares for her roommate, the battle isn’t Emma’s so it lacks emotion and suspense.

A Touch of Scarlet’s best moments are when Emma goes into the world of Hester and The Scarlet Letter.  When Emma watches the plot of the book unfold, she learns that each situation can be viewed from different perspectives and that forgiveness and honesty are important in life.

The book delves into the voodoo religion, showing how to make a hex. Another troubling portion of the story is when Emma learns how to leave her body and travel to The Scarlet Letter’s world.

Emma is shown to be a troubled teen who is trying to deal with life’s complications. She makes mistakes but cares for her friends. Plus, whe does not have sex or do drugs. However, several of the characters are seen drunk, smoking marijuana, and having sex.

Sexual Content

  • Throughout the book Emma kisses three different boys.
  • Emma and Gray kiss many times throughout the book. In one scene Emma tells Gray that, “My dad worries you’re going to steal my virginal innocence.” Even though Emma considers having sex with Gray, she does not.
  • Emma and Gray make out. She describes the sensation of Gray touching her.  “My body lit up like a pinball machine. Before I knew it, I was lying on the ground, my dress hitched up around my waist, with Grey’s body shifting on top of mine . . . I tore at his shirt, trying to undo the buttons with cold, nervous fingers . . . A part of me wanted to go for it—to lose myself in the moment.”
  • Emma and her roommate, Michelle, talk about how Michelle cheated on her boyfriend.  Michelle says, “It was a little more than kissing . . . I had to tell someone. It’s been eating me up inside.”
  • After a breakup, Emma kisses her roommate’s boyfriend. “Then we were really kissing, his lips on my lips, his hand gripping the back of my neck.”
  • Michelle’s roommate struggles with the fact that she is gay, but she doesn’t want anyone to know about it.
  • One of the characters tells about when she accidently told her friends that her cousin was gay. “Chelsea got all weirded out and Amber flipped because apparently—news to me—she had hooked up with him a few times the summer before. So Amber starts telling me he’s going to hell . . . I feel like vomiting, partly from drinking too many margaritas and partly because I’ve just realized my friend are complete assholes.”

Violence

  • Emma thinks about her mother who killed herself by walking into the ocean. Emma has dreams where she sees her mother walking into the water and Emma tries to save her. “I plunged to the bottom, trying to dive under the tumult, but the waves kept careening over me.”
  • Emma travels to the world of the scarlet letter. Abigail sticks a large needed into her belly and then accuses Elizabeth of being a witch. Elizabeth is arrested when, “the constable finds a poppet with a needle in its belly and accuses Elizabeth of using it as a voodoo doll.”
  • While playing hockey, Emma purposely hits another girl with a hockey puck. “I watched in fascination as it sailed through the air, seeming to hover in slow motion right before it connected with Elise’s exquisite cheekbone.”
  • When Gray finds another boy at Emma’s house. Gray wants to, “smash his face in.” Emma tells him, “You should be thanking him, not trying to smash him to a bloody pulp like some macho dickhead.”
  • In her dream world, Emma is chased by a mob of women who fling mud at her. “Fear and adrenaline surged through me as I ran through the forest, hearing their haunting voices behind me and feeling the pelts of mud at my back.”
  • Emma and Flynn kiss. “His mouth tasted earthy and sweet, like smoke and sage. And then I surrendered to the kiss, allowing him to draw me in, one hand on the back of my neck, the other making its way down my waist.”
  • In her dream world, someone tries to burry Emma alive and turn her into a zombie. “After he poured the last of the dirt on me, he reached in his basket and pulled out one last red rose, which turned black in his hands. He threw it onto my makeshift grave and laughed, ‘this is your fate.”
  • In biology, the class must dissect a cat. Michelle deskins the cat. One of the lab partners tells Michelle not to cut too close to the cat’s tail. The girls laugh when Michelle says, “I wouldn’t touch this cat’s anus with a ten-foot pole.”
  • At the end of the book, the girls find out that their male headmaster had an “inappropriate relationship” with a student when the headmaster worked at an all-male school.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • When Emma gets back to school she thinks, “Lockwood girls didn’t like their parents sticking around any longer than necessary, anxious to break out the booze for the first-night celebrations.”
  • Emma pulls out her cell phone, “looking down at it like a drug addict staring at a fix.”
  • Flynn drinks often, as well as smokes a joint, which is passed around between several others.
  • Flynn’s “father is an asshole and his mother is knocked out on prescription drugs half the time.”
  • Throughout the book, several characters drink as well as talk about things that happened when they were drunk.
  • Emma’s grandmother drinks often. Once the grandmother is admonished, “You’ve had enough whiskey for three people.”

Language

  • A boy asks someone, “When are you two lovebirds going to get off your asses and join us on stage?”
  • After the school finds out the Emma kissed her roommate’s boyfriend she is called a “bitch” and a “slut.” Emma says she is “sick of the slut-shaming.”
  • Emma’s friend is called a “dyke” several times in the story.
  • “Oh my god” and variations of “asshole” are used often.
  • When someone sees Emma and Flynn kissing, he says, “what the hell, man?” Flynn replies, “I’m such a fuck-up.”

Supernatural

  • A major part of the plot is that while running, Emma goes into a trance like state and enters the world of the book The Scarlet letter. After the first time Emma enters the world of The Scarlet Letter, she wonders who she saw. “Ghost lingering in a parallel universe, caught between my world and their own?”
  • Emma is told that she must be careful in her dream world because, “a voodoo priest can put people into trancelike states, and then bury them alive . . . they steak their ti-bone-ange (soul) thus depriving them of free will and conscience. That’s how zombies are created.”
  • Emma learns a “black magic” spell to remove a person “from your path.” Later in the story, Emma and her friends cast the spell. Emma is told, “a hex is just a formal way of putting a wish into the universe.”
  • At a slumber party, the girls play Bloody Mary.  Emma is freaked out when she sees, “Gray’s face, flickering in the candlelight . . . Behind him was a find aura of red, almost like Hester’s ghost was standing behind him.”
  • Emma learns how to send her spirit into the dream world while her body stays in one place. “I imagined myself a dolphin, half of my mind shut down to let me rest; the other half active and alert. It was this second half I sent out wandering.”

Spiritual Content

  • Michelle says that God hates her because she doesn’t believe in God.
  • Michelle’s aunt is “part dream interpreter, part voodoo practitioner, and all around wise woman. She believed in the spirit world and claimed to communicate with the dead.”
  • Emma goes and stands in the same spot where she was hit by lightning. She wonders, “If God would be audacious enough to strike the same place, and person, twice.”
  • When Emma is having her dreams, she is told that, “The Haitian people believe you have two parts of your soul-le ti-bon-ange, or your little angel, and le gros-bon-ange, your big angel. Now the little angel is like your shadow soul.  It’s only visible in dreams or visions, and helps you communicate with the spirits or the loa, kind of like your conscience. But the big angel is your fate soul, the one that determines your destiny or prophesizes your future.”
  • Emma goes to Easter service. “I hadn’t been to church since Christmas, and I felt a little guilty about it. It wasn’t’ that I didn’t believe in God, more than I questioned what kind of God he was.  Anyone who’s lost a parent must go through this crisis of faith, asking, How could a merciful God take my mother away?”
  • Emma thinks, “Michelle claimed to be an atheist, with science her only religion. She often scoffed at Darlene’s voodoo beliefs, but deep down, I think Michelle had some faith of her own, even if it didn’t conform to any church or institutions view of the cosmos.”

We Are All Made Of Molecules

Stewart always wanted a sister. However, he never imagined that it would take his mother’s death, and his father moving in with his girlfriend before he got his wish. Plus Ashley isn’t anything close to being the sister of his dreams. She’s one year older than Stewart, and they have nothing in common.

Ashley is a typical mean girl whose only concern is staying at the top of the social ladder. So when her father announces that he is moving out because he is gay, Ashley fears that if any of her friends find out about her father’s gayness, it will ruin her social standing. Then when her mother’s boyfriend and son move in, Ashley’s anger ramps up even more. After all, Stewart is a total nerd.

We are all made of molecules is told from the points of view of Stewart and Ashley, who are both loveable in their own way. Stewart is a logical nerd who just wants to fit in. Ashley is a self-centered, angry teen who is trying to deal with the upheaval in her life. Having the story told by both Stewart and Ashley gives the book an interesting twist, because not only can the reader see each character’s thoughts and feelings, but the reader also sees how the two view each other.

Through Ashely’s experiences, the reader learns about the danger of drinking as well as the sexual dangers girls may face. In the end, Ashley realizes that outward appearances are not as important as she thought, and that nerdy Stewart may just know a thing or two about friendship.

We are all made of molecules is an easy-to-read, fun story that explores the messy relationships of parents. Ashley’s father reveals that he is gay, and his gay boyfriend appears. Ashley’s mother has her boyfriend and son move in. In the story, the group of five is shown becoming a unique family unit.

Sexual Content

  • A subplot of the story is about Ashley’s divorced father, Phil, who has revealed that he is gay. In one scene, Phil tells Stewart, “I didn’t decide to be gay. It’s not something you choose.” They then discuss why Phil married Ashley’s mother and didn’t tell people he was gay until two years ago. Phil says, “I didn’t want to be gay. I grew up in a very conservative and strict religious family . . . I made myself believe I was straight.”
  • Ashley sees her father kiss another man.
  • In the locker room, Stewart, “sat quietly on one of the benches and tried not to stare, but it was impossible not to notice that almost every single guy in my class was well into puberty. They had hair in all the right places, and their you-know-whats actually dangled. . . Mine does not dangle. Mine is more like a protruding belly button.”
  • Ashley watches an episode on TV about a guy that found out that, “he wasn’t the father of his girlfriend’s baby, and that the real father was the guy’s own brother.”
  • Jared says to Stewart, “You have the hots for your stepsister, don’t you? Gross, Stewie, that’s verging on incest.”
  • Ashley goes to Jared’s house and while there he pushed her onto the bed and tried to take her shirt off. “I grabbed his hands, but he kept yanking . . . I tried to move, but he pinned my arms down. When I looked at his face, it was as if he’d gone somewhere else. It was like I wasn’t even there . . .He was pulling at my shirt and my skirt at the same time.” Then the housekeeper comes in and Ashley leaves.
  • At a party, Ashley is passed out on her bed. After Jared and his friend make sure Ashely was completely out of it, Jared pulls up her shirt and takes a picture of her in her bra. Jared then pulls up her skirt and takes a picture of her underwear.” Then Stewart shows up and runs off with Jared’s phone and calls the police.
  • When some of the students at school find out that Ashely’s father is gay, one of the characters says, “I think it’s so cool that your dad is gay. It’s so . . . twenty-first century. Very cutting-edge. Ashley is then invited to the LGBT club. Ashley says, “But I’m not gay. Or lesbian, or bi, or transatlantic.”

Violence

  • Stewart tries to hide in the locker room because he doesn’t want to take a shower with the other boys. When Jared notices him, he “grabbed my gym shorts and yanked them down around my ankles . . .Then suddenly he grabbed hold of my boxers and I realized with sphincter-tightening horror that he was about to pull them down.” Then the teacher walks in and Jared leaves.
  • When Jared sees Stewart in the locker room, he again tries to pull his pants down. Stewart was prepared and wearing a wrestling uniform. Then Jared, “Yanked my T-shirt up and over my head. I couldn’t see a thing. I felt his hand grab one of the straps of my wrestling uniform and pull it down . . .” Before Jared can get the uniform off Stewart, Steward reveals that he is Ashley’s brother and Jared stops.
  • Stewart is wearing the school bulldog mascot costume and scares Ashley. “She started pummeling me . . . She started kicking me. I tried to shout, but my voice was muffled, and her screams drowned me out.”
  • Jared was kicked out of a private school. He said he, “dealt with someone who needed dealing with. Guy was a colossal turd, and everyone knew it.” Later in the story, it is revealed that in the locker room, Jared beat up the guy because he was gay. “Then I saw him looking at my junk after our final game, so I punched him . . . stupid faggot.”
  • Jared said that Ashley was a, “total tease. All she’s let me do is squeeze her tits a few times. Outside her clothes . . . I’ll break that bitch down.”
  • Stewart remembers a time when a little boy was throwing rocks at him. The little boy’s mom and Stewart’s mom got into an argument. “That’s when my mom picked up a stone and threw it at [the kid]. Not hard, but still; I couldn’t believe my eyes . . . Then she threw a second stone.”
  • Stewart is dressed up as the school mascot when Jared comes up to him and talks badly about Ashley. When Jared walks onto the basketball court, Steward, “was working on pure fury when I ran onto the court and plowed my dog-head into Jared’s stomach . . . I ran behind him and pulled his gym shorts, along with his underwear, down to his ankles.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Jared invites Ashely over to his house. Jared drinks a beer and Ashley has a wine spritzer.
  • Ashley has a party. Some of Jared’s friends show up. “They were carrying bottles of vodka and rum and stuff, probably stolen from their parents’ liquor cabinets.”

Language

  • One of the characters describes her family as FUBER. Then she explains the term is a military term that means, “’Effed Up Beyond All Recognition,’ but in the military, they don’t say ‘effed.’”
  • Ashley called a girl’s mother a “skank.”
  • When her mother’s boyfriend compliments the pasta, Ashley thinks, “which was a total butt-kiss because the pasta was just so-so.”
  • Ashley describes her mom’s boyfriend as having, “MPAL (Male Pattern Ass Loss, a tragic and devastating syndrome in aging men.”
  • When Ashley finds out Stewart is in the same English class as her, she thinks, “OH MY GOD . . . This cannot be happening.”
  • Ashley said she had a “crappy day.” She also tells her friend that a pair of jeans makes her “ass look fat.”
  • Profanity is not used frequently, but it is scattered throughout the book. The profanity includes: hell, ass, bitch, pissed, slut, faggot, shit.

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • Stewart thinks about his dead mother. “Even though the scientific part of my brain tells me she probably isn’t looking down on me from heaven, and that all that is left of her is random molecules, I feel a deep need to do this for her.”

Expelled

Theo Foster’s secret Twitter account just went viral. Now he and three other teens are expelled and Theo is determined to find out who is guilty and who is innocent.

Theo forms an unlikely allegiance with the three others who have been expelled. There is Sasha, the girl he’s been secretly crushing on, Jude, the school mascot and Theo’s best friend, and lastly Parker, the quarterback. Everyone seems to have a secret that they want to hide. Can Theo discover the truth? And will the truth bring these unlikely teens together?

James Paterson creates a first-person narrative that makes the reader fall in love with Theo and his unlikely friends. Although Theo is all about saving himself, he is completely relatable and loveable. The characters in Expelled jump off the page with humor, anger, and an array of teen emotions.

Expelled explores several deep issues include steroid use and incest without going into graphic detail. In the end, the reader will learn that other people’s lives are not as perfect as we imagine them to be.  Despite the engaging story, there are several drawbacks to Expelled. There is frequent and creative use of profanity as well as sexually crude remarks. Because of this, Expelled should be enjoyed by older readers.

Sexual Content

  • Someone posted a picture on social media. The picture was of the quarterback, “drunk and shirtless . . . He’s got a bottle of Jack Daniels in his right hand and the bare breasts of an unidentified female in very close proximity to his left.”
  • Jude is a “sixteen-year-old-bisexual virgin in a Hello Kitty T-shirt.” He is bullied even though his school has a Gay-Straight Alliance club and “the rainbow flag over the counselor’s office.”
  • Parker’s friend has a dog that humps a pink pig stuffed animal. “He’s always horny in the morning,” Jude says. “Also, he and Sex Pig are in love.”
  • Jude wants to go to art school. When talking about it, he tells Parker, “RISD’s school mascot is a giant penis named Scrotie.”
  • Parker asks a computer nerd if his porn isn’t downloading fast enough.
  • When Parker is looking at Sasha’s ears, he has, “an almost overwhelming desire to kiss them.”
  • Sasha said that she has a “dick pic” that the quarterback sent her.
  • Parker kisses Sasha. “Sasha’s mouth is soft and warm, and it opens to mine. I’m going to die of how good this feels. I let go of her with one hand, and twist my fingers into her dark hair, hot and silky in the sun.”
  • Sasha tells Parker that her dad molests her. “. . .he pressed me up against the refrigerator and he kissed me. . .” When her father tries to convince Sasha that incest is okay, he said, “Greek nobles used to kidnap young boys, take them into the forest, and rape them, and no one had any problem with that.”

Violence

  • Parker thinks about someone who killed themselves from jumping off a water tower. “. . . I can’t help wondering how he did it. How he coaxed himself to the edge and then leapt into the air.”
  • Parker’s father committed suicide because he had ALS. Parker thinks of finding the body. “There was still the blood. The gun. The shattered back window of the car.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Someone dressed as the school mascot. When trying to find out who it was, the quarterback said, “I was so drunk it could have been Tinkerbell under that head.” Later the quarterback tells Parker, “I was torn up that night, bro. I did six Jager shots and woke up under the bleachers.”
  • The Shell station is where “you can shoulder-tap for beer if your fake ID sucks.” However, Parker has never tried to use his fake ID.
  • Sasha’s dad is seen drinking whiskey and often seems drunk.
  • Parker has a secret social media account where he likes to post “harmless gossip.” In one post he said someone was, “drunk enough last weekend to introduce self to own dad.”
  • When talking about the picture, Parker asks his friend if he knows who was wearing the mascot head, “and then whoever that was go so wasted he whipped his dick out in front of an iPhone.”
  • Feeling sorry for himself, Parker drinks half a bottle of Knob Creek whiskey.
  • Parker talks about how fishing usually involves beer because all you do is sit and wait for a fish to bite the bait.
  • A computer smart boy tells Parker, that if he wanted to he could, “have six pounds of heroin sent to his mother at her office.” The boy then admits it would be “tricky.”
  • Parker goes to a baseball game and one of his friends is drinking a Michelob Ultra “she bummed off a guy coming out of the 7-Eleven.” Her water bottle is also filled with vodka.
  • Sasha said her mom was into the art scene and would go to, “really fancy restaurants and snort lines off the porcelain in the ladies’ room.”
  • Parker throws a prom for those who are expelled from school. The kids that attend drink. Someone brings a keg to the party. One boy brings a case of Tecate.
  • The quarterback reveals that the coach has been giving steroids to the players. “They shot me full of chemicals like I was a prize-winning steer!” He takes his jeans down, “so I can see half of his left ass cheek, where the skin is puckered and red—a big, angry scar.”

Language

  • Profanity is used often throughout the book. The profanity includes ass, bitch, dick, fuck, goddamn, hell, piss, pussies, shit, and wiseass.
  • Parker thinks waking his friend up early was a “dick move.” He often thinks of other people as a “dick.”
  • Sasha said, “Oh, my God I don’t know why I called you a nerd.”
  • Several times Parker uses Jesus as an exclamation. For example, he said, “Jesus, you scared me!”
  • While at an expulsion hearing, the narrator thinks, “I’ve heard that some kids show up to expulsion hearings with lawyers. Probably, at the very least, they bring a pissed-off parent or two.”
  • Parker is upset that people think he posted the picture, and he would like to “kick the ass of whoever’s trying to make me take the fall for it.” Later he yells that he will “tell my side of the story. And I will make my own goddamn ending!”
  • When Parker starts asking questions about the picture, someone jokes that “Those are my tits in the picture.”
  • Parker’s mom leaves him a note not to eat all the ice cream “or there’ll be hell to pay.”
  • Parker sees graffiti that reads, “fuck school.”
  • When leaving, someone says, “later bitches.”
  • Parker thinks to himself that he is an “asshat.”
  • Parker yells at the quarterback, “You were too much of a pussy to admit you hated it (football).”
  • When Parker tells Mr. Palmieri, the school administrator, about the steroid, Mr. Palmieri says, “God fucking damn it.”

Spiritual Content

  • When talking to his mom, Parker asks her “if she felt hypocritical, seeing as how she’d been a socialist atheist at UCLA.”
  • Sasha, an atheist, tells Parker that, “my grandma used to make prayer shawls . . . with each stitch, she’d say a little prayer for the person she was making it for.”

Nemesis

The Anvil, an enormous asteroid, threatens the earth is about to devastate the world. But Min has bigger problems. Min has died – again. Every two years since she was eight, a man in a suit finds her and kills her. Where ever she hides, he finds her. After her death, she always wakes up in the same clearing in the forest outside her small Idaho town. When she returns from her disappearances, no one believes her story and there is no evidence. This year when Min is murdered, she goes on a mission to discover why.

Terrifying dreams of death haunt Noah. Anxiety is his only true friend. Noah tries to hide that he is different by blending in, going along with what others say. When Noah discovers that he has been lied to and his dreams were in fact reality, he vows to be brave and search for the truth.

When the military arrives just out of town, Min and her best friend Tack make an uneasy alliance with Noah. Although they do not fully trust each other, they are determined to find out what has been happening to them. They go on a search to discover the answers to the questions that plague them.

Told from both Min’s and Noah’s perspectives, Nemesis starts with a suspenseful story of Min being murdered and coming back to life. The reader is instantly drawn into Min’s mystery. With detailed descriptions of events, the reader can step into Min’s shoes and understand her feelings. Suspense will grip the reader, who will be surprised by the events in the story.

Nemesis brings the stereotypical high school to life, with the typical cliché groups. The language in the book is a bit over the top, with most of the characters constantly spouting a plethora of cuss words. The ending of the book is similar to Lord of the Flies and just as violent. In the end, a computer simulation talks about saving humanity, but the majority of the characters are so unlikeable the reader wonders if humanity should be saved at all.

Sexual Content

  • While with a boy Min imagines, “leaning forward and kissing him.”
  • Min and Noah kiss several times. They fall asleep on a couch and wake up next to each other. Noah, “buried my face in her neck. Our lips met again, and for a while all other thoughts fled.”

Violence

  • Two boys fight at school. Ethan slugged “Tack full in the face. . . Tack dropped to the ground like a boneless chicken breast.”
  • Min and Tack put an oily rag into a Jeep’s gas tank and then set it on fire.
  • Several natural disasters happen throughout the world during a short time period. The events are described on the news.
  • In order to save a boy’s life, the sheriff kills a soldier. “He was lying face down on the ground, a dark puddle spreading beneath him.” As the kids run, shots ring out and they know the sheriff had been shot.
  • A group of men blows up a bridge. When they attempt to surrender, soldiers shoot them. “A line of bullets tore through the liberty men, cutting them in half. They feel in a bloody mass, each body pierced a dozen times.”
  • Tack kicks a soldier “in the crotch. The man dropped, writhing in pain.” The guards wrestle Tack to the ground. “Tack bucking and snarling like a wild animal until one of them struck him on the head with a rifle butt.”
  • Soldiers are rounding up a group of teenagers. Some of the teens resist and there is a scuffle. One of the parents tries to fight the soldiers and they shoot him. “Wendell dropped to his knees, then toppled forward and lay still.”
  • The military sprays a group of teens with a “thin green mist.” The reaction of the teens as they die is mixed. “Classmates writhed on the ground, tears and mucus coating their faces. The agony was unbearable—a burning, stinging horror that tore at the skin.” One of the commanders watching shots himself in the head.
  • When Tack confronts the leader and won’t follow orders, he is stabbed in the heart. Another boy who confronts the leader is killed. “Toby strode to where Benny knelt. Shaking his head, he put a gun to Benny’s temple and pulled the trigger. . . Benny slumped to the ground, a red mess where is head had been . . . Tucker stared at the fistful of hair still clutched in his fingers, then dropped it as if burned.”
  • In order to break Min out of jail, Noah attacks the guard. “Noah kicked him in the face, snapping his head back. Toby crumpled against the wall and lay still.”
  • Hector kills himself by jumping into a canyon. Hector believed he was already dead and was in purgatory.
  • When Min is eight she is murdered. She wanders off with a man, who she thinks is her mom’s friend, and he pushes her into a ravine.
  • A man murders Min multiple times throughout the book. When she is shot, she “tumbled to the floor, struggling to breathe, blood bubbling on my lips as I stared up at the drab fluorescent lights on the ceiling. Pain tingled everything red. . . Liquid was filling my mouth, hot and wet. The hole in my chest burned like a sliver of the sun.”
  • One time when Min was killed, she is chased through the woods. She falls and is barely hanging on the side of a cliff. “A shiny black boot smashed down on my fingers. I gasp in pain as my left hand loses its grip. I swing wildly, on the verge of plummeting to the white water belong. . . A foot stomps on my right hand. Snapping bones. A rush of air. Then I’m underwater, tumbling and spinning. Liquid fills my nose. My mouth. My ears. Something slams into my side, and ropes of agony shoot down my left arm. . . Pain explodes at my temple. I see and feel nothing more.”
  • Another time Min is killed when a man hits her with a car.
  • As Min tries to flee her killer, he finds her on the side of a cliff. He throws rocks at her until she plummets “to the boulders below. I land on my back and something snaps.” He then smashes her with a large stone.
  • Noah is murdered when a man stabs him. “The A spike on agony . . . blood pumps onto the pavement. Slides down the hill. Cold. Blackness. Nothing.”
  • Noah is murdered when a man cracks his skull.  “My head caved in! But I didn’t’ die right away. I struggled, by my arms wouldn’t move. Then he hit me again!”
  • When Noah is in the bathtub, the man puts a black metal rod into the water and electrocutes him.
  • Noah is on the lake in a skiff when a boat hits him. Noah tries to swim but his left leg is missing and he drowns.
  • Noah shoots Min. “There was a smoking hole in my chest. . . Tack was screaming, his clothes spattered in red.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Drinking is mentioned several times, although none of the teens are seen consuming alcohol. One character said the guys would get “Neanderthal drunk.”  Another time, Min talks about someone who, “spends most nights outside by his fire pit, drunk off his ass.”
  • Several of the adults drink alcohol, which is revealed in the descriptions. “Mom had put away the photo albums and washed her scotch glass . . . She rarely drinks, and never more than one. But she’d refilled her glass several times . . . “ ”
  • A character has to step over two adults who drunk themselves into a stupor and then fell asleep by their fire pit.
  • After getting in a fight, tack takes Advil.
  • Tack’s father is a drunk who hits his son.
  • Noah’s father is absent for the entire story. Noah thinks his father is, “busy getting loaded in another hemisphere.” Later in the story, Noah tells his psychiatrist that his dad drank a lot after he divorced his wife.
  • A psychiatrist gives two of the characters “little blue pills” to take daily. Neither character is sure what the pills are for, but when Noah is anxious he, “wanted a blue pill in the worst way.”
  • One of the characters takes his friend’s ADHD medication.

Language

  • Holy crap, crap, damn, ass, hell, prick, jackass, bastard, goddamn, piss
  • When a min shoots Min, she “carefully extended my middle finger” and told him to “go to hell.”
  • When thinking about the man who keeps killing her, Min thinks, “Wouldn’t let the evil bastard’s shadow every moment of my life.”
  • When describing a boy, Min thinks his face, “was gorgeous until you realized what a prick he was.”
  • Tack calls other people names including, “jackass, asshole, douchebag.” He tells one boy, “everyone here thinks you’re dumber than crap, I’m the only one willing to say it. None of these people like you, Ethan. You’re a loser and a fraud, just a redneck piece of trash like me. Kill yourself.”
  • Noah said his dad was a “drunk a-hole.”
  • One of the characters thinks, “Why am I so worthless? God, I hate myself.”
  • A parent spits at a soldier and tells him, “Piss on you and your threats. I know my rights, sunshine soldier.”
  • Someone accuses Noah of hiding behind a “skank’s skirt.”
  • When Min finds the man who has been murdering her, she calls him a “bastard,” and a “son of a bitch.”

Supernatural

  • When the world was destroyed, everyone died. “Though your bodies died, the program successfully preserved sixty-four electro-chemical blueprints. These were uploaded into the mainframe on Day Minus-Four after final measurements were taken. You now exist as autonomous lines of code within the MegaCom master program . . . You still must eat and drink. You must shelter from weather, and avoid hazards. You can be injured. You can be killed”

Spiritual Content

  • When the news is announced that the Earth will not be smashed by an asteroid, Melinda’s mom said “Praise God. . . God is good. Everything is going to be okay.”
  • When the natural disasters begin, Min’s Mom mumbled about “God’s judgement.”
  • Hector, a minor character, is the leader of the youth group. When the students are gassed and come back to life, he thinks he is in purgatory. He explains that purgatory is, “a holding place. Somewhere you’re judged. And tested.” After he jumps off a canyon wall, dies, and comes back to life, Hector said, “God isn’t down with me. It was stupid for me to think I was in control. I won’t defy him again.”

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

In a book that takes place in the time span of about a day, Hadley Sullivan misses her flight at the airport in a matter of minutes. Those minutes will change her life as she is forced to take the next flight, and meets Oliver, a tall and handsome boy from England. They instantly connect at the airport and on the plane, but after the flight, Hadley is left wondering if that is the end of their journey, or if fate will bring them together again.

Hadley is on her way to her father’s wedding, where he is marrying a woman she has never met, an English lady, who her father fell in love with while he was teaching at Oxford. Still upset by her parent’s divorce, and coming to terms with her father’s marriage, Hadley must battle with the mixed feelings she has for her father as she grabs the next flight to London.

Hadley is a very relatable character and her interactions with Oliver are sweet. The novel is overall fun and light, even though it touches on some heavy content with both Hadley and Oliver’s fathers. Hadley’s story is fun, fast, and touching. The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight is a cute love story that navigates the emotions of a young teenage girl dealing with a broken home.

 Sexual Content

  • Hadley mentions that she is a part of an e-mail chain, where one of the things Charlotte and her bridesmaids talks about are, “lingerie preferences.”
  • Hadley and Oliver almost kiss, causing Hadley’s heart to skip around and the feeling of a “bolt of electricity” when their hands brush, but they get interrupted.
  • Hadley and Oliver kiss in the airport before they leave, and Hadley describes Oliver’s lips as, “soft and taste salty from the pretzel they shared.”
  • When she meets Oliver at the funeral home, they share an urgent and desperate kiss.
  • Oliver tells Hadley that his father has had multiple affairs.

 Violence

  • None

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

by Rebecca Mondon

Raging Star

DeMalo has established his borders. New Haven is expanding and its subjects appear to be thriving. At a quick glance, this land is exactly the paradise DeMalo proclaims it to be.

But at its border, a small token of resistance remains. Saba and her family have pledged themselves to destroy DeMalo and all he has built. But what can so few hope to accomplish against a united nation?

The final installment of Young’s trilogy focuses on the struggle taking place within Saba. Every time she attempts to leave the Angel of Death behind and find a non-violent solution to the rebel’s problems, a crisis gets in the way. Her sister is growing up and discovering new talents, DeMalo wants Saba for his wife, and there is a traitor among her small group of trusted friends. The path Saba takes is filled with surprising twists, and the suspense continues to grow in this gripping tale.

 Sexual Content

  • DeMalo asks Saba if she’s pregnant.
  • Saba starts kissing Jack and undressing him. “I kiss him . . . He ain’t kissin me back. He ain’t touchin me. He jest stands, not movin. His shirt hangs open. Did I do that? I don’t recall. I press closer, ever closer. My fevered hands roam him. Reckless. Hell-bent. Uh-uh. He grabs ’em. Firmly. Stop right there, he says.”
  • Saba makes out with Jack. “Our kisses grow hungry. Our bodies heat . . . I push him off, sit up an start puttin my cloths to rights. He’s made a heroic effort to undress me.”
  • An unnamed character has intercourse with Molly so he can learn, “how to please a woman. Yer teachin me. That’s all this is.”
  • Saba sleeps with Jack. “We’re skin to skin. Breath to breath. There’s now. There’s here. There’s him an”
  • Saba agrees to marry DeMalo if he gives her friends and family safe passage. When Jack finds out, he and Saba fight. “What deal did you make? To marry him, I says. His eyes harden to ice. You bought our freedom in his bed.”
  • Saba has a miscarriage. “You miscarried, lady . . . if often happens with the first one. Sometimes you don’t even know you’re pregnant.” Saba’s not sure who the father was as she slept with both DeMalo and Jack.

Violence

  • Saba and the rebels set out to blow up a bridge. At the last minute, a group of Tonton and slaves cross the bridge and get blown up with it. “Gone. The three Tonton. All gone. The Stewards in their cart. The blameless beasts. Animals an people, now bloody lumps of flesh. Flung like so much bad meat.”
  • Mercy has scars on her back. “I’ll survive, she says. I’ve had worse. Thin white lines, the scars of a whip, criss-cross her sun-tough skin.”
  • Mercy slaps Creed. “Marry me, he says. She slaps him hard. Almost slaps his head off. Everybody turns at the sound. The angry crack of skin on skin.”
  • In New Eden, weak newborn babies are left outside overnight. If they survive, they are given a second chance to live.
  • Someone nails a dead crow to a tree, hoping Saba will think it is her pet Nero and get frightened. “There’s a crow spiked to the trunk. Jest above head height. Wings spread wide. Dead. Nero.”
  • Emmi is shot. “We’re runnin an pullin her along by her hands. Lugh one side, me the other. There’s a crack. I feel the shot hit her. The blast throws her forward. I hold tight to her hand. She goes limp between us.”
  • Lugh is shot. “What’ve you done? I shout at Lugh. He’s on his feet, lookin dazed. A gun thuds. a bolt slams him in the back. No! I scream as his arms fly up as he twists an falls to my arms. Then we tip we topple out of the window down to the river below.”
  • Saba kills DeMalo. “DeMalo’s knife slashes my arm . . . I seize the crystal rock. I raise it high. I smash DeMalo in the head…My fingers wet with his blood. His head’s crushed. A mess of hair, blood an”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Saba is given a sleeping potion. “From a tiny stone bottle she tipped the merest, barest blink of a teardrop . . . Molly weakened it three times in water. Saba drained the cup, then lay down. Short minutes later she was out.”

Language

  • Profanity is used throughout the book. The profanity used includes: Gawd, bullshit, bullshitter, fergawdsake, dammit, ass, sonofabitch, ohmigawd, damn, and hell.
  • Gawdamn and gawdamnmit are said many times throughout the story.
  • Saba has a chance to shoot DeMalo, but “I cain’t. I cain’t do it. Slowly I lower my bow. I says, Gawdamnn you sonofabitch.”

Supernatural

  • Emmi starts to hear earth songs, a sign that she can become a shaman. “They’d wakened her at dawn yesterday. The earth songs…the songs leading her, telling her, teaching her. Not songs with words. No. No words. Dreams.”
  • DeMalo claims to have visions of what the earth looked like before the apocalypse.
  • Saba has a heartstone. It gets hot as a way of leading a person to their heart’s desire.

Spiritual Content

  • Saba wonders if it is ever right to kill. “I killed some people. Not becuz I wanted to, I had to. It was kill or be killed. Is that wrong? . . . That’s a big question, says Mercy. Is it ever right to kill another person?”

by Morgan Lynn

Rebel Heart

Saba killed the King, but she didn’t destroy the empire. DeMalo, the King’s second in command, has taken control. He has plans to create a new empire and prove himself a much tougher opponent than his predecessor.

All Saba wants to do is join up with Jack at the ocean and live the rest of her life in peace. But the world has other plans. Rumors that Jack joined the Tonton sends Saba on a journey to find him. Only Saba believes in Jack’s innocence; those she travels with doubt his intentions and are ready to kill him if need be.

Swept into the heart of DeMalo’s new empire, Saba reluctantly joins rebels who are determined to destroy everything DeMalo has created. This sequel to Blood Red Road is not as fast-paced as the first, but the world DeMalo is trying to build is both interesting and alluring. The author makes Saba’s decision between joining DeMalo and fighting him a difficult one. While his methods may be harsh, the picture he draws of the future is beautiful. It’s the age-old question: does the end justify the means? A gripping story, the Dust Lands series has enough violence and sexual content to exclude younger readers.

Sexual Content

  • Saba sees her brother go off with a prostitute after a party. “His hands circle her ankles, smooth her bare legs with restless intent. She jumps down. She takes him by the hand. She leads him off into the night.”
  • Slim tells Lugh to, “get on with it. Life’s too short. Take her off in the bushes, my friend, an make her yer own. If you don’t, somebody else will. Hell, I might jest make a play fer her myself.”
  • Tommo kisses Saba. She stops him.
  • Saba makes out with DeMalo, then sleeps with him. “I’ve climbed on to his lap an I’m runnin my hands through his hair, over his shoulders an arms, while we kiss . . . he drags his lips along the inside of my arm, wrist to elbow. Trailin shivery fire on my tender skin till I’m quiverin head to foot. A rush in my belly, hot an ancient . . . I lead him to the bed. We lie down together.”
  • Molly sees a hickey on Saba’s neck.
  • Saba kisses Tommo to get him to trust her.
  • Saba kisses Jack when she finally finds him. “He takes my face in his hands an kisses me, over an over an over agin. My lips an my cheeks an my eyes an my lips, oh my lips. An I kiss him back. My whole body’s shaking. On fire. He’s shakin too.”

Violence

  • Subjects of New Haven are branded on the forehead depending on their status.
  • A family is displaced. The parents and son are shot, the daughter shoots herself rather than be taken. One of the soldiers is also shot for disobeying orders.
  • Saba is attacked by wolves. Her friend’s wolfdog saves her by ripping the other wolves’ throats out. Saba is knocked unconscious during this; she only sees the dead wolves afterward. “They lie in pools of their own blood. Both got their throats ripped out . . . The air hums with a hungry buzz. Flies. Hunnerds of ’em. Thousands of ’em. The open wounds, the half-dried lakes of sticky blood.”
  • In a fit of rage, Saba attacks her brother. “I leap at Lugh. I knock him backwards. We roll on the ground. I punch, I kick, I claw . . . my hands is tight around Lugh’s throat. My thumbs pressin on his windpipe.”
  • Saba discovers a temple of skeletons built by cannibals. The skeletons “sit close packed, side by side, on long wooden benches. They gleam whitely, dully, in the dim light.”
  • There is a pot cooking in the temple. “Somethin large bobs to the surface. It turns over…a face looks at me. A human face.” She flees, killing a priest on the way out. The cannibals give chase, and she shoots several of them with her arrows.
  • Saba and her friends hijack a man’s wagon. They force him to drive it by threatening to shoot him. “Gawdamn sonofabitch, I mutter . . . I walk fast, loadin by bow, aimin it straight at his face. He throws his hands up.”
  • Twice while on the road, Saba and her friends are spotted. They kill the people to keep their presence in New Haven quiet. “He shoots her head. An it’s silent. Jest like that.”
  • While on the road Saba sees a dead man who was lashed to a tree trunk. “A fat iron spike’s bin nailed through his throat. He ain’t bin here more’n a few days. He died hard. Hard an long.”
  • Saba jumps off a cliff. DeMalo pulls her out of the water and asks, “Were you trying to kill yourself?…[Saba] says naught.”
  • When attacked by Tonton, all the Tonton are killed. One of Saba’s allies is killed, possibly from friendly fire. “Both Tonton lie dead on the ground. Bram hangs halfways outta the driver’s seat, face down. He’s bin shot in the back.”
  • Maev gives herself up as a diversion so the others can escape. She fights for as long as she can, then blows herself up. When Saba tells Maev goodbye, “I kiss her lips. Don’t let ’em take you, I whisper . . . An as I soar through the darkness, high above the lake, Maev starts to shoot . . . the sound of gunfire goes on fer longer than I’d of thought it would. Or could. Then one big explosion.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Jack drinks wormwood whiskey at his friend’s inn.
  • Saba accuses her brother of taking the drug chaal, but he denies it.
  • Saba’s brother is hit with a blow dart. They cut open the wound and suck the poison out.
  • Saba drugs DeMalo’s wine with a potion that will knock him unconscious for many hours.

Language

  • The words damned, helluva, fergawdsake, damn, and sonofabitch are used once or twice.
  • Hell, variations of gawdamn, and ohmigawd are used often.
  • When Saba starts acting irrationally, her brother yells at her. “Tell me, gawdammit! Why’d you break yer dawdamn bow?”

Supernatural

  • Saba has a heartstone. It gets hot as a way of leading a person to their heart’s desire.
  • Saba starts to see ghosts. “It’s Epona. But not like she was. In life, she gleamed an shone…She’s a child of the air now. Fog an mist. She drifts. She gathers. She fades.”
  • Saba meets the Sky Speaker, a type of shaman who can sing the earths songs and sometimes see what will happen in the future. “The Sky Speaker’s shakin, head to foot. Her eyes roll back an she waves her hands wildly. She starts to babble, a endless stream of sounds.”
  • Saba follows the Wraithway, a road where spirits are said to roam.

Spiritual Content

  • None

by Morgan Lynn

Paper Covers Rock

Alex narrates his story through diary entries and poetry. At the beginning of the school year, Alex and his friends are drinking and decide to jump off a tall rock into the river. Thomas, one of Alex’s best friends, dies. With that death comes terror—the terror of someone finding out that they were illegally drinking. The terror that Mrs. Dovecott saw more than she is letting on. The terror that Thomas’s last words will shatter someone’s life.

Alex life is full of secrets. He splits his time between daydreaming about his crush on Mrs. Dovecott and wondering how far Glenn will go to keep their secret. Paper Covers Rock revolves around Thomas’ death and the boys wanting to keep their drinking a secret. Glenn wants Alex to tempt Mrs. Dovecott into kissing him so that she will get fired. And Alex reluctantly goes along with the plan.

The storyline of Paper Covers Rocks does not always ring true. The boys’ lives are full of lies, deception, and sexual content. As Alex paints the story of his life, it is hard to connect with someone who is willing to lie to everyone around him in order to hide the fact that he was drinking when his friend died.

Sexual Content

  • Alex spends a lot of time fantasizing about his English teacher, who he thinks he is in love with. In one scene he thinks, “I wish there were punch, I wish it was spiked, I wish that Mrs. Dovecott would drink a gallon of it and make crazy love to me.”
  • When talking about the culture of the school, the narrator explains that there are not a lot of employees at the school who are hot. “If you want to have a crush on a Burch bitch . . . there are not a lot of options. You’ve got your dining hall employees, but they’re inbred. . .”
  • The narrator mentions that his roommate is, “jacking off every night.”
  • The narrator wonders if his friend is gay. At school there, is no worse label than being gay.
  • One of Alex’s friends tells him, “Your brains are in your crotch.”
  • The boys play a version of Would You Rather. “Would you rather watch Mrs. Davido give a blow job to Buddha or Mr. Lyme? Would you rather watch Miss Dovecott give a blow job to Gaybrook or Everson?” Then they talk about if Mrs. Dovecott could get Gaybrook “off” and if Everson would “sploodge in about two seconds.”
  • Alex is glad that his mom isn’t coming to parents’ weekend because she will be labeled as a FUM, “boarding-school speak for (f^ckable mom).”
  • The boys wonder if a teacher is a lesbian.
  • Alex thinks about how he, “fondled a girl’s breast once. Her nipples were tiny, but her tits were huge . . . She laid the sweater across my crotch and slid a hand underneath it . . . I moaned and came in my shorts.”
  • Someone tells a story about girls kissing another girl’s breast and practicing kissing on each other. “I had heard before that girls practice kissing with one another so that they know what they’re doing when a boy kisses them for real.”
  • Alex thinks about the faculty members’ daughters who are sent away to go to school. He thinks that the girls who stayed would all have sex with his friend Glen, if Glen wanted to have sex with them.

Violence

  • At a dance, someone talks about how a student committed suicide. “This teacher’s theory is that the boy took all those pills because he was struggling with his sexuality . . . He might have been gay.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • While drinking, Alex and his friends jump off a rock and into a river. His friend Thomas, who was “shit-faced” from chugging vodka, hits his head on a rock and dies. The boys are afraid that if the school finds out, they will be expelled.
  • There is drinking at a football game that the alums go to.

Language

  • Alex says someone is, “full of shit.”
  • The narrator says that parents pay “shit-loads” of money to send their sons away to boarding school.
  • An “ass-hole” who lived in Alex’s dorm room before he moved in burnt holes in the carpet with cigarettes.
  • Profanity is scattered throughout the book. The profanity includes bullshit, f^ck, smart-ass, and damn.

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • The school’s reverend, “is a hypocrite. He preaches on the sin of homosexuality at least once a trimester, he quotes the Scriptures, twists it so that it fits his message. . .The good reverend says that we are made in God’s image. God is perfect. Therefore, God is not gay. If you engage in the sin of homosexuality, then you will contract gay cancer and die a very slow, very painful death.”
  • In one sermon the reverend says, “You will come to learn that God shows His mercy in small ways . . . God is with us, and under His watch, all things are good.” Alex doesn’t agree.
  • Alex’s father told him that, “religion was a human invention.” Alex thinks that more educated people don’t, “need religion to make sense of the word.” Therefore Alex does not believe in God.
  • The reverend says Thomas, “did not die in vain; he was part of God’s plan.” Alex thinks, “Even God does not have the power to intervene in a world where centuries of evil have rooted beneath the surface of everything . . . My father is right: humans made god up to satisfy their own needs.
  • Mr. Parks preaches that “God is programmed into our DNA, so He’s there under our skin, biologically there, to connect us to a force larger than ourselves.” Alex wonders if homosexuality is programmed there too.

Monument 14

One minute, fourteen kids were on the bus heading towards school. Then the gigantic sized hail began. The bus crashed and everything changed in an instant.

Six high school kids, two eighth-graders, and six little kids are trapped in a chain superstore, while chemicals fill the outside air. They must work together in order to survive. However, the longer they are in the store, the more difficulties they must face—they must keep others out, they must take care of the younger children, they must fight the escalating tension between each other—all the while trying to come up with a plan to survive.

Monument 14 is a suspenseful survival story written from the point of view of one of the teenagers. Although the premise behind the book is interesting, some of the events in the story are farfetched. The narrator describes some graphic fights, including one in which an adult is shot and killed. One of the pre-teen girls is sexually assaulted. Another character raids the pharmacy and is high for most of the story.

Sexual Content

  • When exposed to the chemicals in the air, Brayden thinks, “But I still had some weird stuff happening in my body. What I wanted was Astrid. She looked so good to me that I wanted to take her, in a dark and terrible way.”
  • When one of the children is playing with Barbie toys, the narrator describes it as a “Barbie orgy.”
  • When some of the characters fight, a boy says, “I see. I get it . . . You and your brother want in on Niko’s little gay Scout thing. You guys wish you could be up in the woods, huffing on each other’s campfires . . .”
  • Some of the boys were talking about Astrid. Brayden says, “You don’t even love her. You just want her so you can get your rocks off.”
  • Sahalia helps people wash their hair. The narrator and two other boys watch her. “We can see skin under the leg of her shorts. The creamy skin of her inner, inner thigh . . . Now we see her breast outright, through the material of her shirt. We could see the nipples. Everything about them, we could see . . . But it seemed to me she wanted us to see her body. She wanted to be wanted.”
  • Sahalia is wearing a revealing outfit. When the boys look at Sahalia’s body, another character yells at her, “We get it, okay? You’re sexy and you want to have sex with these guys. We get it. But, honey, it’s not going to happen because you are thirteen.” As the two fight, Sahalia yells, “I know more about sex than you do, you stuck-up bitch!”
  • Astrid finds Sahalia “basically naked” and crying. “She sat on the floor, clutching her nightgown to her chest.” Later Sahalia says, “He (an adult, school employee) said that I should be, like his girlfriend. And I guess I thought I could, you know, do what all he wanted me to do. But then I didn’t want to and . . .”
  • Two of the characters kiss. “Nicko held her to him, encircling her dark shoulders and pulling her into his body . . . She looked up at him and he looked at her and they were kissing.”

Violence

  • When the school bus crashes, the driver is killed. “He was pinned behind the wheel and blood was spilling out of his head like milk out of a carton.”
  • When exposed to the air, the narrator begins attacking Niko. “I started beating him with the mask I was still holding. He wouldn’t let go of my leg and was dragging me down the stairs. I swung at him, wanting him to lose his balance . . . I couldn’t think. Just pummel. Pound. tear. Destroy.”
  • One of the characters talks about how his mother’s boyfriend hits her. In a later scene, he talks about how his aunt’s husband would beat her aunt, but the aunt would always lie about how she got hurt.
  • When Chloe was exposed to the chemicals, she attacks the others. “She had Batiste by the throat, up against the wall . . . He was getting strangled to death . . . His face was blue and his eyes were big and his legs were limp.”
  • When Robbie (an adult, school employee) is found sexually abusing Sahalia, Astrid holds a gun to him. Later, Jake is given the gun and Robbie attacks him. Robbie says, “I told you it wasn’t me. She wanted to be my girlfriend.” Then Robbie, “lashed out and struck Niko across the face with the barrel of the pistol.” Another character shoots Robbie dead.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • One of the kids says that he went to a strip club with his uncle. He said that they serve liquor. “They have these little glasses in all kind of flavors like watermelon and peach passion and hot apple. They taste horrible.”
  • Some of the older kids drink rum. The narrator describes the experience. “I was loose. I felt big, like I could say what I really felt. I was drunk.” In another scene, three of the older kids put alcohol into their slushies and get drunk.
  • After getting in a fight, the narrator takes some pain pills and some steroids. “I was already starting to feel better. More warm and relaxed.”
  • Jake offers the narrator a pill and says, “Let’s get high.” The narrator takes, “one of the EZ-melt pain pills from the day before and one triangular orange mystery pill later, I was flying. I felt relaxed but energized. Loose and happy.”
  • Jake said, “I keep taking these pills. But every time, they’re working less. It’s like I squeezed all the good feelings out of my brain and now I’m out. I drained it all out and I’m done.”

Language

  • Profanity is used often. The profanity includes: holy Christ, hell, son of a bitch, a-hole, crap, and ass.
  • When the group of kids make lunch in the store, one of the kids asks, “What do we do if the people from the store come? They’re going to be pissed?”
  • When watching the news, the narrator notices the anchors messed up make up. “I wondered why no one fixed her makeup. It was CNN, for God’s sake.”
  • When Brayden tells Astrid what to do, she yells, “Screw you, Brayden! You’re the last person I want to be stuck here with!”
  • When Chloe sees Brayden’s beat up face she asks, “Oh my God, what happened to you?”
  • Someone tries to get into the store. The man shouted, “BY THE HAIR OF MY F—CHIN, LET ME IN OR I’LL HUFF AND I’LL BLOW YOUR EFFIN’ GREENWAY DOWN.”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • When disaster strikes, Batiste keeps saying it is “the end of days” and that “judgement day was upon us.”
  • When talking about the strip club, Batiste says, “Our church is always trying to get those sinners to repent. But I don’t even know what kind of sinning they’re doing.”
  • A character says, “I thank God he brought us to this place.”

We Were Liars

Cadence is a Sinclair. A member of the beautiful, blonde American dynasty. No one is depressed, addicted, or a criminal. No one is greedy or drunk. They are the perfect family that spends every summer on their private island, Beechwood. The oldest of the Sinclair grandchildren and their best friend call themselves the liars. The four of them—Cadence, Mirren, Johnny, and Gat—are inseparable every summer. They share secrets, go on forbidden adventures, and uncover mysteries of their family as they grow up together in a world of money and privilege.

But the Sinclairs aren’t perfect. The aunts always fight over their inheritance and drink away their sorrows. Grandad is beginning to lose his mind and can’t cope with the loss of his beloved wife. Cadence herself can’t remember summer fifteen after she wakes up in a hospital with traumatic brain injuries and burns.

Cadence struggles to retain her memories as she returns to the island after two years of absence. Everything seems the same as it always was, but the closer she looks, the more she realizes how much the world she once knew has changed. As Cadence tries to put together the pieces of memories that led to her accident, she discovers that the secrets of summer fifteen might have been better left as they were.

We Were Liars is a gripping novel that will leave readers restless to uncover the truth. Suspenseful and surprising, this book is well worth the read as it is fast-paced and entertaining. The characters are realistic and ask questions that teen readers may also be pondering such as the existence of trust between family members and the necessity of faith. However, the intertwining timelines may be difficult to grasp for some readers, and the story contains some mature content that is not appropriate for younger audiences.

Lockhart’s writing style is also unique and takes some getting used to. The story is told from Cadence’s point of view, and the descriptions make it sometimes difficult to differentiate between imagination and reality.  Careful reading is necessary to determine if the event actually happened to Cadence or if it is a figurative description of her inner emotions.

 Sexual Content

  • Cadence’s parents get divorced because “my father ran off with some woman he loved more than us.”
  • Aunt Carrie’s husband left her with four children to care for, including a baby.
  • When the liars are having a conversation, Johnny asks, “Can’t we talk about sex or murder?”
  • Gat and Cadence fall in love. There are several kissing scenes throughout the novel, but they are never long and their relationship never goes beyond making out. “He touched my face. Ran his hands down my neck and along my collarbone. . . Our kiss was electric and soft, and tentative, and certain, terrifying and exactly right.”
  • Cadence and Gat are anxious to be near one another and often make physical contact. “He touched me whenever he could . . . As long as no one was looking, I ran my finger along Gat’s cheekbones, down his back.”
  • Mirren mentions her boyfriend during a conversation with Cadence. “I have a boyfriend named Drake Loggerhead. . . We have had sexual intercourse quite a number of times, but always with protection.” Their relationship is never described again and later in the story, it is revealed that Mirren made him up.
  • When Cadence and Gat are mad at each other, she longs to be with him. “I reach out and touch him. Just the feel of his forearm beneath the thin cotton of his shirt makes me ache to kiss him again.”

Violence

  • Cadence often describes events in her life figuratively and descriptively. When her father leaves, she says, “Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed.”
  • When Cadence discovers that Gat has a girlfriend, she punches the shower wall in anger.
  • Cadence often describes her emotional pain as blood dripping from her body. Although she is not actually bleeding, this description conveys the pain she feels inside. No one notices except her beloved Gat. “When blood dripped on my bare feet and poured over the book I was reading, he was kind. He wrapped my wrists in soft white gauze.” Her pain is described in this manner multiple times.
  • As a result of her brain injuries, Cadence feels immense pain that is sometimes depicted in disturbing detail. Her pain is often compared to violent situations in an attempt to help the reader understand what she is going She describes her pain as “a truck is rolling over the bones of my neck and head. The vertebrae break, the brains pop and ooze.” In another instance, a witch, “swings the statue again and hits above my right ear, smashing my skull. Blow after blow she lands, until tiny flakes of bone litter the bed and mingle with chipped bits of her once-beautiful goose.”
  • Aunt Carrie smacks Aunt Bess across the mouth as they are arguing over their inheritance.
  • The liars steal some of Grandma Tipper’s favorite expensive collectibles and smash them to pieces on a dock. They then wipe them away into the sea.
  • Near the conclusion of the novel, the liars decide to burn the Clairmont house (the largest house on the island) down to the ground as they are angry with all that it represents. The burning does not go as planned and several characters die in the fire. Their deaths are not described.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • When Cadence is anxious, she “drank wine I snuck from the Clairmont pantry. I spun violently into the sky, raging and banging stars from their moorings, swirling and vomiting.” She and the other liars sneak wine from pantries and other places several times throughout the novel.
  • Cadence takes medication to help her deal with pain. If she does not take the prescription medication, she suffers pain so unbearable that it makes her question her will to live. Although the drugs are habit-forming, she claims that she does not have an addiction.
  • The aunts often discuss wine and have chats during cocktail hour. They are also frequently drunk.
  • Cadence’s younger cousins often ask if she is a drug addict. One of them adapts the motto, “Drugs are not your friend.”
  • When making a joke to her aunts, Cadence says, “Nothing wrong with me that a Percocet and a couple slugs of vodka doesn’t cure.”
  • Cadence says that she is “high on Percocet half the time.”

Language

  • Profanity is used frequently throughout the novel. Profanity includes: damn, God, fucking, good lord, ass, hell, stupid-ass, asshole, assface, bullshit, fuck, shitty, fuckload, and fucked up. The cursing intensifies when the liars get older.
  • Shut up is used several times in a conversation.
  • When attempting to recall her incident, Cadence says, “I suppose that I was raped or attacked or some godforsaken something.”
  • Gat discusses some of Grandad’s negative tendencies and behaviors with the liars. “The point is, Harris doesn’t like Ed’s color. He’s a racist bastard, and so was Tipper.”

Supernatural

  • When thinking about her feelings towards Gat, Cadence says, “I am not talking about fate. I don’t believe in destiny or soul mates or the supernatural.”
  • Cuddletown, one of the cottages on the island, is haunted, as the ghosts of the deceased liars remain there to help Cadence remember the events of summer fifteen.
  • Bonnie has an obsession with vampires and insists that they are real.

Spiritual

  • Cadence and Gat have a conversation on whether or not God exists. When Gat asks, “Do you believe in God?” Cadence responds, “Halfway . . . When things are bad, I’ll pray or imagine someone watching over me, listening . . . But the rest of the time, I’m trudging along in my everyday life.” After listening, Gat asserts that he no longer believes in God after witnessing the horrors of poverty in India.
  • One of Cadence’s aunts says, “Thank God you’re here.”
  • The liars think setting the fire on Clairmont is a semi-spiritual act. They see it as a form of purification as they cleanse their family of its past. Gat refers to the burning as “playing God.”

by Morgan Filgas

I Am Number Four

John moves around a lot. But not because of his dad’s job—because he’s an alien. He is one of the few survivors of the Loriac, who are being hunted to extinction by the Mogadorians, a race of conquering aliens who have now set their eyes on Earth.

John tries to blend in among the Earthlings, something that isn’t difficult at first. He looks just like you and me. But then his Legacies start to appear.  Glowing hands, fire-proof skin, and more. With the appearance of his Legacies, his life becomes a lot more complicated. Will he have to move again? It has never been a problem before, but now John has a best friend and girlfriend, and refuses to flee when the Mogadorians start to close in.

I Am Number Four is an interesting story. The story is told from John’s mind, which feels like the mind of any normal teenage boy. John learns about the death of his planet, his parents, and his race. At first, he wishes that he could just be human and not have to hide anymore. But as he learns more about his heritage, John begins to realize he is a part of a much bigger battle.

This book is fun, but lacks suspense until the very end. The characters are extremely likable though, and following their lives is enjoyable. I Am Number Four is a good introduction to Lorien series.

Sexual Content

  • John and Sarah kiss several times. “I kiss her good night, a lingering kiss while holding both her hands gently in mine.”
  • “When we get to her room, she closes the door and kisses me. I’m surprised, but thrilled.”
  • Sarah and John make out on his bed. “We fall back on the bed, on our sides…all at once we’re kissing again. Entangled. Meshed. Our arms tightly around the other…Sarah and I fall on the bed kissing each other, falling into each other.”

 Violence

  • A man is killed. “ ‘No,’ the man whispers, and in that instant the blade of a sword, long and gleaming…comes through the door and sinks deeply into the man’s chest . . . The man takes a single breath, and utters one word: ‘Run.’ He falls lifeless to the floor.”
  • John gets into a fight with some bullies. “I bring my knee straight up into his crotch. His breath catches in his throat, and he doubles over.”
  • John sees visions of his planet’s destruction. “People are running everywhere, fighting back. As many Mogadorians as Loric are being killed . . . I turn around and face a beast that must be forty feet tall…[it] takes out dozens of Loric around me.”
  • John sees another vision of his planet. “Mounds of bodies, not all of them intact, not all of them whole. On top of one mound is the man in silver and blue, dead like all the rest.”
  • Sarah is dragged off in the darkness of a hayride. John is attacked but finds Sarah and fights back. “I throw him and he hits the side of a tree twenty feet away . . . I pick him up and lift him a foot off the ground with my hand again around his throat. His legs kick wildly.”
  • John challenges a group of bullies to a fight. “Two of the guys come at me, both bigger than me. One swings but I duck his punch and send one of my own into his gut . . . I shove the second guy and his feet leave the ground. He lands with a thud five feet away.”
  • Sam points a gun at John because he thinks he isn’t human. John talks Sam into putting the gun down, and Sam admits, “it wasn’t actually loaded.”
  • Henri disappears. John goes after him and follows him to a certain address. When he goes in, he is attacked by a man with a bat. “He swings the bat. I duck and it hits the wall with a thud, leaving a large splintered hole in the wood panel.”
  • A man points a gun at John. Later, John points the gun at the man to get him to share information.
  • John is attacked by Mogadorians. “Henri fires the shotgun. The sound is deafening…He cocks the gun again, keeps it aimed. I twist my body to look out. Two fallen scouts are lying in the grass, unmoving.”
  • During the final fight, there is a lot of shooting, fighting, and running away from Mogadorians with swords. “A golden glinting object that speeds through the air with violence. It hits the scout so hard that its skull cracks on impact, and then it falls to the ground and lies motionless…Henri takes Sarah’s knife and thrusts it through its chest, reducing it to a pile of ash.” “Henri cries out in pain. I turn. One of the scouts has thrust a knife into his gut . . . The soldier raises its sword in the air. The blade tastes death, starts glowing in the night sky behind it.”

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • John goes to a party where there is beer.
  • There is a substance that looks like a stone. When placed under a Loriac’s tongue, it dissolves and gives the Loriac strength.

Language

  • Hell, dick, shit, and damn are said many times in daily conversation.
  • Son of a bitch, ass, bitch, asshole, and bullshit are said one or two times.

Supernatural

  • The protagonist of the story is an alien. There are many aliens living on Earth, hailing from two different races and two different planets. One race is trying to drive the other to extinction.
  • John starts developing powers such as being fire-proof and telekinetic. “I put all my power into the pit of my stomach and direct it towards him…he goes flying backward and crashes into the wall.”
  • John’s race of aliens develops a myriad of powers. Some are universal, such as super strength, while some are specialized, such as invisibility. John trains to increase his powers’ strengths.
  • John has visions of his planet’s destruction.
  • On Loriac the animals can change their shapes.
  • The Mogadorians can make people see horrible visions, such as, “My own death, and the deaths of all the people I know and love . . . Not only did I have to witness the deaths, but I could feel them, too . . . then came things I’ve always feared as a kid . . . werewolves. Demonic clowns. Giant spiders. I viewed them all through the eyes of a child, and they absolutely terrified me. And every time one of those things bit into me, I could feel its teeth rip the flesh from my body . . . I couldn’t stop screaming.”

Spiritual Content

  • None

Watched

Jesse’s life has been destroyed by a man he has never met. He doesn’t know what this man looks like, or what his name is. He only knows that his screen name is King. King makes a living blackmailing people, mostly kids, into committing sexual acts on camera. Jesse is one of those kids. And every time he tries to escape, the noose gets tighter.

Miranda used to work for King, until the guilt became so great that she defied his orders. Not one to take no for an answer, King has devoted himself to ruining Miranda’s life. King has posted nude pictures of Miranda all over the web and had her mom attacked. The horrors keep coming and coming, and Miranda believes taking her life is the only way of escape.

Both Jesse and Miranda are helpless in King’s net—until they meet each other. Together, they might have a shot of taking King down. But what will be the cost?

Watched is a well-written book with constant suspense. Written to educate on the dangers of virtual blackmail and cyberbullying, this book does not shy away from the sexual aspects of pornography, pedophilia, and the children that supply such people with their perverse desires. While Watched explores an important aspect of our world, this book is not suitable for anyone under the age of eighteen.

The Prologue starts with, “You don’t know what it feels like to hold a life in your hands, but I do. There’s nothing like it. Better than sex, it’s a rush that leaves you panting, wanting more . . . Your life will never be the same—you might die or you might keep living, but your life will always be mine.” This is a book with extreme adult content and should be read with caution.

Sexual Content

  • Jesse sees a fire and talks about pyromaniacs. “Some guys think fire is sexy . . . these guys are hanging out, staring, licking their lips, one hand shoved deep down the front pocket of their jeans.”
  • “Firemen talk like that, like fires are women, like conquering a fire is better than sex.”
  • There is mention of the sexual acts Jesse is forced to perform. “No one would ever believe what he was doing at three in the morning . . . she tried hard not to notice what was actually happening, what the Tokyo perv was making the kid so . . . ”
  • King asks Jesse to recruit a younger kid. He tells Jesse, “You’re getting too old for most of my clients. Unless they see you with other boys. Younger boys . . . I want you to have some fun. Like your uncle does with you.”
  • It is mentioned several times that Jesse has been sexually abused by his uncle. After a while Jesse realizes that “my uncle is still standing there, truly believing I wanted everything that’s happened to me these past few years, that I asked for, that I even . . . liked it.”
  • Miranda tells Jesse that King had been, “posting naked pictures of [her] all over [her] school’s website, sending them to [her] dad’s boss.”
  • King posted Miranda’s mother’s picture and information online, “along with a rape fantasy. Five thousand dollars to the man who made it come true and posted a video of it.” Because of this, she is attacked twice.
  • Jesse thinks about Miranda. “I want to be with her in real life, see her face, touch her hair, touch every part of her.”
  • Jesse’s uncle said he was taking him camping, but they “ended up in a slimy motel . . . he brought with him a bunch of kinky stuff . . . and the things he did to me that night . . . Even now, three years later, my insides drop out of me just thinking of it. Couldn’t walk after. Spent the next day on the floor of the bathroom, naked except for a blanket.”
  • Jesse’s uncle’s, “hand slides down my shoulder . . . he tugs on my belt with his other hand . . . he leans in, his gaze on my lips, hungry for more than dinner.”
  • Jesse thinks about what his uncle wants. “I realize what he feels for me goes far beyond sex, more like obsession.”
  • Miranda and Jesse kiss. “Our lips touch. The kiss is better than anything I could ever dream of.”

Violence

  • Jesse, the protagonist, sets small fires for fun. Setting fires gives him a sense of control.
  • Jesse remembers a video they watched in health class about cutting. “She said seeing her blood was like wrapping a chain around her heart, anchoring her to the real world . . . only by tearing into her own flesh, allowing the blood to escape, could she release the pain building up inside.”
  • King has someone with a knife follow Jesse’s little sister, in order to get Jesse to obey him. Jesse realizes, “He really will kill Janey or Mom, just to prove to me that he can—and he’ll get away with it.”
  • Jesse steals a “snub-nosed .38 revolver” from his uncle’s toolbox because “It’s time for me to man up . . . What other choice do I have?”
  • Miranda writes a suicide note, planning to kill herself before her next birthday. She had previously tried to kill herself twice. “They’d said she was lucky they found her before all the pills had gotten into her system. Miranda had decided adults had a warped idea of what lucky really was . . . That night was the second time she’d tried to end it all. A razor blade that time.”
  • Miranda talks about revenge porn, where “guys vote on the hottest or cruelest or most disgusting . . . the baby porn and the torture porn.”
  • Miranda wishes Jesse will kill King. “I even fantasized that I could make you kill him. For me. How sick and twisted is that . . . I’m a pathetic, selfish bitch.”
  • Jesse realizes that his uncle is an arsonist.
  • Jesse thinks about his uncle. “Punching him, pummeling him, pounding him into the ground would be so much easier and feel so much better. I fantasize about it, but I can never do it.”
  • When Jesse decides to confront his uncle, he thinks about needing, “tinder. Because if this goes wrong, I’ll need to get rid of the evidence.”
  • When Jesse confronts his uncle he, “slide[s] the snub-nosed revolver from my back pocket and jam[s] it under his chin, forcing his head back . . . I jam the gun up harder, and he makes a little squeaking noise like a rat with its leg caught in a trap. Tough choice. Chew your leg off or wait to see who comes to get you . . . [I] smash my foot into his face so hard his nose gushes blood.”
  • Jesse threatens to start fire to the house with his uncle locked in the garage.
  • A man with a knife tries to kidnap Jesse. “He takes my hand and twists it back hard . . . the pain is excruciating, lightning blazing up my arm.”
  • The remains of Jesse’s father are found buried on his uncle’s property. At first, Jesse is wanted for murder, but later his uncle confesses to having killed him.
  • Jesse’s uncle breaks into Miranda’s apartment, kidnapping Miranda and her mother. “‘Please,’ her mother begged, her words choked with blood from her split lip and broken nose . . . He jabbed the gun hard into Miranda’s temple, forced her forward.”
  • Miranda creates a suicide countdown to get publicity for her plan to take down King.
  • King kills a bystander who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. “King shot him in the chest. The sound echoed like thunder as she stood, stunned, the acrid scent of gunpowder mixed with blood filling her nostrils.”
  • Miranda gets ahold of King’s weapon and considers killing him with it. Jesse talks her out of it.

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • Jesse sees some drug dealers making sales and wonders why they even bother to hide, since, “no one seems to care.”
  • Jesse thinks about a girl who used to cut herself, then was locked up and fed drugs that, “turned her into a zombie telling other kids don’t worry; be happy.”
  • The first time Jesse built a fire he, “soaked it in a bottle of . . . booze—Old Grand-Dad, it tasted awful, burned all the way down . . . the booze must have been high test because the whole thing went up.”
  • When Miranda asks him if he is okay to drive, Jesse says, “I’m not drunk. Not high.”

Language

  • Profanity such as hell, shit, and damn is used frequently.
  • God, bastard, and bitch are used a few times.

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • When Jesse describes the fires he sets, he says, “But I know them. I am their God, their Creator, their Master.”
  • Jesse and Miranda discuss the morality of telling the truth versus hiding behind a lie. If they continue to lie, the perverts will, “keep doing this to other kids. They’ll think it’s okay to ruin our lives, to hurt us like we’re nothing more than dirt on the bottom of their shoes.”

by Morgan Lynn

Bang

Fear:  that’s what Sawyer feels. And Jules can understand why. After all, she is the one who gave the vision curse to Sawyer.  Now Sawyer and Jules must decide if they are going to risk their lives trying to stop a tragedy.

Book II of the Visions series adds more involvement from Jule’s brother Trey.  Jules loves her brother, and it’s easy to see why.  He’s good-natured, loyal, and teases his sister about her love life. The relationship between Trey and his sister adds depth and delight to bang.  However, both Sawyer’s and Jules’ relationship with their parents is dysfunctional and full of distrust.  Sawyer’s grandfather hits him, in the past, his mother had an affair, and Sawyer lies to his parent so he can spend time with Jules and try to solve the mystery of the vision.

At the beginning of the book, the language is mild with words like “crap” and “friggin.’” However, it doesn’t take long until the cursing (and the make-out scenes) increase in frequency and intensity. Another troubling aspect of the book is Jules’ sisters’ romantic relationship. Her sister decides to fly to New York to stay with a boy she met at soccer camp, all without her parents knowing about the trip until she’s left.

bang loses a lot of the suspense that was contained in the first book, crash.  Instead of focusing on the mystery of the vision, bang delves into Jules’ relationship with Sawyer as well as their family relationships.  Although Jules cares deeply about her siblings, she is disrespectful and deceitful to her parents.  None of the characters consider confiding in the adults in their life.  Instead, Sawyer, Jules, and Trey band together to try to stop a tragedy from happening.

 Sexual Content

  • Jules sneaks out of the house where she receives her first kiss which was the, “most weirdly amazing feeling.”
  • When Jules sees her boyfriend, he tells her that he’d like to kiss her but only, “runs his thumb across my lips and looks at me so longingly it hurts.” Later Jules presses, “a finger to his lips and watch his eyes droop halfway in response,” and, “his gaze lingers and burns.”  When her boyfriend leaves she thinks, “At this rate, we’ll have, like, nine babies by the end of our senior year.”
  • There are many scenes where Jules and her boyfriend make out, which involves kissing and caresses each other. In one scene Jules thinks, “I really want to see that chest once more.”
  • In another scene, the two make out and they are, “kissing and panting and touching each other, starving and lusty and steamy hot . . . he presses against me, his chest against my chest, our feet finding spaces every other, and his thighs squeezing mine. And suddenly, I realize that what’s pressing against me is not all thigh, and I am secretly amazed and a little shocked by it being there, doing that.”  She describes being, “intoxicated by his fervor and the overwhelming electric, psychedelic aching in my loins.”
  • While joking with his sister and her boyfriend, Trey says, “I’m not into incest, thank you. However…If you ever, you know, want to experiment.” Sawyer replies, “Maybe I could bang all the Demarco siblings.”
  • At school, a girl who likes Sawyer comes up to him and, “sticks her boobs out.” She asks him to Spring Fling and promises they can, “make out behind the bleachers like when we were a couple.” Sawyer tells the girl he is gay, and she gets upset and asks, “I made out with a gay?” and “Were you gay when we made out?”
  • Jules father asks her, “What do you want to say that I don’t already know? That you’re pregnant?”  Jules is angry that her father, “thinks I’m out there banging people left and right.”
  • Jules thinks about her father’s past affair, and she talks about it with others.

 Violence

  • Jules boyfriend talks about how his grandfather used to hit him.
  • Sawyer has a gruesome vision of a school shooting where eleven people are shot. He describes the scene of the shooting and how the “faces are blown into bits.”
  • A college campus was vandalized and someone spray paints a stop sign so that it reads, “Stop fags.”
  • The college campus shooting is describe in detail over four pages. Several people are shot.  One of the shooters jabs a gun between a boy’s eyes.  There is a fight between the gunman and several others, which is described.  “I kick the crap out of her arm that holds the gun, and I whack the shit out of her face with my cast . . . I kneel on her fucking head as she screams.”  Trey shows up and is shot.  Jules watches as he sinks, “to the floor, leaving s streak of red on the wall behind him.”
  • Trey says, “All I can remember is someone screaming ‘Die, fag!’ in my face, which really, you know, sucked. Then I took one look at the blood spurting out of my arm” and he passed out.
  • In the hospital, several characters discuss the events of the shooting and the injuries of the victims.

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • While in the hospital, Trey is given morphine for his pain. He acts goofy and, “a little drunk on morphine.”  Later when Trey talks about going to a pricey private school that she knows her family can’t afford,  Jules thinks, “there’s always the power of morphine to make your forget about the minor details of your life.”
  • Jules, “scared the hell out of Trey when I tell him that he totally threw himself at a college boy while under the influence of morphine.”

Language

  • Cursing is frequent. The cursing includes crap, dang, shit, damn it, fucking and pissed.
  • Jules uses Oh my God and Oh Christ as profanity.
  • Jules wonders when she became an “insecure loser” and thinks, “back when I accepted the fact that I was a total psycho.”
  • A character says jokingly, “tell the two-timing lunch whore I said hey.”
  • When Trey is frustrated, he says, “for shit’s sake, Jules.”
  • Jules brother, Trey, is jealous that both of his sisters have a boyfriend and he doesn’t. When his sister talks about sneaking out of the house and flying to New York to see him, Trey says, “Fuck…Why the hell not.  Why the hell not.”
  • Jules’ sister jokingly tells her, “You ruin this for me, and I will ruin your face, bitch.”

Supernatural

  • Jules talks about, “the vision isn’t a total fix; it’s a chance to change a bad thing to something less bad . . . the vision’s gone. You did what you were supposed to do. Maybe . . . maybe those people needed to go through that experience in order to become the people they’re meant to be, you know?  Maybe the experience triggers something inside of them that will help them become great.”   Sawyer replies, “And maybe it’ll make them dependent on prescription drugs, or want to kill themselves.”
  • Jules asks Sawyer, “You think the vision gods, or whoever, gave us these changes so we can end up watching the people we save turn into drug addicts?”

Spiritual Content

  • One of Jules favorite sayings is, “thank dog for that.”
  • Jules finds a newspaper article that reports about a protest lead by a cult preacher who’s been, “shouting about gays taking over the government, and he’s been ragging on U of C lately because their rights group have been picketing the guy.” The preacher has been getting his followers and, “saying God wants his cult to rid the country of homosexuality.”  Sawyer asks, “So you think our shooters are some outsider cult followers of the raving lunatic, coming to campus to . . . do God’s will?”
  • When Jules talks about the news article she asks, “Who would want to believe in a God like that? If God is not, like, totally in love with all the people he created, why would anybody want to believe in him?  Five things a real God should be:   Not a hater.  2. That about sums it up.
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