Reading Level: Young Adult

Dirt Road Home

Two years ago, Hal was sent to a state residence to keep him away from his alcoholic father. Hal escapes the boys’ home but is eventually captured. Now, he’s being sent to serve hard time at Hellenweiler Boy’s Home.

With his dad back on the wagon, Hal can walk out sooner than he thinks if he keeps his cool. But at Hellenweiler, trouble finds those who try to avoid it. In order to stay out of trouble, Hal tries to avoid the other residents, but two rival gangs each want Hal to pick a side. To make matters worse, Hal realizes the head of Hellenweiler, Mr. Pratt, is determined to keep Hal locked up. Is there any way Hal can stay out of the gangs’ fights? Will everyone believe Mr. Pratt’s lies?

Hal is determined to stay out of trouble, but other inmates notice his confidence and compassion. For example, Hal encourages the new arrival of Leroy to quickly choose a gang as Leroy will need protection. But after seeing Leroy and Hal interact, the gang leader chooses a cruel initiation task—beat up Hal. Hal quickly realizes Leroy’s struggle and promises not to fight back. Hal takes the beating because he knows it is the only way Leroy will be safe. Throughout the story, many boys fight each other. Some of the fights are barbaric and bloody, which may upset more sensitive readers.

Readers will admire Hal for his determination and grit. Hal’s experiences highlight the violent nature of boys’ homes and the corrupt system that is designed to keep the boys behind bars. The boys often fight each other and the guards gladly ignore much of the fighting. However, the guards seem to relish in being able to use violence to stop the fighting. While the story ends on a positive note, readers will be left wondering if all of the boys can be reformed or if are some of them already destined to live in a prison for the rest of their adult lives.

Full of violence, questionable characters, and suspense, Dirt Road Home will keep the reader interested until the very end. The story has a darker tone and explores difficult topics such as alcoholism, justice, and prison life. Hal and several other characters made an appearance in Alabama Moon. Even though readers do not have to read Alabama Moon to understand the story, understanding Hal’s background will help readers have empathy for him. Dirt Road Home is an easy-to-read story that illustrates how one person can make a positive difference in others’ lives.

Sexual Content

  • Hal dreams about his girlfriend and “the time I couldn’t help myself and leaned over and kissed her on the tailgate of my truck. And the way I’d felt when she’d kissed me back and then later when she’d stood behind me and put her hands in the front pockets of my jeans and pulled close against me.”
  • Hal kisses his girlfriend. “I leaned into her and kissed her on the mouth. Her lips were soft and tasted like cherry ChapStick. I’d been thinking about that kiss ever since.”

Violence

  • Two rival gangs try to recruit new boys. A boy chases after a basketball and gets too close to a rival gang member. “The Hound slapped the ball out of the Minister’s hand and bent down to get it. The Minister kneed the boy in the stomach and the Hound collapsed, holding himself.” An adult breaks up the fight.
  • As part of a gang initiation, Hal’s friend Leroy is told to beat up Hal. Hal tells him, “I won’t fight back, Leroy.” Leroy “drew back and hit me in the ribs. I grunted and leaned over and grabbed my side. . . He punched me hard in the stomach. I doubled over and went to my knees. . . He hit me across the face and I fell sideways. I rolled over and looked at him. Tears were coming down his face. ‘Kick me,’ I said.” Hal is taken to the infirmary.
  • When Hal refuses to join a gang, Tattoo “slammed his hand into my throat and pressed me against the wall. I gasped for breath as he held me there. . . He hit me again. I felt the coppery taste of blood in my mouth. Then I saw it running down his hand.” Hal is knocked unconscious. The scene is described over a page.
  • A gang member tries to make Hal throw a punch. “Jack’s hand shot out and grabbed me by the throat and pinned me to the wire. He was breathing heavy through his nose, and his eyes danced with craziness.” An adult intervenes.
  • When one of the boys refuses to fight, he disappears. Someone tells Hal, “Chase accepted a service he could not pay for. He is gone. . . He was taken away in an ambulance last night.”
  • Hal sneaks down to the basement intending to fight Jack. “I tightened my grip on the shiv and started to stand. Before I could rise, another figure slipped out of the darkness behind Jack and pulled him to the floor. The room was suddenly filled with screaming.” Someone beat up Jack. The next morning, one of the boys is found in bed with “blood staining his bedsheet and the entire side of his shirt.” Both boys heal from their wounds.
  • The two gangs fight. “It was a blur of chaos and confusion as the Hounds descended on their cowering prey . . .” Guards watch the fight and then one “stepped down onto the yard. Behind him came three more guards, each of them with his own club. . . Then I saw sticks rising and falling and caught glimpses of their faces, jaws clenched and eyes narrowed at the pleasure of what they dealt. I heard grunts of pain and more yelling. . . in the end, the guards stood in the settling dust. A few boys lay around them, moaning and curled into fetal positions.”
  • Paco explains how he became a gang leader. “I put a rock in my fist and walked up to their leader and hit him in the face with it until he fell to the ground and spit his teeth into the dirt.”
  • During a fight between the two gangs, “the boys are so worked up that they continue to fight and do not notice the guards. Perhaps even if they did notice they do not believe what is about to happen. . .” The guards attack the boys. After the fight, “there are several boys lying on the ground. One of them is not moving. . . Caboose’s younger brother.” When Caboose refuses to leave his brother’s side, “the guards close in and I hear the clubs hitting his back like punches to a side of beef. Slowly, after many blows, Caboose becomes silent. . . Then, after many more blows, he rolls over and falls across his brother.”
  • A guard finds a shiv in Hal’s locker. The guard grabs Hal and, “I felt the hand on my shoulder. I tried to twist away and the fingers dug clawlike into my collarbone and pain shot up my neck. Then I was hit hard from behind and I went to my knees with the room spinning.” Hal is put in solitary confinement.
  • Paco tells the story of how he ended up in the boys’ home. He was bullied. He became tired of the jeers and ridicule. “I snapped. I began picking up desks and throwing them at students from the back of the room. They screamed and ran for the door. . . All I had to do was throw the desk at the cluster of them.” Paco blames the boys’ home for turning him into a “violent youth.”
  • The gangs fight. Jack, one of the gang leaders, “charged and rammed Paco against the fence. . . Jack began driving his fists into Paco’s kidneys over and over while Paco did nothing to defend himself. . . Jack came at Paco again and began hammering his face with the fury of an insane person. . .” Paco’s friend Caboose “picked him up and put him over his shoulder like he weighed nothing. Blood drooled out of his mouth and down Caboose’s back.”

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • Hal’s father is a recorded alcoholic. In a brief conversation Hal asks, “He goin’ to AA meetin’s?” Occasionally, Hal thinks about the past, when his father would drink whiskey.
  • When Hal’s father comes to visit him, Hal is worried because his father has lost weight. His dad says, “I guess I’ve been wired to the stuff [alcohol] for too long. Gotta get reprogrammed.”
  • One of the boys tells Hal, “My parents are in jail for sellin’ drugs.”
  • Before Hal had to go to the boy’s home, he spent time with his girlfriend. They were “drinking a couple of hot Budweisers I’d found in the toolbox.”

Language

  • Profanity is used frequently. Profanity includes ass, crap, damn, hell and pissed.
  • Someone is called a wuss several times.
  • Christ is used as an exclamation twice.
  • Hal’s father writes Hal a letter. In it, he writes, “I figured you wanted her [Hal’s girlfriend’s] address, numbskull.”
  • While talking to his father, Hal calls his mom a “fat old nag.”
  • One of the boys calls someone a “dumb spic.” The boy replies, “Bring it on, cracker!”
  • Someone tells Hal that he will have to join a gang for protection. When Hal refuses, someone gives him a shiv. Hal says, “Then I’m screwed!”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

Hideout

Twelve-year-old Sam has been given a fishing boat by his father, but he hates fishing. Instead, he uses the boat to disappear for hours at a time, exploring the forbidden swampy surroundings of his bayou home. Then he discovers a strange kid named Davey, mysteriously alone, repairing an abandoned cabin deep in the woods. Not fooled by the boy’s evasive explanation as to why he’s on his own, Sam becomes entangled in his own efforts to help Davey. But this leads him to tell small lies that only get bigger as the danger increases for both boys and hidden truths become harder to conceal.

Hideout is a suspenseful survival story that delves into the complicated nature of friendship, self-esteem, and evil. Sam and his best friend, Grover, are savagely beaten. Sam is unable to forget about “the fight” and blames himself for the event. Told from Sam’s perspective, the reader gets an inside view of how Sam feels ashamed. He thinks that if he wasn’t a loser, “the fight” would have never happened. While Sam struggles with his own personal demons, he meets Davey who is living alone in the middle of a swamp.

Davey’s story is one full of hardship and mystery. Even though Davey is secretive, Sam is determined to help him. In doing so, Sam begins to tell lies that get him into a dangerous situation. Readers will be drawn into the two boys’ lives and wonder if their secrets will lead to their downfall.

Hideout expertly weaves the boys’ stories into an interesting, suspenseful story that is difficult to put down. The story ends on a happy note and shows Sam’s character growth. In the end, Sam learns several important lessons. He finally realizes that “there’s just bad people in the world. Sometimes they do bad things to people like us. But it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with us.” In addition, Sam learns that “being a man isn’t about winning fights and carrying guns. It’s about helping people however you can, no matter what.”

Fans of survival stories will enjoy Hideout’s fast pace, the surprises, and the life lessons. In addition, readers will empathize with Sam and Davey, who both struggle with hardships. Readers who enjoy Hideout should check out Key’s other survival stories which include Terror at Bottle Creek and the Alabama Moon Series. Readers looking for another intense survival story should check out ADRIFT by Paul Griffin and Surrounded by Sharks by Michael Northrop.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • Leroy and Gooch beat up Sam and his best friend, Grover. Leroy “tripped Grover. . . he smacked hard onto the concrete.” Then, Gooch “shot out and his fist punched Grover in the chest so hard it sounded like a hammer thumping a wood barrel. Grover flew backwards into the lockers and collapsed . . .” Sam tried to help him and “Gooch’s arm slid around my throat and constricted me in the crook of his elbow. . .”
  • While Grover was still on the ground, Leroy “kicked him in the stomach and bounced him off the lockers like a soccer ball.”
  • During the fight, Sam “began to struggle against Gooch, trying to break free. Then I felt a sharp blow to my ribs, and what breath I had left me and everything went blurry. . . Gooch kicked me in the stomach . . . [Sam felt] blows to [his] face and stomach and arms until it didn’t hurt anymore.” Both Sam and Grover have to be hospitalized. The fight is described over three pages.
  • Sam’s father chases a thief. “I saw the big man sitting up and punching down. . . I saw Dad start to stand. Suddenly he was falling, and then he was gone and the big man was punching again.” Sam’s father is able to restrain the man.
  • Sam meets a boy who tells him, “My stepmom got a boyfriend, and Dad stabbed him in the stomach with the knife.” No other details are mentioned.
  • Davey was in a foster home. “My foster dad used to tell me I was like a stray dog that nobody wanted. He hurt me sometimes, but he didn’t do it so you could tell. He’d do things like press his thumbs up real hard under my armpits. . . If I yelled, he’d press harder until I got quiet.”
  • Davey’s foster dad sprayed him “in the face with some air freshener . . . Everything’s been blurry ever since.”
  • Davey’s step-brother, Slade, tells Sam, “And if you screw up, I’m gonna come to your house on Acorn Drive and kill you in your sleep.”
  • Slade got upset at one of his friends and “grabbed him by the throat with one hand. Jesse swung and hit him in the stomach. . . [Slade] punched him in the face. . . Slade kicked him hard in the ribs and he went down again, clutching his side.”
  • Slade kicks Davey “in the shoulder and knocked him over into the leaves.”
  • While trying to flee the swamp, Slade crashes into a patrol boat. Davey gets thrown and stops breathing. After receiving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Davey is revived.

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • Slade and his friends show up with beer. The step-brother’s friends “were each drinking a beer.”
  • Slade and his friends are growing marijuana out in the swamp.
  • Sam’s father grabbed a beer.

 

Language

  • Profanity is used rarely. Profanity includes ass, crap, hell, and pissed.
  • A classmate trips Grover, Grover calls the boy a “dumbass” and a “stupid redneck.”
  • Someone calls Grover a “wuss.”
  • “Christ,” “Lord” and “my god” are used as exclamations seven times altogether.
  • Grover calls Sam’s dad a “redneck cop.”
  • Dumbass is used three times. For example, Davey’s step-brother calls him a dumbass.
  • Someone asks Sam, “Are you a complete idiot?”
  • While trying to resuscitate Davey, the officer says, “Breathe, damnit!”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • Sam’s family attends First Methodist Church.
  • When Sam’s boat is almost out of gas, he prays, “Please God, let me get home. Just this one time. . . Okay, God, I won’t go out there again [into the swamp]. Just let me get home and I won’t go out there again.”
  • When Sam goes to church, he “remembered my plea to God and tried my best to pay attention to the sermon as repayment for any help.” The preacher’s sermon, which was about the good Samaritan, is paraphrased in a paragraph.
  • Sam goes missing. When his father finds him, he says, “Thank God.”

The Girl Who Drank the Moon

Every year, the people of the Protectorate leave a baby as an offering to the witch who lives in the forest, to keep the witch from terrorizing their town. But the witch, Xan, is really kind and gentle. She shares her home with a wise Swamp Monster and a Perfectly Tiny Dragon. Xan rescues the children left in the woods and delivers them to welcoming families on the other side of the forest.

One year, Xan accidentally feeds a baby with moonlight, filling the ordinary child with extraordinary magic. Xan decides she must raise this girl, who she calls Luna, as her own. As Luna’s thirteenth birthday approaches, her magic begins to emerge with unpredictable consequences, just as it’s time for Xan to go collect another child. Meanwhile, a young man is determined to free his people by killing the witch. And a volcano, dormant for centuries, rumbles within the earth. . .

The Girl Who Drank the Moon has many elements of a classical fairytale. A witch who lives in the woods, a swamp monster who recites poetry, a tiny dragon, and a curious girl filled with magic. Like a classical fairytale, the story is often dark, scary, and teaches a lesson. Despite this, readers may get bogged down in the long, repetitive descriptive passages that often use difficult vocabulary words. Between some of the chapters, there is a one-sided conversation between an anonymous speaker and another person. Because the speaker is unknown, these pages are more confusing than interesting.

The complex story uses an omniscient point of view so the reader can understand all of the characters’ thoughts. However, the story jumps to many characters—Xan, Glerk, Fyrian, Luna, the Madwoman, Sister Ignatia, Antain, Grand Elder Gherland, and Ethyne. While all the stories merge at the end, the large cast of characters and the winding plot make The Girl Who Drank the Moon best for strong readers.

Xan, a beautifully complex witch, shows love through every action. When she collects the abandoned babies and finds them new homes, she truly believes that she is doing what is right. Later she realizes that “I was wrong not to be curious. I was so wrong not to wonder.” Xan’s compassion allows her to understand others’ pain, and her love gives her the strength to fight for others.

The story deals with the difficult topics of death, grief, and political corruption. But beauty is woven into each page as the characters realize that family is not always determined by one’s birth, but by love. Luna’s family—Xan, the swamp monster, and the tiny dragon—is formed by love, loyalty, and the willingness to sacrifice for each other.

Even though The Girl Who Drank the Moon won the Newbery Award, the story may hold more appeal to adults than to middle-grade and teen readers. While the story has some interesting elements, the length of the story, the long descriptive passages, and the slow world-building make the story difficult to complete. Readers looking for a story about a witch that steals children may want to skip The Girl Who Drank the Moon and read Nightbooks by J.A. White instead.

Sexual Content

  • An anonymous speaker dreams about her son. She says, “Last night I dreamed that he waited next to a tree for a girl to walk by. And he called her name, and held her hand, and his heart pounded when he kissed her.”

Violence

  • Every year, the youngest child in the village is sacrificed to a witch. The town Elders take the baby into a clearing in the woods and leave the child there.
  • Paper birds come alive and attack a boy called Antain. “A paper raven swooped across the room, slicing its wing across Antain’s cheek, cutting it open, letting him bleed. . .” The birds permanently disfigure the boy’s face.
  • A man tries to take a sacrificed baby, but Xan stops him. “She could feel her magic rush from the center of the earth. . . like massive waves pushing and pulling the shore. She reached out and grabbed the man with both hands. He cried out as a surge hit him square in the solar plexus, knocking his breath clear away.” Xan turned into a bird and “lifted the baby into the sky.” Both the man and Xan were trying to keep the baby safe, but they did not realize it.
  • Xan turns into a sparrow. She flies over a frightened man. She tries to comfort him. “She fluttered out of her hiding place and circled over the figure. A young man. He screamed, loosed the stone in his hand, and hit Xan on the left wing. She fell to the ground without so much as a peep.” The sparrow’s wing is broken so the man binds the wing and carries the bird with him.
  • The Sorrow Eater feeds off of grief. In order to feed, she finds a starling nest. “She reached in and grabbed a tiny, wriggling nestling. She crushed it in one fist as the horrified mother looked on. The mother sparrow’s sorrow was thin. But it was enough. Sister Ignatia licked her lips and crushed another nestling.”
  • Sister Ignatia threatens Luna. In order to protect the girl, paper birds attack Sister Ignatia. “The birds cut her hands. They cut her forehead. They attacked without mercy.”
  • Sister Ignatia tries to take magical boots off of a woman. Sister Ignatia “balled her hands into two tight fists and raised them over her head. When she swept them back down, uncurling her fingers, they had four sharp knives. Without hesitating she reared back and snapped her hands forward, shooting the knife blades directly for the madwoman’s heart.” The madwoman moves just in time and is not injured.

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • The town Elders “grew big and strong on beef and butter and beer.
  • Luna gave “ale to the geese to see if it made them walk funny (it did).”
  • A woman goes mad after her baby is sacrificed. She is given “special potions to keep her calm.”
  • The Elders drink wine with lunch.

Language

  • A monster says, “As the Poet famously said, dear lady: ‘I don’t give a rat’s—‘” The monster stops talking when he is interrupted.
  • “My god” is used as an exclamation once.
  • When Antain asks to see the Elders, which is unusual, his uncle says, “Tradition be damned. The council will be ever so pleased to see you.”

Supernatural

  • Sister Ignatia is a Sorrow Eater, who “spreads misery and devours sorrow.” When someone feels grief, Sister Ignatia’s “tongue quickly darted out and disappeared back into her mouth. She closed her eyes as her cheeks flushed. As though she had just tasted the most delicious flavor in the world.”
  • Xan is a witch and can change forms. She picks up the sacrificed infants and feeds them starlight. “Once it was dark enough to see the stars, she reached up one hand and gathered starlight in her fingers. . . and fed it to the child.”
  • In order to hide from the Elder, Xan “transformed herself into a tree—a craggy thing of leaf and lichen and deep-grooved bark, similar in shape and texture to the other ancient sycamores standing guard over the small grove.”
  • When Luna was an infant, she drank moonlight, which “enmagicked” her.
  • Xan believes that “magic should never be used to influence the will of another person.” Despite this, she uses magic to make Luna sleep. When Luna begins transforming things, such as turning bread dough into a hat, Xan uses a spell to keep Luna from using magic. Xan is afraid Luna will hurt herself or someone else.
  • Xan uses her magic to cure a young woman of headaches.
  • Xan has a memory of protecting people “who lived in a castle. . . She remembered how she put protective spells on each of them—well, each of them but one—and prayed to the stars that each spell would hold as they ran.”
  • A girl is told a story about a witch who had boots that “could travel seven leagues in a single step.” The witch ate “sorrow, or souls, or volcanoes, or babies, or brave little wizards.” Soon, the girl discovers that the witch and the magical shoes are not just a story, but are real.
  • A woman learns how to transform herself into small things such as a cricket, a spider, or a waterbug.
  • Luna discovers a library, where the books are eager to have their voices heard. “Each book and each paper, as it turned out, had quite a bit to say. They murmured and rambled; they talked over one another; they stepped on each other’s voices.”
  • A flock of paper birds helps a “madwoman” escape from prison. The paper birds appear several times in the story.

Spiritual Content

  • A creation story explains how everything came from a bog. “In the beginning there was the Bog. And the Bog covered the world and the Bog was the world and the world was the Bog. . . But the Bog was lonely.” So the Bog created life on earth.
  • Xan remembers another time in her life when “she could remember climbing into her bed and clutching her hands to her heart, praying to the stars that she might have a night free from bad dreams. She never did.”

Whale Talk

T.J. is a Cutter High School senior who despises school sports. He thinks the jocks and their letter jackets are over-glorified, and that the school favors them. He wants nothing to do with sports until his English teacher, Mr. Simet, asks him to form a swim team. After witnessing a mentally handicapped student get bullied for wearing his dead brother’s letter jacket, T.J. forms an idea: a swim team full of high school rejects earning the right to wear letter jackets at school.

What the team lacks in skill they make up for in motivation. There is no pool at Cutter, and they have to travel to every swim meet. Mr. Simet and Icko, a homeless man who sleeps at the gym where they practice, help morph this group of outcasts into a real team. The team eventually becomes a family, a place to share their tragic backstories and offer each other consolation.

The story is told in the first person from T.J.’s point of view. Readers will enjoy his quick wit and appreciate his empathy. T.J.’s motivation for the swim team sways from wanting to defy Cutter’s athletic expectations, to giving the team a sense of belonging. While T.J. makes questionable decisions and can be hot-headed, his heart is in the right place. T.J. has a great support system, including his foster parents and his counselors, who give him advice along his journey. Unusually wise for his age, T.J. learns that knowing someone’s past experiences is the key to understanding the reason behind their actions.

While there is some swim terminology used, Whale Talk focuses mostly on T.J.’s life. There are a lot of subplots besides T.J. forming the swim team, which may be overwhelming for some readers. However, in true Chris Crutcher fashion, every subplot intertwines and contains a lesson to be learned by T.J. and the reader. These subplots have mature topics including bullying, domestic violence, child abuse, racism, and death. Whale Talk is a must-read, heartwarming book for those who want to think deeply about human connection.

Sexual Content

  • J. talks about how his biological mom got pregnant with him. “She’d had a one-night stand with my sperm donor to get even for a good thumping and had no idea the tall black-Japanese poet’s squiggly swimmer was the one in a billion to crash through to the promised land.”
  • When talking to a classmate named Dan Hole, T.J. is grateful his “last name can’t be translated into any target so basic to adolescent males.”
  • J. tries to “outsmart the Internet controls the school puts on” and types in “‘chicken breasts,’ hoping the browser will spit back a little bit about chickens and a whole lot about breasts.”
  • J. talks about how much a jock at his school loves his Ford. T.J. says, “I swear, if God made him choose between that ugly truck and his you-know-what, which he claims is also supersized by McDonald’s, it would have been a three-day decision.”
  • J. describes Carly, the girl he has a crush on. “There is no butt-twitching or flirtatious glancing or any of the symptoms that usually rocket me to Hormone City, but her natural sexuality is jarring.”
  • Carly tells T.J. what she is looking for in a relationship. “If we’re friends, we’re friends. If we have sex, we have sex. I don’t sleep with more than one person, and I won’t go with anyone who does. We double up on birth control.”
  • J. recounts the story of his dad having lunch with a woman and then sleeping with her. “She took him to her house, where they made fast, hot, electric love, uncharacteristic for either of them, to hear Dad tell it.”
  • J. hints that he and Carly messed around in his car. “I drop off Carly to head home, having completed a science experiment with steam and the interior of a Chevy Corvair.”
  • J. tells Tay-Roy, one of the swimmers, his goal for the swim meet should be “for him not to get sexually assaulted on the deck by the female spectators.” T.J. goes on to say Tay-Roy is a “serious hunk in a tank suit.”
  • Mott, one of the swimmers, says one of his mother’s boyfriends molested him. Matt says, “Ol Canada [the boyfriend] couldn’t figure out which bed he was supposed to sleep in.”
  • Rich accuses T.J. of “fucking [Rich’s] wife.” T.J. responds, “Nope. I have a girlfriend.”
  • When Tay-Roy asks Mott what the point of having a girlfriend who lives in Alabama is, Mott “simulates whacking off.” Mott later calls it “cybersex.”
  • Carly’s friend, Kristen, recounts her date with Barbour, a man who is known to be abusive. Kristen told Barbour something that upset him, and he said she “could make it up to him by having sex.” Kristen thought he was joking, but “all of a sudden he was unbuttoning my coat, and I [Kristen] was trying to get out and accidentally scratched his [Barbour’s] face . . . He kept telling me to strip, and I’d say no and he’d punch my arm . . . he just kept saying it faster and faster and hitting me before I could answer.”
  • J. describes the swim team’s new workouts. “We have put the supine surgical-tubing station (which Dan Hole began to call muscle masturbation – thereby placing him forever in Mott’s good graces) into mothballs, and now the guys simply line up in an endless forty-by-infinite-yard relay.”

Violence

  • J. throws himself over a fawn so two hunters can’t shoot it. “Wyberg and Barbour tried to peel me back, slapping the back of my head and kicking my ribs, and in the chaos the deer kicked a three-inch gash in my forehead.”
  • J.’s dad accidentally killed a baby, who crawled under his truck and got caught between the two rear tires. The baby’s mom “discovered a small severed arm lying next to the white line . . . maybe a hundred yards from where the truck spit out the rest of the little boy’s mangled hand.”
  • J.’s dad confronts Rich about stalking his wife, who has a restraining order on him. “He walks in and right up to Rich, shoving his fingers deep on either side of his Adambac, pushing the back of his head against the window.”
  • Rich shoots T.J.’s dad, killing him. “I [T.J.] glimpse the muzzle of the deer rifle . . . Dad instinctively dives directly into the path of the bullet. His body crashes to the pavement with a thud . . . I see blood leaking onto the pavement.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • J. says his birth mother was “getting heavily into crack and crank and heavily out of taking care of me.” She eventually decided to take him to his adoptive parents.
  • J. says Chris was “born addicted to crack cocaine.”
  • J. says his mother “may have been a little too ‘spiritual’ on mood-altering funstuff” when she named him “The Tao.”
  • Simet, T.J.’s English teacher, drinks a beer as he and T.J. eat pizza.
  • Simet orders a glass of wine while he and T.J. are at dinner.
  • J. thinks about his past. “When my bio-mom…was at the top of her druggie game, she would leave me for days, propped in the crib or the car seat . . . I’ve heard my mom say a thousand times that if you give her a drug-addicted mother with a kid under two, she’ll give you a ninety-five percent chance of that kid getting molested or beat or both.”
  • While the swim team is on their way home, the bus drives over ice and smashes into a ditch. Mott says, “Damn, I been on drug trips that weren’t that good.”
  • Rich shows up at T.J.’s house drunk, begging to see his wife.
  • J.’s foster mom says his biological mom was “launched on meth.”

Language

  • God, Jesus, for Christ’s sake, and Goddamn are frequently used as exclamations.
  • Profanity is used frequently. Profanity includes butt, dummy, shit, shitty, shitter, bullshit, shithead, chickenshit, hell, asshole, ass, ass wipe, hardass, smartass, prick, piss off, fuck, fucked-up, fuckin, damn, bitch, son of a bitch, nigger, chink, bastard, crap, and retard.
  • J. says a famous radio talk show gives the “hot poop on big-time crime fighting.”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • J. says the Cutter sports teams “pray before games.”
  • J. says the football players are “gods” at Cutter.
  • Coach Cutter goes to church.
  • J. talks about the irony of his dad acting like a saint, yet not being religious. “It’s funny. Dad doesn’t attend church, and it is seldom I hear his spiritual take on anything. But the running over of that little boy almost turned him into a saint, as far as public behavior goes.”
  • In the past, T.J. has a teacher who was “the new preacher at the Mountain Bible Center, and he ran his classroom the way I imagine he ran his church, with a holy iron fist.”
  • While doing an activity where he tries to make all the words he can from the word “Christmas,” Chris puts his own name above “Christ.” The teacher tells Chris he “can’t put [his] own name before the name of the Lord.” Chris responds by saying he was told “at Sunday school that Jesus liked kids and He was nice. So He wouldn’t mind.” As a punishment, the teacher made Chris stand up beside his desk and say “Chris Coughlin thinks he’s better than Jesus.”
  • J.’s dad says he was “mad at God” for letting him accidentally kill a baby.
  • J.’s dad talks about the first time he saw a photograph of the Earth that was taken from the moon. “From a physical point of view, God appeared a long ways off.”
  • Someone talks about how his mother’s old abusive boyfriend, Rance, used to babysit him. “Man, if you want to pass up purgatory and go straight to hell, you want to enroll in Rance Haskins’s Day Care.”
  • J. says it’s “as if the minor gods in charge of jerks are doing their job,” when he catches Rich violating the restraining order.
  • In a fit of rage, Rich shoots T.J.’s dad. As T.J.’s dad is dying, he tells T.J., “You’re going to have to forgive him, T.J. He had no idea what he was doing.” T.J. thinks, “That was Jesus’ last line.”

by Jill Johnson

Beautiful Wild

Vida Hazzard can see her future. Aboard the heralded “Millionaire’s Ship of the West,” she’ll charm the young scion Fitzhugh Farrar, resulting in a proposal of marriage.

But Vida didn’t plan on Fitz’s best friend Sal, a rough-around-the-edges boy with a talent for getting under her skin. Nor did she anticipate a hurricane dashing their ship and her dreams to pieces. Now stranded on an island with both Fitz and Sal, Vida is torn between the life she’s always planned for, and a future she’s never dared to want. As they desperately plot a course for home, Vida will discover which boy will capture her wild heart—and where her future truly lies.

Beautiful Wild has an interesting premise, but the predictable plot and spoiled protagonist make the story drag. First of all, Vida is a self-centered girl whose only goal is to snag Fitz as a husband, even though she has no genuine feelings for him. Vida longs for adventure but realizes “that the adventures of young women are adventures of the heart—or of husband-hunting. And that it was enough for you to see the heights of the world through the eyes of the man you would marry.” When Vida finally wins Fitz’s heart, she realizes her longing for clothes, parties, and acceptance in society means nothing to her. Unrealistically, she sails off into the sunset, alone and in search of her true love, Sal.

Even though the story is written in third person, Vida’s thoughts take center stage. Unfortunately, Vida’s conflicts are revealed through long-winded passages. In addition, readers may have a hard time relating to Vida because the girl is selfish and vain. Even after Vida learns that Fitz has been in a long-standing sexual relationship with his brother’s wife, Vida still wants to marry him so her own materialistic wants will be fulfilled. When Vida begins to have doubts, Vida’s mother reminds her of the importance of getting married, because if she doesn’t “your life will be aimless, and you won’t be anybody at all.”

Beautiful Wild has elements of a survival story as well as a romance but lacks action and character development. Vida’s two love interests are so undeveloped that the love triangle lacks suspense. However, readers will come away from reading Beautiful Wild with a new understanding of the restrictive lives women had in the past. The ending is predictable and lacks an emotional impact. Readers who like to understand a character’s inner musings may like Beautiful Wild. However, if you’re looking for a heartfelt romance or an action-packed survival story, Beautiful Wild will leave you disappointed.

Sexual Content

  • It’s revealed that Fitz had a sexual relationship with his brother’s wife.
  • Vida goes to find Fitz in the hopes that “Fitz would kiss her.”
  • Fitz kisses Vida. “His face moved toward hers, his chin tilted—in a moment she would close her eyes to accept his kiss. His hands spread over her waist, and she felt the press of his mouth against hers, and the warmth of his breath, and the pump of his heart.”
  • Vida asks Sal why he didn’t try to kiss her. She thinks, “It had been so easy to get Whiting, and Bill, and Theodore to kiss her—why should Sal be so difficult?”
  • After Fitz returns with help, he tells Vida, “When I was on that raft, in the storm, when the sea was all around me and we seemed certain to drown, I kept thinking of your lips, and I thought that if I could only steer her true, I’d survive and I’d be able to kiss you again.” Fitz then gives Vida a “chaste kiss just slightly off the mark of her mouth.”
  • Before her upcoming marriage, Vida seeks out Sal. “And then quite unexpectedly her fingers fluttered up, brushed his lips, his jaw, gently pinched his earlobe. . . Her mouth found his mouth. . . Then he returned the pressure of her kiss, and she knew what it was to want and be wanted in equal measure.”
  • Later, Vida thinks about kissing Sal and wonders “what the next kiss would have been like, and the one after that.”

Violence

  • Their ship sinks and Camilla’s husband dies. Vida sees Camilla “as she tried to protect the body splayed on the beach. A dead body.”

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • A gossip columnist writes that “the heir to the shipping fortune drank more than his older brother thought proper.”
  • Vida has a hangover after drinking a “hideous quantity of champagne.”
  • When the ship is ready to depart, “champagne bottles popped. . . cheers erupted.”
  • While at parties and on the ship, Vida drinks champagne.
  • Vida thinks about all of the gentlemen in a room. One man was “liable to drink too much and become boorish.”
  • Fitz tells Vida that when they are saved, the two of them will “play bridge, and we’ll have cocoa and whiskey and we’ll dance.”
  • When Fitz scolds Vida, no one notices because “everyone was a little drunk.”
  • When Vida’s father talks about her upcoming marriage, Vida stops him. “Her Father—Vida supposed—made a gesture that implied she’d been too free with the passing trays of champagne last night.”
  • At her engagement party, someone finds Vida upset. The person tells her to “have some sherry to fortify you for the rest of the night.” Vida drinks brandy, which “stung her mouth and snapped her back to this place.” As the night progresses, Vida drinks enough to have a hangover the next day.

Language

  • Damn is used five times. Vida is afraid that she will never get the tangles out of her hair. She says, “Tomorrow I will cut the damn braid off.”
  • My God and oh God are both used as an exclamation once.
  • Vida calls someone a bastard.

Supernatural

  • When someone gives Vida a knife, her mother tells her, “If you accept a blade as a wedding gift, it means the marriage will fail.”

Spiritual Content

  • Vida’s lady’s maid tries to hide the champagne glasses from Vida’s father. When he leaves the room, she says, “Oh thank God.”
  • The ship passengers hold a funeral service for a man who died. The man’s brother says, “He is with God now. May his soul be at rest.”
  • After the ship sinks, Vida is worried about a friend. She prays, “God, please, let her still be [alive].”
  • The surviving passengers are forced to hide in a cave. Vida “had prayed for the night to end.”

Defiance #1

Girls in Baalboden learn to be submissive and obey their male Protectors. While other girls learn how to sew dresses, Rachel’s father has been teaching her to survive in the wilderness and wield a sword. When her father, Jared, doesn’t return from a courier mission, everything changes for Rachel. When her father is declared dead, Rachel is assigned a new protector: her father’s apprentice. Now Rachel is commanded to obey Logan, the boy who rejected her two years ago. Rather than meekly obey, Rachel is determined to find her father and prove that he survived the Wasteland.

Logan is many things: orphan, outcast, inventor, apprentice to the city’s top courier. Logan is focused on learning his trade so he can escape the tyranny of Baalboden. But his plan never included being responsible for his mentor’s impulsive daughter. Logan is determined to protect her, but when his escape plan goes wrong and Rachel pays the price, he realizes he has more at stake than disappointing his mentor.

As Rachel and Logan battle their way through the Wasteland, stalked by a monster that can’t be killed and an army of assassins out for blood, they discover romance, heartbreak, and a truth that will incite a war decades in the making.

Even though Rachel is headstrong and capable of defending herself, she is not a very likable character. Rachel often acts impulsively, which almost leads to her death. She is forced to go into the Wasteland with Melkin. When Melkin attacks her, Rachel kills him. Afterwards, she is overcome by guilt because she believes that Melkin wouldn’t have killed her. Although Rachel’s feeling of guilt is understandable, her reasoning doesn’t make sense. This is just one of many frustrating inconsistencies in this story that just don’t make sense.

While Defiance has some action-packed scenes, too much time is devoted to Rachel finding her father and then returning to the city. When Rachel finally makes it to her destination, she learns that her father has died, but left her a package, which Logan is supposed to destroy. Because of this, Rachel’s long journey into the Wasteland and back to Baalboden seems pointless.

Defiance jumps back and forth between Rachel’s and Logan’s points of view. Even though this allows the reader to understand both of their thoughts, readers may still have a hard time relating to either character. Much of the plot is devoted to the characters’ inner monologues, which revolve around their feelings for each other. Many of their troubles could have been easily prevented if they would have talked to each other. In addition, Logan is inconsiderate, controlling, and only thinks about himself. Unfortunately, there is little to like about Rachel or Logan.

The predictable villain, the characters’ inner monologues, and the plot inconsistencies will frustrate readers. The world building is so vague that it does little to add to the dystopian plot. Unfortunately, Defiance is an underdeveloped, forgettable story. If you’re looking for a must read end-of-the-world novel, you should leave Defiance on the shelf and instead read The Host by Stephanie Myer.

 Sexual Content

  • Logan almost kisses Rachel. His “gaze wanders to her lips, and I can’t see anything but a thin trail of water gliding over her skin, gathering at the corner of her mouth, then slowly drifting toward her neck. . . I ache to press her against the wall and taste her.”
  • Rachel thinks about Logan. “I remember the intensity in Logan’s eyes as we leaned close to each other in his kitchen. The way his hand felt pressed against my skin.”
  • When Rachel is too distraught to speak, Logan is worried that she’s “been violated.”
  • Logan notices Rachel’s breast. “The neckline dips down and curves over breasts I didn’t realize until just this minute were so . . . substantial. I force my eyes to scrape over her trim waist, but in seconds I’m staring once more at the way the glittering line of thread along her neckline barely contains her.”
  • Logan and Rachel kiss multiple times. For example, while cleaning off in a lake, Rachel and Logan kiss. “His kiss is rough, tastes like lake water. . . and is the best thing I’ve ever felt. I press against him, consuming him like I’ll never get enough, and when we break apart, my pulse pounds against my ear. . .” The scene is described over a page.
  • Logan grabs Rachel and pulls her close. Logan “can’t hear anything beyond the pounding of my heart and the soft catch of Rachel’s breath as I fist my hands in the back of her tunic and pull her against me like I can’t stand to have a single sliver of air between us.” The three pages of description imply that Logan and Rachel have sex.

Violence

  • When Rachel argues with the Commander, “he grabs a handful of her hair and twists her around to face him. . . She hisses a quick gasp of pain but meets his eyes without flinching.”
  • Logan frequently thinks back to his mother’s death. She was killed when she left the house without male supervision. Logan thinks about the Commander’s “whip falling in cruel precision across my mother’s back . . . my mother’s broken body lying lifeless at the Commander’s feet.”
  • Rachel attempts to leave the compound. A guard begins to follow her. Logan takes a “leap forward, slam my fist into the side of his head, and drag his unconscious body back under the lip of the roof.” Both Rachel and Logan are captured.
  • After the Commander captures Rachel and Logan, a guard “lays the edge of his sword against my [Rachel’s] neck. I raise my chin as the silver bites into my skin, but I refuse to beg for mercy.” At one point, the commander “swings his sword until the tip digs into the soft skin beneath my [Rachel’s] chin. . . The pain is sharp and quick, and a hot trickle of blood slowly snakes its way down my neck.” The Commander eventually lets the two go. The scene is described over five pages.
  • Rachel and Logan ignore the Commander’s orders and the Brute Squad grabs Rachel. “The Commander’s sword plunges deep into the chest of the guard beside me. The man makes a wet gurgling noise in the back of his throat as he reaches up to grasp the blade embedded in his chest. Blood pools beneath his palm and slides along the silver in a single, sinuous streak as he slowly crumples to the floor.”
  • The Cursed One attacks. “It looks like a huge wingless dragon, nearly half the height of the wall, and just as thick. . .” The citizens try to get back into the city wall. The Commander “slashes with the whip, driving people into the side of the wall. One man can’t move out of his way fast enough, and the Commander rides over the top of him. The man lies crumpled and still in the Commander’s wake.” Many people are killed, but their deaths are not described.
  • In order to get Rachel to obey, the Commander shows Rachel someone covered in cloth. He “smiles and drives his sword into the lump. Whoever is trapped beneath the cloth sucks in a raspy breath and moans. Blood blossoms beneath the cloth and spreads like a fast-blooming rose.” When the cloth is removed, Rachel sees her grandfather Oliver, who dies from his wounds.
  • Rachel and Logan are walking home when three drunk men try to rob them. Rachel freaks out and “she whips her knife out of its sheath, raises it above her head, and rushes toward the men. . .” Logan jumps in and “slam[s] the butt of my sword into the man closest to me, whirl to block a blow from the other. . .” After a brief struggle, the men run away.
  • While at a ceremony, Rachel defies the Commander. He “let’s go of my arm to backhand me across the face. I tumble to the floor and see Logan, sword raised, face ablaze, charge the Commander.” People begin to run as Logan “drives his shoulder into the first guard who reaches him, sends the man flying off the stage, and whirls to block the sword thrust of another.”
  • Rachel joins the fight and “a guard jumps in front of me. I drive my knife through his stomach, twist it to the right, and yank it free while he’s still in the act of telling me to halt. Crimson splashes onto my pretty blue skirt.”
  • The Commander catches Logan and, “In seconds, he has his sword against Logan’s neck, and his vicious smile twists his scar into an ugly, knotted ball of picked flesh.” Several guards die. Rachel threatens to kill herself, so the Commander doesn’t kill Logan.
  • The Commander throws Logan into prison. The two men argue and the Commander “lunges for me [Logan], but I duck back. Swinging the chains up, I wrap them around his arm. One swift jerk and I fling him onto the filthy floor of the cell. He lands hard, and I drive my knee into his back, but the guards outside the cell are already on me.” The guards repeatedly hit Logan. “Pain flares to life within me, and it’s all I can do to curl up in a ball and endure as the guards use me as their punching bag.”
  • The Commander brands Logan’s neck. “The smell of scorched skin fills the air, and I retch as brilliant spots dance in front of my eyes. I drag in a deep breath and try to ride out the worst of the agony, but it refuses to abate.”
  • While looking for Rachel in the wasteland, Logan finds a soldier on guard duty. When the man hears him, Logan drops “to my knees, grab the dagger in my boot, and thrust it up as his momentum drives his abdomen onto my blade.”
  • The Commander sends Rachel and Melkin into the Wasteland to retrieve a package. Once they find the package, Melkin tries to take it from Rachel. “He’s in the air, long legs dropping down, his face a mask of murderous intent. I broke his right wrist. The weapon must be in his left hand. . . Flipping my blade around, I push myself off the ground and bury my knife deep into his chest. . . His blood seeps along the knife hilt, thick and warm, and coats my hand.” Melkin dies.
  • Logan knows that a tracker is hunting Rachel. The tracker “turns, but he’s too late. I slam into him, wrap my hands around his throat, and drive both of us onto the ground. . . His knife arm goes up, and his eyes lock on mine, but before I can react, an arrow sinks into the narrow space between his eyes with a soft thud. He shudders, his body sags. . .”
  • The Cursed One attacks a battalion. “The beast rears back, swings its head to the left, and strafes the line of Rowansmark soldiers with fire. The flames incinerate most of them on the spot, but a few fall to the ground wailing in agony.”
  • In the multi-chapter conclusion, the Cursed One attacks a city. “Fire leaps from the creature’s mouth. Two members of the Brute Squad are incinerated and then crushed beneath the thing’s monstrous length as it races forward.”
  • Logan can hear “the citizens in the East Quarter are screaming in agony . . . And through it all, the monstrous shape of the Cursed One coils, lashing out with its tail to crush wagons, buildings, and people.”
  • Logan and a group of people throw jars filled with explosives. When they hit the Cursed One the explosives “blow a section of its tail to pieces.”

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • When Logan goes into a tavern, the owner, “slaps a heavy wooden mug filled with ale in front of me, though I haven’t ordered a drink.”
  • Logan mentions a man who “can’t hold his liquor.”
  • While in prison, someone gives Logan medicine to help relieve his pain.

Language

  • Rachel wants Oliver to leave the city. Oliver says, “I aim to be great-granddaddy, if that takes riding an ass across a godforsaken wilderness. I guess that’s what I’ll do.”
  • Hell is used once.

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • When the Commander forces Rachel to agree to his plan, she prays that “I’m not making the biggest mistake of my life.”
  • When the Commander shows Rachel a man covered in a cloth, she “prayed it would be a stranger.”
  • During a fight, Rachel prays “Logan isn’t already dead.”
  • Rachel accidentally tells Logan that he is handsome. Then she prays “he’ll change the subject.”
  • When the Cursed One attacks, Logan prays “the citizens there heard the screaming of their neighbors and had enough warning to start running.”

 

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

Written originally as Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You is the exploration of racism in the United States since before the founding of America. The book is remixed for younger audiences by prolific author and the Library of Congress’s National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Jason Reynolds. The fast-paced book explores the history of racism and how we can build an antiracist present and future.

Reynolds makes it clear that Stamped is not a history book, but instead a book about racism in present times. Although there is plenty of history described, he pulls the essentials from Kendi’s book and brings these historical events and people to life for younger readers. He shows how racist thoughts have persisted through time and affect everyone today. Most importantly, he uses Kendi’s definitions of segregationists, assimilationists, and antiracists to explore various thoughts about race, race relations, and racist ideas.

Reynolds breaks down the three terms by saying, “The antiracists try to transform racism. The assimilationists try to transform Black people. The segregationists try to get away from Black people.” Reynolds’ ability to bring difficult topics to a level that young teens can understand is remarkable, as racism is so prevalent and widespread across the United States and the world.

Despite Reynolds’ sense of humor and smooth-flowing writing, Stamped is not a cheery book, nor is it supposed to be. The history of racism is terrible; terrible things have happened and still happen – a point which Reynolds and Kendi make throughout. There is are discussions about mass incarceration, lynching, slavery, and kidnapping – all of which pertain to the history of racism. They also analyze major players in the Civil Rights movement, some of which fall into the assimilationist category, and others into the antiracist category.

Racism exists, and Reynolds and Kendi ask that people become antiracist in thought and in practice. Hope is a strong thread that pulls the novel together, despite the atrocities committed because of racist beliefs and policies. If people can become antiracist, the future can be so much brighter for many people who have faced oppression. Everyone should read Stamped because it isn’t a history book; it’s a guide to a better way of being and treating people.

Sexual Content

  • Reynolds breaks down a scene from the book of Genesis in the Bible, discussing how Noah orders his “white sons not to have sex with their wives on the ark, and then tells them that the first child born after the flood would inherit the earth. When the evil, tyrannical, and hypersexual Ham has sex on the ark, God wills that Ham’s descendants will be dark and disgusting, and the whole world will look at them as symbols of trouble.”
  • It was not uncommon for slave owners to start “breeding slaves. . . [Thomas Jefferson] and other like-minded slave owners began forcing their men and women slaves to conceive children so that they, the owners, could keep up with all the demands of the Deep South.”

Violence

  • Reynolds and Kendi detail the racial violence that has occurred throughout history and in present times. They often discuss topics such as murder, slavery, and incarceration, as well as a host of other atrocities. For instance, “Young Black males were twenty-one times more likely to be killed by police than their White counterparts between 2010 and 2012, according to federal statistics.” Other details of violence are frequently shared throughout the book.
  • Reynolds also discusses violence against Native Americans. For example, he talks about Metacomet, “a Native American war leader, [who] was killed, which basically ended the battle in 1676. Puritans cut up his body as if it were a hog’s, and paraded his remains around Plymouth.”
  • Reynolds describes the movie The Birth of a Nation, where, “A Black man (played by a White man in blackface) tries to rape a White woman” who then “jumps off a cliff and kills herself,” and “Klansmen avenge her death.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Reynolds writes about tobacco as a major cash crop in the American South prior to the founding of the country.
  • There is a discussion about the “War on Drugs” and “crack babies” in their relation to racism and racist government policies.

Language

  • Based on historical context, language is used to dehumanize Black people is scattered throughout the book. The language describes the growth and pervasiveness of racism. Reynolds, for instance, discusses the thoughts of Italian philosopher Lucilio Vanini, who said that “Africans were born of a ‘different Adam,’ and had a different creation story. Of course, this would mean they were a different species. It was kind of like saying that Africans weren’t actually human . . . Africans went from savages to SAVAGES, which revved up the necessity for Christian conversion and civilizing.”
  • Racial slurs are used in historical context. For instance, Reynolds talks about a group of artists that emerged out of the Harlem Renaissance that referred to themselves as the “Niggerati. They believed they should be able to make whatever they wanted to express themselves as whole humans without worrying about White acceptance.”

Supernatural

  • Reynolds describes Curse Theory, saying, “In 1577, after noticing that Inuit people in northeastern Canada were darker than the people living in the hotter south, English travel writer George Best determined . . . that it couldn’t have been climate that made darker people inferior, and instead determined that Africans were, in fact, cursed . . . And what did Best use to prove this theory? Only one of the most irrefutable books of the time: the Bible.”
  • Reynolds talks about witches and witchcraft. Reynolds writes, “[Cotton] Mather wrote a book called Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions . . . Mather’s book, outlining the symptoms of witchcraft, reflected his crusade against the enemies of White souls.” This book launched the Salem witch hunt of 1692.

Spiritual Content

  • Reynolds uses comparisons to make history digestible and sometimes includes religious descriptors. Gomes Eanes de Zurara wrote propaganda for Prince Henry to encourage the slave trade. For instance, Zurara “made Prince Henry out to be some kind of youth minister canvassing the street, doing community work, when what Prince Henry really was, was more of a gangster.”
  • Reynolds describes the links between racism and Christianity, and many times the Bible is referenced. For instance, at one point Reynolds says, “Zurara’s documentation of the racist idea that Africans needed slavery in order to be fed and taught Jesus, and that it was all ordained by God, began to seep in and stick to the European cultural psyche.”
  • Reynolds discusses Puritans. He says, “They were English Protestants who believed the reformation of the Church of England was basically watering down Christianity, and they sought to regulate it to keep it more disciplined and rigid.”

by Alli Kestler

Komi Can’t Communicate Volume 1

Socially anxious high school student Shoko Komi’s greatest dream is to make some friends, but everyone at school mistakes her crippling social anxiety for cool reserve. With the whole student body keeping their distance and Komi unable to utter a single word, friendship might be forever beyond her reach.

Timid Tadano is a total wallflower, and that’s just the way he likes it. But all of that changes when he finds himself alone in a classroom on the first day of high school with the legendary Komi. He quickly realizes she isn’t aloof — she’s just super awkward. Now he’s made it his mission to help her on her quest to make 100 friends!

Anyone who’s ever been afraid to speak up will relate to Komi, who freezes every time someone talks to her. The socially awkward girl has a conversation with Tadano by writing back and forth on a whiteboard. This conversation helps the reader understand Komi’s inability to talk to others. While Tadano’s desire to help Komi become friends with others is endearing, part of the reason he wants to help Komi is because he finds her beautiful. Despite this, Tadano shows how two people’s friendship can bloom into something beautiful.

The black and white illustrations are adorable and portray the socially awkward girl and her interactions with others with humor. Each page has 1 to 11 simple sentences which appear in quote boxes. Square boxes are also used to show characters and general information. The illustrations help show Komi’s nervousness by showing her tremble.

While Komi Can’t Communicate focuses on Komi, the story also shows other awkward situations that arise because of miscommunication. Through Komi’s experiences, the reader will see the pitfalls of making assumptions about others. The story highlights this lesson by comparing the difference between what Komi is thinking and what others are thinking. With Tadano’s help, Komi begins to communicate with some of her classmates, which allows them to understand her difficulty talking.

Anyone who has ever had difficultly speaking up will relate to Komi. The anime art, the relatable conflict, and the easy-to-read vocabulary make Komi Can’t Communicate accessible to all readers. Readers will enjoy both the artwork and the plot. Readers who have social anxieties like Komi’s will want to put Guts by Raina Telgemeier and After Zero by Christina Collins on their must-read list.

Sexual Content

  • There are a few lewd jokes. For example, Osana asks Tadano, “Shall I sate your lust with my body?”
  • Osana’s sexual identity is unclear. Tadano is confused when he sees Osana in a dress. He says, “In junior high, you were a boy, weren’t you? In a boy’s uniform.”

Violence

  • None

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • When a girl sees Tadano talking to Komi, she says he shouldn’t talk to Komi because he is a “scumbag” and “less than horse poop.”
  • When Komi and Tadano are talking, a girl thinks, “I can’t bash him in front of her highness Komi, but I wish that scumbag would get lost.”
  • While playing a game, Tadano thinks he is “watching idiots.”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • A girl hides from Komi in a bathroom stall. The girl prays to God, Buddha, and Komi. She says, “Please! I’ll do anything you want! Just go easy on me!” When Komi leaves the bathroom, the girl says, “The divinities answered my prayers.”
  • The students think being the student body president isn’t “grand enough” for Komi so they decide that “Komi’s position is God.”

Blood Relatives

The absolute last thing goth-girl Raven and her vampire boyfriend, Alexander, need is another hitch in their nighttime-only romance—but dark trouble hovers on the horizon when Raven and Alexander discover four freshly dug graves filled with empty coffins. When a crew of sketchy vampires takes up residence in Dullsville’s lonely graveyard, Alexander finds this motley bunch led by his very own blood-sucking cousin, Claude Sterling. Shocking! Claude and his creepy crew can only spell out more problems for the pair, especially when Raven finds them in daylight in the very last place she could ever imagine. What could Claude and his invaders be doing—or searching for—in Dullsville?

Blood Relatives is based on a YA vampire romance novel that falls under the Vampire Kisses umbrella. Readers will find that the graphic novel Blood Relatives does not follow the same plot as any of the other novels. However, while Blood Relatives is extremely short and lacking in plot, it introduces all of the main characters and villains.

Even though Blood Relatives focuses on Raven and the vampire Alexander’s relationship, Alexander spends most of his time trying to keep Raven safe. However, she is determined to find answers to the mystery, even if that means putting herself in danger. While teens may like the protective Alexander, some of the plot is unrealistic, such as when Alexander’s cousin Claude drags Raven down the school’s hallway and grabs her hair, but none of the students or teachers notice the abuse. In addition, no one questions why four new students, who are all the same age, enroll in school on the same day.

Readers will enjoy the manga artwork, especially Raven’s fashionable goth clothes which include skull barrettes. While most of the black and white artwork is beautiful, some of the pictures do not feel finished. For example, in one picture Raven is crying but her eyes are empty and her face is poorly sketched. In addition, in one picture a “Cool Pax” is magically staying over her eye. Each page has eleven or fewer words. While some of the text is in quote bubbles, other text is printed in black with a white border that makes the text difficult to read.

The simple plot and vocabulary make the graphic novel a quick read. If you’re looking for well-developed characters and a unique plot, Blood Relatives will be a disappointment. However, if you want to bite into a vampire romance that is pure entertainment, add Blood Relatives to your reading list. Make sure you have the second book in the series ready because the first installment ends with a cliffhanger.

Sexual Content

  • Raven kisses her vampire boyfriend three times. “One night at the mansion we sealed our date with a heart-meltingly passionate kiss.”
  • While at school, Raven walks by two kids kissing in the hallway.

Violence

  • Raven runs away from a group of vampires that want to get information from her. One of the vampires grabs Raven by the hair and says, “like perhaps, at your house. . . for a midnight snack.”

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • A group of half-mortal, half-vampires are looking for vials filled “with centuries-old pure vampire blood.” The blood would make them complete vampires.

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

The Cupcake Queen

When her mom decides to leave Manhattan and open a cupcake bakery in Hog’s Hollow, Penny gets dragged along. She doesn’t know how she’ll survive high school without her lifelong friends and big-city comforts. To make matters worse, her father is staying behind, and her mom isn’t talking about what the future holds for them. And as if that weren’t enough, Penny’s clumsiness leads to a cupcake-avalanche mishap at the Queen Bee’s birthday party, which instantly makes her a social pariah.

But small-town life isn’t all bad. Penny finds bright spots in Hog’s Hollow—like her art class and her free-spirited friend Tally. Then there’s Marcus, the cute and enigmatic boy who is always running on the beach. . . and into Penny. Just when Penny is settling in, her parents ask her to make a choice that will turn everything upside down again.

Told from Penny’s point of view, The Cupcake Queen focuses on small-time life in Hog’s Hollow. Anyone who has been a target of bullying will relate to Penny as she tries to find her place in a new town. Penny struggles with the changes in her life, including her parents’ separation. Like many teens, Penny is frustrated that her parents are keeping secrets from her, especially since their decisions have a huge impact on her life.

The story also shines a light on the importance of dealing with loss. Even though Penny’s parents are alive, she feels neglected by a father who doesn’t have time for her. Penny’s friend Tally lives with her aunt because her musician father’s career is more important than her. Meanwhile, Marcus still grieves his mother’s death. Even though each character has faced the loss of a parent differently, the book acknowledges that sometimes, “Life can be pretty hard. . . I’d like to tell you it gets easier, but it doesn’t. It just gets different.”

While The Cupcake Queen has some predictable factors such as a mean girl, a cute boy, and an eccentric friend, the characters are relatable and likable. Tally adds a dash of spice to the story, while Marcus adds a little romance that doesn’t go past holding hands. The Cupcake Queen doesn’t sugarcoat events that are confusing and hurtful. Instead, both Penny and Tally learn that “at some point you just have to let go of what you thought should happen and live in what is happening.”

Middle school readers who want a character-driven story with a sprinkle of romance will enjoy The Cupcake Queen. Penny’s story continues in the holiday-themed book Frosted Kisses. Readers may also want to add How to Steal a Dog by Barbara O’Connor and The Dog Who Lost His Bark by Eoin Colfer to their reading list. Both are engaging stories that skip the romance and focus on parental problems.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • None

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • Someone calls manure “cream of crap.”
  • In a yearbook, someone drew over Penny’s mother. “You know, the usual—glasses, mustache, black teeth. Underneath the photo someone crossed out her name and wrote in Hog’s Hollow Ho.” Penny’s friend tells her, “Don’t let those morons get to you.”
  • A mean girl calls Penny a loser and stupid.

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

The Maddie Diaries

Maddie Ziegler knew one day she’d be a star—she just didn’t know how soon that day would come. At just eight years old, she was cast on Lifetime’s hit reality show Dance Moms and quickly won the hearts of fans everywhere with her natural talent and determination. Soon, she was capturing attention from all over—including pop superstar Sia, who cast her as her dance double in the incredibly popular music video for her hit song “Chandelier.” The rest, as they say, was history.

For the first time, Maddie has chronicled every minute of her exciting ride so fans can experience it with her. Besides sharing her tips and advice on everything from style and beauty to friendship and crushes, Maddie wants to inspire readers to follow their passion as well. “Everyone has a talent and a gift; everyone can make an impact. We are the future, and there is nothing that we can’t do if we put our minds to it.”

Each short chapter ends with a Dear Maddie section that has questions from teens. Maddie answers each question with encouraging words. In addition, Maddie includes a list of things to do each day such as going tech free, volunteering, or making funny faces in the mirror. Some chapters have short passages written by famous people Maddie knows; these all focus on Maddie’s positive attributes. The book also contains thirty pages of pictures of Maddie dancing, hanging out with her friends, and meeting celebrities.

While Maddie tells her story, she gives positive advice. She reminds readers that they don’t have to be perfect and that everyone will make mistakes. Even though The Maddie Diaries has good advice, the book is all about self-promotion. Maddie talks all about her positive traits, her talents, her experiences, and the famous people she has met. She takes every opportunity to remind readers that she has met many famous people. For example, Maddie writes, “Sia always tells me you have to take time off, step back, and appreciate the moment.”

Unfortunately, Maddie doesn’t give specific information about the hardships she’s faced. The story lacks depth, which makes her advice sound shallow—“try harder, don’t give up, and you can make your dreams come true.” Maddie attributes her success to her responsible nature and her hard work. However, she never acknowledges that much of her success came because other people helped her along the way. For example is when she was shooting a film, her mom couldn’t stay with her so other people helped out by taking turns chaperoning her. Instead, Maddie complains that shopping in her hometown isn’t nearly as fun as shopping at expensive name-brand stores in Los Angeles.

If you are not already a fan of Maddie Ziegler, you may find her look-at-how-great-I-am attitude annoying. Instead of writing an in-depth profile of herself, Maddie gives cliché advice and shallow stories that focus on how wonderful she is. If you’re a fan of the reality TV show Dance Moms, you might enjoy The Maddie Diaries. However, if you’re looking for a motivational autobiography, The Maddie Diaries will be a disappointing read.

Sexual Content

  • During a dance, Maddie had to “kiss a boy in front of millions on national TV. . . every time we rehearsed, we had to actually lock lips.”

Violence

  • None

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

 

Tales from Shakespeare

Tales from Shakespeare takes a trip through 10 of Shakespeare’s plays covering the gamut of plots. From lighter stories such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream to stormier plots like Macbeth, Packer does a thorough job portraying the range that Shakespeare had with his pen.

Shakespeare is often cautioned when given to readers as it can be hard to get through, but this book helps to break down that barrier. Packer tells Shakespeare’s stories in her own words while seamlessly weaving excerpts into the process. This method of storytelling removes the intimidation factor that Shakespeare can sometimes have with new readers without forfeiting the ingenious wordsmithing that the Bard is known for.

Perhaps as enticing as the beautiful stories are the incredible artwork that sits between the pages. Packer recruits a different illustrator for each of the plays, and each has vastly different styles. The variety of artwork is all too fitting for stories with vastly different plots. The illustrations serve as milestones when flipping through the book urging one to continue reading to reach the next scene. With highly detailed illustrations in high resolution, one finds themselves looking at the portrayed landscapes and characters and feeling a sense of escape. Illustrations appear every 10-15 pages, often at the beginning of a new story. Having such detailed imagery only seems fitting for literature that was intended to have a visual aspect as well. Originally, one would be listening to these stories while watching it unfold in the spotlight. This book simulates that feeling with the interplay of visual art and literature. Tales from Shakespeare feeds one’s fictitious hunger and lets one’s imagination roam.

It is a known fact that some of the topics covered in Shakespeare’s plays could be harsh for a younger audience. The original stories have sexual innuendos, violence, and strong language, and Tales of Shakespeare does not remove those topics. Packer does not alter the stories, but she does not dwell on graphic details that are portrayed in a matter-of-fact way. If someone dies, she mentions it, but she does not use the moment to leverage a reaction from the reader. The focus of this book is to welcome as many readers into the “Shakespearean fold” as possible by introducing his command of the human experience. The theme that ties these stories together is the timelessness of these plays, and how they have the power to cause one’s eyes to well up hundreds of years later.

Tales of Shakespeare is the perfect introduction to Elizabethan England, 17th-century English dialect, and Shakespeare’s stories. Shakespeare’s stories are timeless, and they have spoken to people throughout the ages. This book would serve as an excellent resource as an introduction to how plays are read and how they are formatted. The book includes the plays A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, The Tempest, Othello, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and King Lear. Tales of Shakespeare covers some of Shakespeare’s greatest works and the prowess of the Bard is made accessible through this book.

Sexual Content

  • Don Pedro and Claudio see, “A woman leaning out of Hero’s window kissing another man.” They believe Hero is cheating.
  • Romeo and Juliet are “laying in each other’s arms” and he is “sealing her lips with a kiss.”
  • Othello thought his wife looked so beautiful sleeping. “He could not resist giving her one last kiss . . . and then another . . . and then another.”

Violence

  • Hermia’s father threatens her with death if she doesn’t marry the Duke.
  • After Hamlet has slain Polonius, “the bloody corpse of old Polonius slumped forward.”
  • After being weighed down by her dress, Ophelia drowns in the river.
  • Hamlet and Laertes duel and at the end “both men now bleed.”
  • Hero fakes his death in order to test the love of Claudio.
  • Beatrice orders Claudio’s death and that Benedick should duel him. They do not duel and Claudio is unharmed.
  • Macbeth goes into Duncan’s chambers when he is sleeping and “plunged both daggers into the king’s chest” and fled “still clutching the gory blades.”
  • After Macbeth kills Duncan, Lady Macbeth is unsuccessfully trying to wash the stain of a bloody spot. “Here’s the smell of blood still.”
  • Macduff and Macbeth duel and Macbeth is slain. Macbeth realizes he was the king to fall and dies in regret after “blade met flesh.”
  • In an ambush, “Roderigo leaped from the shadows and jabbed a knife in the back of Cassio’s chest.”
  • Othello “pressed a cushion over his wife’s face, smothering her.”
  • Oliver offers a blood-soaked rag to Rosalind. Rosalind faints at the sight of it.
  • Mercutio “stumbles backward” and is slain by Tybalt. Tybalt is then slain by Romeo in revenge. “He wildly fought and the sword found its mark.”
  • Romeo drinks poison given to him by the friar. He believes Juliet to be dead and kills himself. Juliet wakes up to see her lover dead and says, “Oh happy dagger! This is thy sheath. There rust and let me die.” She proceeds to stab herself in the heart and falls next to her husband, Romeo.
  • Cornwall plucks out Gloucester’s eye saying “out, vile jelly” and then proceeds to pluck the other one out. Regan then “leaned over Gloucester’s bloody, unseeing face.”
  • Gloucester tries to take his own life by jumping off a cliff, but is unsuccessful. He swears to never do it again. He later dies from grief and from having his eyes taken out.
  • Goneril’s steward is “struck down” by Edgar after turning on him.
  • Regan dies from being poisoned by Goneril, and Goneril, who is overcome with grief, stabs herself.
  • Edmund orders both King Lear and Cordelia to die. Although it is not described, he is successful in killing Cordelia. When Lear sees his daughter dead, he is overcome with grief and dies as well.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Claudius promised to serve Hamlet a “goblet of poisoned wine for good measure.”
  • Queen Gertrude, the king, and Laertes are poisoned by wine.
  • Stephano, the king’s butler, “washed ashore with a case of wine and had spent the last hour swigging from a bottle.” He meets Caliban and he gets drunk as well.
  • Cassio gets drunk and gets into a fight with Roderigo.
  • Toby makes a drunken effort to draw his sword, but Maria crafts a plan to distract him.

Language

  • Polonius says to Ophelia, “You speak like an immature girl.”
  • “Get thee to a nunnery!” Hamlet says to Ophelia
  • Lady Macbeth yells “out damned spot” when trying to clean the blood from her hands.
  • Macduff shouts, “Turn hellhound, turn!”
  • Caliban says to Stephano, “What a thrice-double ass was I to take this drunkard for a god.”
  • Iago says to Roderigo “after all, it’s only natural that she tire of that ugly moor.”
  • In a rage against Desdemona, Othello says to kill her. “No, damn her, lewd minx.”
  • “Oh dishonorable, vile submission!… Wretched boy.” Tybalt exclaimed to Mercutio.
  • King Lear calls Goneril and Regan “unnatural hags.”

Supernatural

  • Puck gives Bottom a Donkey head.
  • Demetrius has a love potion cast upon him that makes him love Hermia.
  • Hamlet sees his father’s ghost and says that his father was murdered. His ghostly father makes him swear to avenge his murder and kill his uncle.
  • The three witches in Macbeth predict the future and the eventual demise of Macbeth. They create a potion and finish each other’s sentences.
  • Macbeth sees the ghost of Duncan at the dinner table, and others believe Macbeth is mad.
  • Caliban is an enslaved, scaled creature and the son of the witch Sycorax.
  • Prospero has strong magical powers, a book of charms, and creates the Tempest.
  • “’My daughter, O my daughter,’ Brabantio wailed. ‘Stolen from me and corrupted by spells.’” Brabantio goes on to accuse Othello of witchcraft.

Spiritual Content

  • Beatrice says, “God give you joy.”
  • As Hamlet dies, Horatio says, “Flights of angels sing to thy rest.”
  • “Oh let me not be mad, sweet heaven,” said King Lear who feared for his sanity.
  • After seeing Cordelia dead, the distraught King Lear says, “The Heaven’s vault should crack.”

by Paul Gordon

 

Wonder Woman: Tempest Tossed

Wonder Woman: Tempest Tossed follows Diana of Themyscira (AKA Wonder Woman), a sixteen-year-old who leaves her home island and learns about the modern world. Diana is the only child on her island, which is full of powerful, immortal Amazon women. With no one to share in her experiences, Diana has often felt lonely and confused while going through puberty. Even so, she lives an enjoyable life. The Amazons are happy and ensure that everyone is well-fed and cared for.

When boats full of refugees wash up on the shores of Themyscira, the Amazon women chase them off in order to protect their border. Diana, though, is determined to see the refugees to safety and accompanies them off the island and into the mortal world.

They land in a refugee camp in the Middle East, where Diana sees war, poverty, sickness, and cruelty. Her ability to understand and translate every human language soon catches the attention of UN ambassadors, who give her a visa to the United States. Diana soon finds herself living with Polish immigrant Henke and Henke’s granddaughter Raissa in the Queens borough of New York City.

Diana becomes passionate about helping the children of her new community. As a headstrong and compassionate warrior, Diana finds herself at odds with the forces of injustice and hatred. She must stand up for the truth and justice that she was raised to believe in. While fighting for the rights of immigrants, she finds a new family and home in the mortal world.

With skillful writing and drawing, Laurie Halse Anderson and Leila Del Luca have brought a new and original story to the Wonder Woman character. The full-color illustrations are detailed and visually engaging, with a diverse array of panel layouts for effective visual storytelling. While comics fans will recognize the characters of Diana and the Amazons, this story can be read independently of any other Wonder Woman comic book. Diana’s position as an idealistic fish-out-of-water lets readers gain a fresh, heartbreaking perspective on the injustices of war, poverty, homelessness, and even human trafficking. At the same time, Diana discovers the joys of caring for children, connecting with other teenagers, and partaking in modern culture. Diana encounters food trucks, regional slang, polka dancing, subway transit, and parkour with wide-eyed enthusiasm readers will find endearing.

The story culminates in an exciting fight where Diana uses her superhuman strength to rescue children from a rich and powerful villain. It’s satisfying to see a real-life “bad guy” vanquished so quickly and easily by Diana. Even so, the story will leave readers with the knowledge that change is not always easy, and that the human rights abuses (like poverty and human trafficking) portrayed in this piece of fiction have real-life parallels which are not so easily brought down. The story is political in nature, with a stance that mature readers will recognize as being pro-immigration. The message is optimistic and idealistic, but still emotionally compelling. It makes for an uplifting story that will interest not only superhero fans but also for casual readers who want to read about social justice in the modern world.

Sexual Content

  • At the refugee camp, a woman suggests Diana cover up her Amazon armor (which is sleeveless) with a sweatshirt because “the guards can be dangerous,” implying that she might draw unwanted attention.
  • Diana and Raissa are harassed by men on the street, who whistle and say, “Gimme that sweet candy, baby!” When Diana realizes their intentions, she slams them up against the wall saying, “My aunts would have killed those jerks.”
  • Diana is horrified when she learns about the concept of human trafficking, and even more horrified to hear that children who are kidnapped or trafficked are often “forced to have sex.”
  • Raissa gets into an argument with a rich man who is gentrifying her neighborhood. He taunts her by saying, “You’re hot. I like having pretty girls in my office. Want to be my personal intern?”

Violence

  • An Amazon kicks a refugee who has landed on the shores of Themyscira, saying, “Quiet! You’ve broken our barrier.” The other Amazons scold her and say she has gone too far.
  • A woman tells Diana that before she fled Poland, “Thousands were beaten and jailed for protesting. Including me.”
  • During an encounter with bureaucrats who want to stop her from feeding hungry children, Diana is so angry that she throws a picnic table and breaks it. She is arrested.
  • A fight breaks out when Diana rescues a group of children from human traffickers. The fight lasts four pages. Several of the kidnappers have guns, but nobody is seriously hurt.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • When mortals land on the shores of Themyscira, the Amazons give them a “forgetting tea” before sending them away.
  • Diana rescues a group of children who have been kidnapped by human traffickers. The children have been drugged to keep them asleep.

Language

  • Profanity is used very infrequently. Language includes bitch, badass, hell, ass, and shitty.

Supernatural

  • As a child of the Amazons, Diana has superhuman strength and abilities. She tries not to draw attention to these. When Raissa says she saw Diana send two vans flying into the air during a fight, Diana says, “You hit your head. You must have been hallucinating.”

Spiritual Content

  • Diana recalls how the “Five Mothers”—the Greek goddesses Athena, Aphrodite, Demeter, Artemis, and Hestia—created the Amazons. She also recalls how the Five Mothers granted the Amazon queen a child, which was how Diana was created.
  • Diana makes offerings of food at the Temple of the Five Mothers, and says a prayer to each. For example, to Athena, she says, “Athena, grant me your wisdom. Help me be a good Amazon.”
  • Diana feels that “the gods are warning” her with a vague ominous feeling. She says, “The gods are whispering, but I can’t hear what they’re saying.”
  • Diana says that the Statue of Liberty “looks like Hestia, the goddess of family and the home.”

by Caroline Galdi

 

War Storm

In the splintered Kingdom of Norta, freedom for Reds and newbloods is closer than ever before. Torn between the two princes and the feuding noble Silver Houses, Norta is ripe for the taking. All the Scarlet Guard has to do is clean up the mess Maven Calore made, and create the type of nation that will never discriminate against Reds and newbloods. The first step is to rip the crown from Maven’s head.

In order to change the world, Mare Barrow must ally with Cal, the boy who chose the crown over her. Cal’s betrayal nearly broke Mare, but now she must fight alongside him if she wants any chance at winning freedom. If she doesn’t, Maven will surely overrun them all, and capture her for himself. Maven’s obsession with Mare runs deep, and he’ll stop at nothing to have her again.

For the Reds to rise, they must first go through a war storm. Scurrying from nation to nation and striking deep into the heart of Norta is only the beginning, and there are endless battles in sight. Are Mare and the Scarlet Guard willing to sacrifice everything to achieve the impossible? Or will Maven crush them and their dreams?

War Storm is the final entry in Aveyard’s Red Queen Series, and the story will not disappoint readers. As Mare and the Scarlet Guard are about to secure a future for themselves, they fight intense battles. The action-packed series features different combinations of Silver and newblood abilities, which makes every battle feel unique and fresh. Readers will love how each battle plays out differently than the last.

Of course, all those battles support the theme of war, as nearly the entire continent gets dragged into the civil war between Cal and his brother, Maven. Maven brokers alliances with the powerful nation of the Lakelands, as well as the smaller nation of Piedmont. While Cal allies with the free country of Montfort, the only nation known that allows equality for Reds, newbloods, and Silvers.

The characters in War Storm are strong and interesting. Mare has grown into a girl that’s strong enough to handle whatever is thrown at her. Another fascinating character is Evangeline Samos, Mare’s former enemy, who begins the long journey to overcome her Silver-born prejudices. These strong characters will keep readers on the edge of their seats. While not every main character gets the most satisfying ending to their arc, the ending ties up most of the loose ends and will leave readers happy. Warm Storm is a satisfying conclusion to Aveyard’s Red Queen Series.

Sexual Content

  • Evangeline is in love with her brother’s wife, Elane. Evangeline thinks, “It breaks my heart to know she isn’t really mine.”
  • Evangeline’s brother, tells her that their mother wants grandchildren. “Prodding after grandchildren. She escorts Elane to my rooms every night. I think she might even stand guard outside the door.”
  • Davidson, the leader of Montfort, shares a kiss with his husband, Carmadon. “They embrace quickly, touching foreheads and kissing, before Carmadon backs away.”

Violence

  • During an attack on a military transport, Mare sees Evangeline lift a vehicle. Mare watches as Evangeline “hisses as she raises the heavy transport off the road, revealing twisted limbs and a few flattened skulls seeping brain like popped grapes leaking juice.”
  • During a battle, Kilorn, Mare’s best friend, is thrown off a building. Mare thinks, “The crack and thud of Kilorn hitting the railing below makes me sick.” Minutes later, when Mare gets to Kilorn, he “jolts and hacks, painting the steps with his own blood.”
  • Mare gets revenge on the Silvers that threw Kilorn, killing them with lightning, “I have to look away from the charred remains. Only their buttons and guns remain intact, smoking with heat.”
  • When Iris meets with Cal’s grandmother, Iris pictures, “her grip changing, shifting, and then my skull exploding open, spewing brain and bone all over the transport interior.”
  • Just before being ambushed, Mare sees pine needles floating in the air. One pine needle, “sprouts before my eyes, a sapling growing in midair. It spears a soldier before any of us can react.
  • During an ambush, Tyton kills a lot of raiders with his ability to control lightning. Tyton, “blinks once, twice. Killing anyone within his reach, leveling them with a fury of electricity in their skills.”
  • Iris thinks about the man who killed her father. The man “cut his throat. Attacked him from behind like some honorees dog.
  • Mare kills a man who attacked her. She strikes him with her lightning and “then his face explodes; shards of bone and torn flesh arc forward. His body follows the momentum, slumping over me, and the thunderous touch of electricity returns as quickly as he falls.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • During a dinner party, wine is served. Mare watches as her friend, Farley, “barely nods in thanks when Carmadon fills her glass with rich, almost black wine. She drinks deep.”

Language

  • Damn is used frequently. Mare thinks about Cal’s marriage to Evangeline, “Like us, Volo needs him. Needs his name, needs his crown, and needs his damn hand in that damn marriage to his damn daughter.”
  • Maven called Elane “Evangeline’s whore.”

Supernatural

  • Silvers and Newbloods have unique powers.
  • Mare is an electricon, a type of newblood that can manipulate lightning. Mare thinks, “I hardly know the depths of my own abilities. It’s the same for all newbloods I’ve met and helped train.”
  • Ella, another electricon, “used her own storm to strike the central, furious blue lightning cracking stone.”
  • Mare thinks about her ability to manipulate lightning, “I know what it is to pour lightning into a person, to sense their nerves sparking off and dying. It feels like a small death of your own, an ending you can never forget.”
  • Prince Bracken is a mimic. Iris thinks about his abilities, “If he were to touch me, he would be able to use my nymph abilities, albeit only for a time, and to a lesser extent. The same goes for any Silver.”
  • Jidansais is a telky. Iris thinks about Jidansa, “She used her talky ability to amuse Ti and me as children, juggling our shoes or toys with her mind.”
  • Evangeline is a magnetron, who can manipulate metal. After lifting a military transport, “Evangeline lowers the transport again. With a twitch of her fingers, she rips off one of the doors, allowing those inside to tumble out.”
  • Shadows can manipulate light. Mare sees, “The work of shadows, no doubt, manipulators of light. It sends harsh light and harsher darkness dancing across us all.”
  • Nymphs can manipulate water. Evangeline sees the signs of a nymph attack, “‘Nymph strike!’ I manage to scream as another towering wave crashes—backward.”
  • Evangeline recounts her first time teleporting, “It feels like being squeezed down to my marrow, all my organs twisting, my balance thrown off, my perception turned on its head.”
  • Windweavers can manipulate wind and air. Mare sees, “On the opposite side of the chamber, Radis gestures to Davidson, flicking out one hand. As he does so, a sudden breeze rustles through the Gallery.”

Spiritual Content

  • In the Lakelands, the people worship gods that don’t have faces.
  • Iris thinks it’s a blasphemy to speak for the gods.
  • Iris tries to get her betrothed, Maven, to accept her gods. When he refuses, she thinks, “Nonbelievers are not my problem. I can’t open their eyes, and it isn’t my job to do so. Let him meet the gods in death and see how wrong he was before he enters a hell of his own making.”
  • In Archeon, the capital of Norta, Iris tries to maintain her beliefs. She has, “a small temple—a shrine, more than anything—filled with candles and worn emblems of the nameless gods.”
  • In the Lakelands, the nameless gods are everywhere. Iris sees, “Worn faces, bland in their features, both strange and familiar, look down from the ceiling and walls. Our gods have no names, no hierarchy. Their blessings are random, their words sparse, their punishments impossible to predict.”

by Jonathan Planman

Halt’s Peril

While Will and Halt are hot on the trail of the Outsiders, which is a cult that’s been making its way from kingdom to kingdom by conning the innocent out of their few valuables, they are ambushed by the cult’s deadly assassins. Pierced by a poisoned arrow, Will’s mentor is near death and in dire need of the one antidote that can save his life. Time is not on Will’s side as he journeys day and night through the harsh terrain to Grimsdell Wood in search of the one person with the power to cure Halt: Malkallam the Sorcerer.

Halt, Horace, and Will track the Outsiders in the hope of dismantling the cult. The three travel through unknown territory in a story full of adventure, fighting, and friendship. However, this time both Halt and Horace face life and death situations. Their survival is not guaranteed. In order to save Halt, Will and Horace are willing to do anything. Unlike previous installments in the series, both Will and Horace no longer have qualms about killing others. While they try to use peaceful means to solve a problem, killing others becomes necessary to save Halt and defeat the Outsiders.

Halt’s Peril highlights the importance of loyalty, dedication, and friendship, but the book also has several scenes that readers may find disturbing. As the series progresses, the characters do not become stagnant. Instead, they mature, and their relationships become more complex. Readers will enjoy the changing relationship of Will, Horace, and Halt. Instead of Will and Horace being subordinates, Halt values their skills, knowledge, and friendship.

The conclusion of Halt’s Peril will leave the reader smiling because good overcomes evil, loves last through separation, and friends help each other in times of need. Flanagan delivers another action-packed story that will keep readers entertained until the very end.

Sexual Content

  • When Halt makes it back home, he cast “aside his usual reticence, he stepped forward to meet [his wife], swept her into his arms and kissed her for a long, long time.”
  • When Will makes it home, he “felt a gentle hand on his arm and looked up slightly to meet Alyss’s smiling eyes…” Will “stepped forward, embraced her and kissed her. His head swam a little as she responded enthusiastically.”

Violence

  • When Will leaves a tavern, two men follow him. To encourage them to leave, Will shoots an arrow at them. Then, “without warning, there was another hiss-thud between them. Only this time, Niallis’s hand flew to his right ear, where the arrow had nicked him on its way through. Blood ran hotly down his cheek.”
  • Two thugs, Niallis and Dennis, are told to remove Halt from a tavern. Halt says Horace’s name, then “Horace began with a straight right to Dennis’s jaw. It was a solid blow.” Niallis attempts to help Dennis, but “Horace had pivoted and hit him with a crushing left hook to the jaw. Niallis’s eyes glazed and his knees went slack.” Horace knocks out both thugs. The scene is described over one page.
  • Halt attempts to talk to a smuggler named O’Malley. When the man attempts to leave, Halt’s saxe knife “was now pressing a little too firmly against the smuggler’s throat.” The smuggler gives Halt the requested information.
  • When O’Malley follows Halt’s ship, Will and Halt begin shooting arrows at the boat. “One arrow thudded, quivering, into the bulwark less than a meter from the helm. The other buried itself painfully in the flesh part of O’Malley’s upper left arm…” As the arrows continue to rain down on the crew, chaos ensues. “Again they shot. This time, both arrows found their mark and the man pitched forward, rolling into the scuppers as the ship heeled…” The smuggler’s ship hits a reef and crashes. Halt has men throw “some barrels overboard to float down to them. It might give them a chance.” The scene is described over three pages.
  • Tennyson, a false prophet, orders his men to kill a farmer. Tennyson “heard the slap-whiz of two crossbows, and two bolts streaked across the field to bury themselves in the man’s back. He threw up his hands, gave a choked cry and fell face-first down in the grass.” Tennyson’s men kill the farmer’s wife, then burn the farm and the barn with all of the cows inside. The scene is described over three pages.
  • Halt, Will, and Horace hide in an ambush of Tennyson and his men of Scotti raiders. When the raiders are close, Halt and Will begin shooting arrows. As the raiders attempt to flee, “threatened by the hail of arrows, they bunched together uncertainly. A few seconds later, the crazed cattle smashed into them… When the stampede passed, at least half of the raiding party were lying, seriously wounded, on the field.” Half of the raiders die before the others are able to run off. The scene is described over one page.
  • Tennyson sends two assassins to kill Halt and Will. During the attack, “Will’s arrow slammed into [the assassin’s] side. He lurched sideways, jolting against his companion and throwing off his aim. Then Halt’s arrow slashed into his chest and he jerked the trigger with dead fingers as he toppled backwards.” Will hears “Halt’s brief cry of pain, followed by the sound of his bow dropping… wet red blood stained his cloak. There seemed to be a lot of it.” Halt is hit with a poisoned crossbow bolt. The scene is described over three pages.
  • Later, Will attacks the assassin. The two are on horseback when the assassin “struck once, aiming for Tug, but Will leaned forward over his horse’s neck and deflected the thin blade with his saxe…” Both men jump out of the saddle, and Will “stepped in and slammed the heavy brass-shod hilt of his saxe into the side of the man’s head. Then without waiting to see if the first blow had been successful, he repeated the action a little harder.” Will takes the assassin captive.
  • When the assassin insults Will, “Horace’s open hand slapped hard across the side of his head, jerking it to one side and setting his ears ringing.” Horace strikes the assassin several times throughout the story.
  • In order to help Halt, Will and Horace need to know what type of poison was on the crossbow bolt. In order to get the assassin, Bacari, to talk, Horace “put the razor-sharp tip of the bolt against Bacari’s inner forearm, then deliberately pressed it into the flesh, penetrating deeply so that hot blood sprang from the wound and ran down Bacari’s hand. Bacari screamed in pain and fear as Horace dragged the sharpened iron through the flesh of his arm, opening a deep, long cut.”
  • During guard duty, Horace falls asleep. “Horace came awake in panic as he felt something whip over his head and then tighten inexorably around his throat, dragging him back away from the fire, cutting off his air and strangling any attempt he made to call out.” When the assassin tries to kill Horace, Will steps in. Bacari “was still laughing when Will’s throwing knife, drawn and thrown the moment the saxe had left his hand, buried itself in his heart. He looked down and saw it for a fraction of a second before his sight went black and his legs collapsed underneath him.” The scene is described over four and a half pages.
  • In the past, Halt had saved another ranger’s life by “shooting two of the bandits and cutting the third down with his saxe knife.” Halt was injured when “the huge bandit leapt out, swinging a terrible blow with the massive club.” All of the bandits were killed. The battle is described in one paragraph.
  • When Tennyson is preaching, one of his men uses an optical illusion. When Will sees the man, “the young Ranger’s arm went up, then down as he crashed the brass striker into the man’s head, behind the ear.”
  • Tennyson takes his followers into a huge cave. Halt, Will, Horace, and Malcom interrupt Tennyson’s preaching. Tennyson’s men attack. “Quickly, Halt retreated before the first rush, drawing his saxe to deflect a dagger thrust, then slashing the razor edge across his attacker’s forearm. The man yelled in pain and dropped out of the fight.” In order to prevent Tennyson and his men from escaping, Will throws explosives. “Rocks and earth fell from the ceiling in ever-increasing amounts… Will saw a massive rock shaken loose from the wall above the ledge where Tennyson stood. It hit beside him, barely a meter away.” The preacher “stepped onto empty air and toppled slowly off the ledge. He smashed against the jagged rocks at the base of the wall.” The scene is described over five pages.

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • When Will goes into a tavern, he is offered ale or ouisgeah. “Ouisgeah, Will knew, was the strong malt spirit they distilled and drank in Hibernia.” When three men come into the tavern, “the tavern keeper immediately began to pump up three large tankards of ale without a word passing between them.”
  • While making stew, Will added, “a generous glug” of red wine.
  • The assassins dip their crossbow bolts in poison.
  • When Halt is shot, Will gives him a salve that was “derived from the drug warmweed.”

Language

  • “Why the devil” is used several times. For example, when someone tells Halt that Tennyson went to Picta, Halt says, “Why the devil would Tennyson want to go to Picta?”
  • “Oh my god” is used as an exclamation once. “My god” is used as an exclamation once.
  • “For god’s sake” is used as an exclamation twice. When someone has difficulty mounting a horse, Halt says, “For god’s sake, can’t you just haul him up behind you?”
  • When the cave is collapsing, Will tells someone, “get the hell out of here.”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • Tennyson is a false prophet who preaches about Alseiass, the Golden God. Tennyson convinces people that they must build Alseiass “the golden, jeweled alter that he desires—an alter that you can worship at for generations to come.”
  • Tennyson tells people, “Alseiass loves you! Alseiass wants to bring light and joy and happiness into your lives… Alseiass is the god of light and enlightenment! His light of mercy can be seen even in the darkest reaches of the earth.”

Better Off Friends

When Levi moves to town, Macallan becomes his best friend. Everyone thinks that guys and girls can’t just be friends, but these two are. They hang out after school, share inside jokes, their families are close, and Levi even starts dating one of Macallan’s friends. They are content being just friends.

But no one believes that they are just friends. Guys won’t ask Macallan out because they think she’s with Levi. On the other hand, Levi goes through a string of girlfriends, who each think he spends too much time with Macallan. Basically, when it comes to dating, Levi and Macallan keep getting in each other’s way. With everyone thinking the two are more than friends, and they begin to wonder if they really can be just friends or if they should be more.

Better Off Friends alternates between Levi’s and Macallan’s point of view. In addition, the end of each chapter has a short conversation between the two, which allows them to reflect on their past. Levi is portrayed as a selfish, stereotypical Californian. For example, he wonders, “Why couldn’t we have stayed in Santa Monica, where the weather was sweet and the waves were sick?” Even though the book is told from both of the character’s points of view, both Levi and Macallan are forgettable characters.

Macallan is more well-developed character than Levi. Her mother’s recent death has shattered her family, she tries to stay out of Levi’s love life, and she stands up for two characters with disabilities. Despite this, she is not a memorable character. Unfortunately, too much of the story focuses on Macallan and Levi’s internal struggle as they try to hide their true feelings from each other. Even after the two realize they are in love with the other, their refusal to openly talk about their feelings becomes tedious.

Instead of being a fun romance, Better Off Friends has a predictable plot, forgettable characters, and a cliché conclusion. The main characters spend too much time trying to prove that they are just friends, and predictably fall in love with each other. Unfortunately, none of the characters are unique and readers will quickly forget the story. With a plethora of teen romances crowding the shelves, readers should reach for a truly unique and memorable romance such as I Believe in A Thing Called Love by Maurene Goo or Since You’ve Been Gone by Morgan Matson.

Sexual Content

  • Macallan and an unknown person have a short conversation. The unknown person wants to know if Macallan “hooked up at some point.”
  • While on a date with Emily, Levi “wanted to kiss her. . .So I kissed her. And she kissed me back.”
  • Macallan went to the movies with Levi and Emily. She went to get popcorn and came back “only to discover them kissing (or, more accurately sucking face).”
  • At a party, Macallan walked into her bedroom to find “Emily and Troy were kissing on my bed.” Emily asks Macallan not to tell her boyfriend that she was kissing another boy.
  • After Levi gets back from a trip, Emily “ran out in the cold and kissed me, which helped warm me considerably.”
  • Emily lies to Levi, telling him that “nothing happened” between her and Troy. As she tells him, Emily “started rubbing my leg. . .She started to kiss me.”
  • Levi says, “My first girlfriend . . . started sucking face with some other guy the second she was alone with him. Tonight my girlfriend was away from me for like two seconds and she was going to make out with another guy. It clearly has to be me.”
  • When Levi thinks something is wrong with him, Macallan “grabbed his cheeks and pulled him in for a kiss. He was tense, probably from shock, for the first couple of seconds. Then his arms were around me and he eased into it.” Macallan tells him, “You are not a bad kisser. It has been verified. Moving on.”
  • When Levi wasn’t paying attention, Macallan’s friend Danielle says, “Macallan and I were going to have a lingerie pillow fight.” Levi thinks, “I desperately tried to get the thought of Macallan and Danielle in lingerie out of my mind. I sometimes thought Macallan forgot I was a guy. And we have certain responses that are difficult to control.”
  • Levi begins dating Stacy and they kiss twice. For example, when Levi picked her up for a date, “he bent over and gave [her] a kiss.”
  • Macallan and Levi kiss. Levi “relished her lips on mine. Her hands gently ran through my hair.”

Violence

  • A boy named Keith makes fun of Macallan’s uncle. Keith “bent his arms up toward his collarbone and let his wrist go limp so his hands were dangling. He collapsed his legs together at the knees and started to walk like he had a disability.” Then Keith says, “Just because your mom’s dead doesn’t mean you can be such a bitch.” Angry, Macallan “tightened up my fist and hit him right in the kisser. Keith, Mr. Athlete Extraordinaire, was knocked onto his butt.”

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • Macallan has a unique name because her “dad liked a certain kind of Scotch Whiskey.”
  • Macallan, her father, Levi, and his parents have dinner. Levi’s parents bring a bottle of wine.
  • When Macallan’s boyfriend broke up with her, she asked, “Have you been drinking?”
  • When Macallan goes to Ireland, one of her friends takes her to a party and offers her alcohol. When she declines, her friend says, “You Americans are so uptight about alcohol.”
  • When Levi is injured, he takes “some serious painkillers.”

Language

  • Several times during the story, a handicapped person is called a retard or retarded. This includes Macallan’s uncle. Macallan stands up for to person and defends her uncle.
  • Levi refers to himself as an idiot eight times. For example, he thinks, “Macallan stood up to those three guys while I stood there like an idiot.” He also says that he’s been “a total idiot lately.”
  • Crap is used six times. For example, Macallan says, “I wasn’t in the mood for his crap today.”
  • Levi says, “I’m sorry. I was being a grade-A jerk.” Later someone else calls Levi a jerk.
  • “God” and “Oh my God” are both used as an exclamation once.
  • Someone calls Macallan a bitch.

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

Here to Stay

Bijan Majidi loves basketball, comic books, and his mom. When he makes it on the varsity basketball squad, he’s over the moon. Now he’s getting noticed and being invited to parties with the cool kids. But when someone sends the whole school a photoshopped picture that makes Bijan look like a terrorist, he has to deal with the fallout. Here to Stay examines the prejudices and identities that envelop the lives of Bijan and his classmates.

Here to Stay tackles discussions about race and prejudice against the backdrop of a wealthy, white, New England neighborhood. Sara Farizan’s commentary creates a rich dialogue that acutely questions a status quo that harms students who aren’t white. Bijan, who is half Persian and half Jordanian, experiences microaggressions and a hate crime. Bijan is also put under emotional and social strain. Despite this, Bijan is resilient and handles the situations thrown at him through his wit and the strength of his heart.

Along with the discussion of race, Farizan includes two LGBTQ+ characters who initially hide their relationship because they fear their community’s backlash. In both overarching plot points, acceptance and sticking up for oneself are recurrent themes. Although not everyone in the novel is kind to these characters or to Bijan, the supporting cast of friends are loyal and kind people.

Bijan is undeniably a good main character. He’s friendly, funny, and sticks up for himself and his friends. Occasionally, some characters’ dialogue comes across as strange or too young for teenagers. However, it doesn’t make the characters any less likable. Considering all the dark topics that Here to Stay covers, Bijan’s inner monologue is really funny and brings some much-needed lightness to an otherwise depressing situation.

Farizan does an excellent job presenting a discussion around prejudices and integrating it with a fun high school basketball story. Ultimately, life is made up of great, game-winning moments as well as terrible moments. Bijan’s story is about dealing with other people’s prejudices, but he’s also a teenager who has crushes and who likes basketball. These things are not separate from each other, and Farizan presents Bijan as a whole person who deals with a full range of human experiences. Here to Stay is powerful, not necessarily because Bijan is extraordinary, but because his story is a reality for many people. Readers certainly won’t have a difficult time finding something to like about Bijan and his story.

Sexual Content

  • Bijan has “an imaginary future ex-girlfriend, Elle.” He has a crush on Elle, and the topic of his love comes up often.
  • When Bijan is getting ready to go to a party, his mom tells Bijan that he can’t “get ‘fresh’ with any young ladies.”
  • According to Bijan, his best friend Sean “has had sex.” No other details are given.
  • At the start of practice, a basketball player throws his shirt to the side. “Some girls from the varsity squash team catcalled as they ran on the track above.”
  • Someone makes a comment about Bijan going back to “whatever country or Cave of Wonders” he came from. Bijan responds with, “I’ll go back to where I came from. Back to your mom’s house. She made me the best breakfast this morning after the time we had together last night. Her maple syrup tasted just as good as she did.”
  • Bijan’s best friend Sean makes a suggestive comment about another classmate. He says, “I wouldn’t mind tutoring Erin Wheeler . . . I’d answer any anatomy and physiology questions she may have.”
  • Another basketball player, Will, mentions his girlfriend to a teammate. Will says, “Once I get what I need from [my girlfriend], I’m calling it off. Then it’s college honeys for days, you know what I’m saying?” This statement is not explained further.
  • Will harasses Bijan about a girl in their grade. Will says, “ ‘It’s really nice of you to keep defending [Stephanie]. You giving it to her, man?’ Will dry-humped the air. ‘I mean, I guess she’d be a good lay. She’s got a nice physique for a munchkin . . . You put a gag over her head when you do her? So you can shut her up and not have to look at her? I know you people like your girls covered.’ ”
  • Stephanie and Erin have been secretly dating.  At a party, Bijan accidentally overhears them.  Stephanie says, “ ‘While we haven’t done anything, I like you. I like you very much’ Then [Bijan] heard it. Lips smacking. Stephanie was kissing someone!” Erin is worried about being found out because “My friends and that school are going to tear [Stephanie] apart.”
  • Will makes yet another comment to Bijan, this time about Bijan and Sean. “I thought you two were joined at the hip. How will you be able to take a piss without him holding your dick?” Bijan responds, “He’s his own man . . . But it’s true, my dick is far too big to hold. Your mom said so last night.” Will then responds with, “By the way…which of his moms did it with a turkey baster?”
  • Bijan and Elle kiss. “[Bijan] cupped her face in [his] hand. She was so warm. Kissing her was a million times better than scoring the winning basket for Granger.”
  • Erin and Stephanie start officially dating. Erin introduces herself as “[Stephanie’s] girlfriend, with all the confidence of her years in the New Crew.”
  • While in the locker room, Will makes a series of sexual comments about Bijan and Drew’s love lives. In response, Bijan says, “Why don’t you find a Jacuzzi jet to stick your dick into and call it a day, Will.”

Violence

  • Bijan talks about movies. He says that “Daniel LaRusso gets to crane-kick the crap out of Johnny.”
  • Occasionally, fouls occur in the basketball games and players are knocked down, pushed, or shoved.
  • After Bijan makes a comment about a player’s mom, the player “rushed [Bijan], knocking [him] to the sidewalk.”
  • Someone photoshopped Bijan’s face onto a racist version of the school mascot and sent it to the school. Bijan’s face was “photoshopped onto the head of a man with a long beard wearing a pakol hat and holding a gun.”
  • An email is sent to the Granger student body, but this time it outs Stephanie and Erin’s relationship and sexual orientations. It’s a picture of their photoshopped faces, and they’re “vomiting rainbows.” It is later revealed that Stephanie’s friend, Noah, is the one who made it out of jealousy, as he felt entitled to Stephanie’s affection.
  • Will gets drunk the night before the first tournament game and brings his buddies to beat up Bijan. One of them, “grabbed hold of [Bijan’s] shoulder and pushed [him] backward with his forearm against [his] chest. [Bijan] tried to get away, and wanted to yell but the fear wouldn’t let [him].”
  • At the basketball game, a group of white people who “had wrapped athletic towels on their heads and wore fake beards . . . held up a poster-sized version of the terrorist photo of [Bijan]” sat behind the basket and chanted “USA! USA! USA!” at Bijan.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • At a party there is a “cooler full of beers.” Many of the underage students drink at the party.
  • Someone says to Bijan about the photoshopped picture, “Whoever did send it, I’d love to shake their hand and buy them a beer.” Bijan responds, “I’d love to buy a keg for whatever college will take you . . . How much does your grandpa pay to have you play for us?”
  • At another party the students drink again. Bijan drinks a beer and says it tastes “like wheat backwash.” Bijan also joins in on beer pong where he plays “with the guys for an hour.”
  • Drew talks about his dad. Drew says, “Mine’s a real piece of work. A guy named Tim who would rather play keno and drink than hang out with his kid.”

Language

  • Profanity is used somewhat often. Profanity includes damn, crap, bitches, ass, and hell.
  • Bijan says his life turned into a “crap salad in a bucket.”
  • Students make many comments about Bijan’s race, and they also make insensitive comments about other races as well.
  • Bijan briefly mentions that the JV locker room talk included “theories about what would happen if you smeared Icy Hot all over your junk.”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • During a speech at school, Bijan talks about his parents’ religions. “My mom is Muslim but doesn’t speak to God as much since my dad died. My father was Christian. My relationship with God is personal and has nothing to do with you.” Bijan thinks, “I didn’t explain to them that terrorists who commit heinous acts in the name of religion don’t understand their faith at all, including the white Christian terrorists within our own country. I didn’t read to them the section of the Qur’an that says, ‘Whoever kills a person unjustly. . . it is as though he has killed all mankind, and whoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved all mankind.’”
  • Bijan doesn’t drink, and he turns down a beer from another student. That student then says, “Allah’s not gonna mind.”

by Alli Kestler

 

 

 

 

 

 

Loveboat, Taipei

Ever Wong’s parents came to America with little, but they were determined to make a better life for their children. Ever’s father, a talented doctor, was unable to obtain a medical license in the US and the family is barely scraping by. The Wongs are determined to see their daughter become a doctor. The only problem is that Ever has very little talent for medicine and would much rather go to dance school.

Ever wants to spend her summer dancing with her friends, but her parents have different plans for her. Ever’s mother pawns her most valuable jewelry to pay to send Ever to a rigorous pre-med program. Then Ever’s mother sends her to Chien Tan, a summer program designed for Chinese-American high school students learn about their culture through eight weeks in Taipei, Taiwan.

In Taipei, Ever finds herself among a Chinese-American majority for the first time in her life, but she also discovers that many of her peers have grown up quite differently from her. Most of the Chien Tan students have enormously wealthy parents, and nobody else has had to pawn jewelry to pay for their airfare. Many of Ever’s peers are fluent or near-fluent in Mandarin, which Ever never learned.

Sophie, Ever’s roommate, tells her that Chien Tan has the nickname “Loveboat.” It’s the status quo for students to sneak out at night, go clubbing, and abandon their boyfriends and girlfriends back in the States for intense, short-lived love affairs. Away from her family for the first time, Ever begins to break all of her parents’ strict rules: she drinks, dresses immodestly, and kisses boys. She finds herself caught in an intense love triangle between golden-boy Rick and mysterious bad-boy Xavier.

Loveboat, Taipei addresses many issues that readers may find relatable: the pressure of overbearing parents, the pressure to get drunk or have sex for the first time, and the complicated feelings one can have over cultural identity. The romance is well-written and the love triangle is cute, but readers may find it hard to believe that the two most popular boys in Loveboat are both so smitten with the likable, but unassuming, Ever.

Much of the book’s plot concerns the drama around Ever’s love triangle. Through Ever’s perspective, readers see background characters work through their own drama, too. The cast of characters is large to start with, and it gets confusing when the book names too many extra characters who aren’t part of the plot and only exist to populate the background.  Chien Tan gives unbridled freedom to kids on the cusp of adulthood. They form hasty relationships, hurt themselves, and hurt each other—emotionally and sometimes physically. For example, Sophie spreads nude photos of Ever out of spite. Readers may think this was unforgivable, but they eventually make up.

Ever’s frustration with her parents is a major theme; despite their disagreements, the family clearly loves each other. The narrative reflects the nature of this complicated relationship. Ever learns to stand up for herself and exercise her new freedom staying true to her own values. Loveboat, Taipei will be a compelling choice for readers looking to read about culture, class differences, and “leaving the nest”.

Sexual Content

  • The official rules at Chien Tan say, “No boys and girls in a room with the door closed.” However, this rule is often broken.
  • Ever says that her mother believes that “sex is a by-product of marriage to be endured, preferably through a hole in the blanket.”
  • Later, after having sex for the first time, Ever says, “Sex isn’t the barely tolerable duty of procreation, like Mom always insinuated. It’s two human beings fitting seamlessly together.” However, she still feels guilty, because she “wanted to wait for love.”
  • Ever sees a boy she once kissed and remembers, “those big hands on my hips. His tongue pressing my lips apart. He taught me everything I know about kissing that I didn’t learn from practicing on oranges” with her best friend in middle school.
  • At the Chien Tan dormitories, a couple is ousted from their room. The girl is “clutching her pink dress to her bra.” Ever says that the boy “grabs his shorts–but not before I catch a glimpse of his . . . equipment.” Ever says she is “too stunned to close my eyes.”
  • Ever says that a girl enjoying a meal makes “moaning noises straight out of a scene I wouldn’t be allowed to watch on TV.”
  • Someone asks Rick if he and his long-distance girlfriend have been “having phone sex.”
  • At a club, Ever sees “middle-aged men who line the walls, eyeing girls on the dance floor.”
  • Ever dances with a boy from Chien Tan. “His eyes sweep my body. His neck gleams with sweat. My hair’s damp. I writhe with him, matching thrust for thrust. His hip wedges against mine as he pulls me deeper, deeper–and then I feel him. Oh my God. Oh my God. Is that what I think it is?” She realizes he has an erection and backs off. Later she thinks, “I’ll have to see him in class every single day, knowing I gave him a boner, and him knowing I know.”
  • Sophie tells Ever, “Xavier and I hooked up. Last night. We did it.” She tells Ever “far more detail than I need or want: how they’d made out the whole cab ride home, fumbled down the darkened hallway, tumbled into a spare bedroom on the first floor.” Ever notices that Sophie has “a pink, quarter-sized hickey” on her neck. Ever says, “I can’t imagine sleeping with a guy after knowing him only a week.”
  • Sophie and Ever go to take “glamour shots.” The photos get more and more risqué until Sophie takes a photo naked. “Her bikini lies in a silky, white heap on the floor. She’s naked. Not practically. Actually. Yannie’s lights shine off her golden skin, illuminating bikini patches.” Sophie tells Ever, “This is art, not porn.”
  • While taking photos, Ever remembers how she always felt “the grip of shame” about her body, especially when she “developed more parts to feel ashamed of flaunting.” She decides to follow Sophie’s lead and pose for her own nude shots.
  • Later, someone makes copies of Ever’s nude photos and distributes them to everyone. Ever sees the photos, which show “A girl. She’s back-dropped in white, the only object in her rectangular world. Her hands open like fans at her sides. She gazes out at me, chin raised boldly, dark-red lips parted with a seductive intake of breath, coils of black hair swept up to show off every curve of skin from the slope of her neck to her coyly cocked ankle–and everything in between.” The photos get her into a lot of trouble. The Chien Tan students and staff all see the photos, and Ever is mortified and almost expelled.
  • Ever recalls that some men have “Asian fetishes.” She remembers explaining to a white friend why attracting men’s interest simply because she’s Asian is “not flattering, why it’s based on stereotypes that have nothing to do with who you are.”
  • A girl in the bathroom seems very embarrassed while she scrubs at a blood stain on her sheets. Ever blushes when she realizes that they’re “not period stains” (The implication is that the girl bled during sex).
  • Later, after having sex for the first time, Ever sees “a red smear, like a smudge of calligraphy ink,” on the bedsheet. She’s embarrassed and hopes she’ll never have to see the boy again.
  • Ever passes a couple’s room and hears “soft little moans and kissing sounds.”
  • Xavier kisses Ever. “His mouth is soft, sweetened by wine. He tucks his fingers into my hair and cradles the curve of my neck. Under his lips, my back arches slightly… His mouth silences me, parting my lips, making me gasp with the unexpected pleasure of his tongue.” They stop a few moments later.
  • Ever has sex with Xavier, but the scene isn’t depicted. The next morning, “I lie on my side on a cloud of down feathers, nude between cotton sheets and a blue duvet and the weight of Xavier’s arm over my waist. His naked body presses against my back from shoulder to thighs. Last night returns like a dream: Xavier’s hand on my back, guiding me to this room as our mouths moved together, the click of the door sealing our privacy, then his mouth on my eyelids, my cheeks, the hollow of my neck, his hands exploring . . . my fingernails in his shoulders. My body is sore in places I didn’t know could feel sore.”
  • Ever and Rick bathe in a hot spring together and become intimate. The scene takes place over several pages and concludes with, “His mouth burns a line down to my belly button. It makes my body quiver like a tightly strung instrument. The splash of water echoes as he slips back into the pool. My stomach dips as his hands part my knees. He slides his shoulders between them, and his hands tuck under my thighs and take hold of my hips. He kisses a trail along the inside of each thigh, his breath warm on my skin, so near and intimate. My pals press the stones, all my body throbbing, unbelieving, as he asks permission to continue, and my whisper yes blends with the gurgle of the hot waters. He takes his time. A slow burn that builds and builds, until I am clawing at the stones and my back arches and my toes splash and my body ripens under his grip.” Later, Ever says, “Who knew Boy Wonder was so good with his tongue?”
  • During Chien Tan’s talent show, one of the boys dresses in drag. A character sees the drag queen and says, “Whoa, she’s stacked.” The drag queen’s “red lace bra is covered only by the middle button of her coat.”

Violence

  • Ever remembers hearing about a child prodigy who “died by suicide.”
  • Ever resents Rick and says, “I indulge a fantasy of me using that big, hard body as a punching bag.”
  • When Xavier gets out of his dad’s car, Ever notices that “a reddish blotch shines on his cheek–a bruise? Did his dad hit him?”
  • During a conversation with Ever, Xavier reveals that his dad said “[he] should’ve beat me harder to beat [the dyslexia] out of me.” Ever is horrified that Xavier was abused over his dyslexia. Xavier says, “My dad gave me a new set of trophies and told me I was a disgrace to nine generations.” Ever realizes that by “trophies” he means “bruises.”
  • Ever remembers “Mom with the chopsticks, hitting the inside of my bare thigh once, twice, three times. I don’t even remember what I’d done. The chopsticks only came out occasionally, and left no scars, but the shame has lingered.”
  • A man making ‘snake-blood sake’ cuts the head off of a snake. “His hatchet bangs down. The snake’s fanged head flies” at one of Ever’s friends. “Its severed end spurts dark red blood . . . Into one vial after another, the man squeezes the snake’s cut end. Dark red blood pulses out, pinking the liquor.”
  • At a bar, Ever is accosted by “two hundred pounds of meaty guy.” Ever says he “crushes me against the bar. He reeks of alcohol and sweat. I shove back, but it’s like trying to move a brick wall.” A boy from Chien Tan comes along and rescues her by telling the man, “She’s with me.”
  • A Chien Tan couple has arguments that “usually ended with something broken—a bulletin board, a lamp, his toe.”
  • When he’s angry, Rick “slams his fist through the center of his rice sack.”
  • Ever becomes interested in the choreography of fighting with staffs and sticks. She and Rick often mock-duel, but never with the intention to hurt. There are several pages of scenes where they ‘fight’. For example, “The crack of wood on wood punctuates the air, reverberating in my hands. I swing again. Again. Force him back until his foot hits a brick wall. And then he’s shoving me back, stick flying. . . swing a blow at his head. He ducks.”
  • During one fight, Ever says, “I instinctively whip my stick down—and slam his knuckles.” Ever apologizes immediately, because she didn’t mean to hurt Rick.
  • Someone tells Ever about “samurai of feudal Japan, soldiers who didn’t fall on their swords like the Romans did, but disemboweled themselves.”
  • Rick and Xavier get into a fight. “Xavier’s arms are locked around Rick’s neck, both bent double as they lurch into Marc, who grabs at them, earning himself a punch in the stomach . . . They’re inseparable, a force of muscled arms and legs and rage, knocking over everyone in their path.” Chien Tan counselors break up the fight and send them to the infirmary to clean up their bloody noses.
  • Sophie arrives home with a black eye and claims she “walked into a wall.” Later, Ever discovers that Sophie’s boyfriend Matteo has been violent with her. Ever sees Matteo “in a drunken stupor,” chasing after Sophie. Sophie locks herself in her room and Ever hears Matteo “spewing curses. The door shakes under his weight. I jam the door in place, then hang on tight. Under me, the door convulses as he pounds and pounds.” Later Sophie says that Matteo was mad because she “bit him.” Sophie agrees to let Ever tell the Chien Tan counselors about the incident, and Matteo is expelled and sent home.
  • Someone talks about how their mom struggled to find employment. “My mom went to work in a hotel and then some asshole manager slapped her butt and she shoved him onto his . . . now she’s cleaning toilets.”
  • Rick speaks about the tense relationship he has with his girlfriend, who suffers from severe depression and relies on him for emotional support. “We were in her kitchen. Cutting a loaf of bread we’d picked up. And she started crying and saying she couldn’t anymore, couldn’t take her parents, school, life, without me. She grabbed the knife, and I grabbed hold.” He “opens his palm to sunlight. Under its harsh yellow rays, the four inch-long scars line up in their row.” He admits that he eventually only stayed with her because he was afraid she would harm herself. The book later explores how this relationship has harmed Rick.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • When trying to navigate the airport, Ever runs into a man who stinks of “cilantro and cigarettes.”
  • Ever soon learns that the drinking age in Taiwan is eighteen—making her legally able to drink. Still, it’s against Chien Tan rules. She says she’s “never even tried alcohol,” and that the last time she went to a wedding, her mom “whisked [my] champagne glasses from under the waiter’s bottle.”
  • During a study group, some boys “are passing a steel bottle around.” Ever declines the first time, but partakes at later meetings.
  • Ever breaks her parents’ “no-alcohol” rule by drinking ‘snake-blood sake’. After watching a man chop off a snake’s head and squeeze the blood into the alcohol, she drinks it. “I throw back my head. The warm, salty blood and sake set my throat on fire. It tastes bitter. Like metal. Heat sears my chest, opening up a pipe there I’ve never felt before . . . My head feels stuffed with rice, then it explodes in a million directions. Kaleidoscopic tingles dance through my body.” Later in the evening, she throws up on the street and has to be carried home.
  • After being in Chien Tan for several weeks, guava cocktails are Ever’s “new favorite.”
  • Xavier hands Ever “a bottle of . . . a French wine with a white label. I fit its glass top to my lips and take a long pull. Dark cherry, rich and strong. I take a second pull, a third, letting its smoothness warm my body.”
  • In her messy room, Ever notices that some clothing lying on the floor “has soaked up a can of stale beer.”
  • After Ever sprains her ankle, a paramedic gives her “a white pill—prescription-strength ibuprofen.”

Language

  • Profanity is used infrequently. Profanity includes crap, ass, asshole, hell, damn, shit, bastard, bitch.
  • Oh my God and Jesus are occasionally used as exclamations.
  • Fuck is used four times.
  • Ever calls Rick a brown-noser.
  • Someone calls Ever a slut.
  • Someone calls Sophie “fucking bitch” and “cocktease.”
  • Ever remembers seeing a store clerk call her dad a “stupid chink.”

Supernatural

  • A hotel “has no fourth floor—the Chinese equivalent of unlucky thirteen, because four sounds like death in Mandarin.”

Spiritual Content

  • Ever describes her parents as “Chinese-Baptist.”
  • When dancing, Ever says she feels like “a goddess.”
  • Ever recalls “sorting I Ching sticks with a fortune-teller” while touring Taipei.
  • One girl at Chien Tan is “really involved with the weekly Bible study she started.”

by Caroline Galdi

 

 

 

 

Never Evers

Thirteen-year-old Mouse is pretty sure her life is totally over. Now that she’s been kicked out of ballet school, she has to go on her new school’s ski trip basically knowing no one. Well, except too-cool-for-school Keira and crazy Connie-May (and her adorable hamster, Mr. Jambon).

Meanwhile, Jack’s life is just about to begin. He’s on the way to the slopes with his school too, and all he can think about is how to get his first kiss.

With her new friends by her side, Mouse has more fun skiing and building igloos than she expected. And when Jack catches Mouse’s eye, he’s smitten. All’s well—that is, until mega-pop star, Roland arrives on the scene and sets his sights on Mouse too! A week in the snow is about to get complicated. . .

Never Evers is ridiculous, over the top, and funny. The story focuses on two friend groups. One group includes three boys—Jack, Max, and Toddy. Max is totally obsessed with kissing a girl—any “hot” girl. Even though Jack is smitten with Mouse, Max keeps pushing Jack to spend time with another hot girl, which causes some drama. Like many preteen boys, the three friends are immature, use body humor, and talk about “pubes” (pubic hair).

The other friend group includes Mouse, Connie, and Kiera. In order to determine if Jack likes Mouse, the girls make a love spell, which causes some laughable moments. However, unlike the group of boys, the girls are not obsessed with boys. Instead, Mouse is also dealing with getting kicked out of dance school, a mean girl, and making new friends.

Never Evers is full of friendship drama, crushes, jealousy, and misunderstandings. The story’s point of view flip flops between Jack and Mouse, which allows the reader to understand their confusion about the opposite sex. Using humor, the story expertly portrays the confusion and insecurity that many tweens feel about growing up. While the story is often laugh-out-loud funny, it also shows the importance of kindness and having friends who will stand by you no matter what.

While Never Evers is not great literature, it will resonate with tweens who often feel awkward and uncertain. Middle school readers who aren’t ready for more mature romances will enjoy Never Evers. If you’re looking for a similar tween-friendly romance, add Pugs and Kisses by J.J. Howard to your reading list.

Sexual Content

  • A group of boys talk about a boy who said, “he kissed sixteen girls in five days.
  • A group of boys talks about their inability to get a girlfriend. “You know Ed’s kissed ten girls now? Ten. He’s a month younger than me and he’s on double digits.”
  • Mouse has never kissed a boy, but her friend, Keira, has “kissed three other boys.” Keira says, “You’re not missing out on anything, to be honest. It’s a little anticlimactic, really. You think it’ll be this big, life-changing moment, but it’s actually just Elliot Campbell slobbering all over you.”
  • While on the bus, a boy moons a group of girls.
  • While talking about Connie’s true love, the bus passes a sign for a French teen singer. Connie says, “Ron is my one true love. But I might let Roland English-kiss me. To warm me up for Ron.”
  • While watching Romeo and Juliet, Mouse thinks, “Watching sex scenes with your parents is horrendous, but it turns out watching them with a bunch of people your own age is also really bad.”
  • While lost in the wilderness, Jack and Mouse go into an igloo to keep warm. Jack “buried all my worries and fears deep in the snow, and leaned in to kiss her.” Before he can, a rescue team shows up.
  • At a dance, Connie kisses a boy. Someone sees them, and says, “That Connie girl’s a man-eater.”
  • Jack thinks about kissing Mouse. “I knew I shouldn’t feel scared anymore, but I did. It was scary. Doing anything for the first time is scary. But I wanted to kiss her so bad.” He moves closer to Mouse, and, “Then I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and leaned in towards her.”

Violence

  • While talking to a group of girls, Jamie was teasing Jack and his friends. “Before I could stop him, Max launched himself at Jamie, shoving him hard in the chest and sending him crashing onto the cold, hard ice. . . Jamie was too shocked to even respond.” A teacher scolds the boys.

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • “Oh my God,” and “Oh God” are used as an exclamation frequently.
  • Occasionally there is name calling, such as dummy, idiot, lunatic, loser, jerk, freak, and wierdo. For example, Kiera calls a mean girl and her friends “a bunch of rancid, pathetic losers.”
  • Crap (or a version of it) is used six times. Jack says, “The only snow I’ve seen is the crappy kind that turns gray and icy and melts within a day.”
  • Freakin’ is used three times. A boy yells, “You’re a freakin’ maniac, Max!”
  • Hell is used seven times. When Mouse disappears, Jack thinks, “I couldn’t tell what the hell was going on.”

Supernatural

  • Mouse and her friends use The Teen Witches’ Book of Spells to cast a love spell. As part of the spell, the girls make a circle out of their clothes and stand in the circle. Mouse’s friend Keira says, “We need paper and a pen. A true belief in magic. A full moon. . . A hair from your head and a mason jar.”
  • Mouse puts a piece of her hair in a jar. Then she writes a boy’s name and puts it into the jar. Kiera says, “Okay, now we’re going to hold hands, and we all have to sing, ‘Name is written / Hidden singing / Compel the object to my bidding / So mote it be.”

Spiritual Content

  • Mouse hides in a bathroom stall so she can hear a group’s conversation. While there, she prays, “Please, God, don’t let my phone ring.”
  • Occasionally the teens pray. For example, when Kiera writes Jack (Mouse’s crush) on her jeans, Mouse prays that Kiera “didn’t wear those jeans again this week.”
  • Jack asks Mouse if she wants to get a hot chocolate. When she turns him down, Jack prays, “Please, God, let something happen now to end this moment—a fire alarm, an avalanche, a rip in the space-time continuum. . . Anything.”

The Betrothed

The King of Corona, Jameson, is young and handsome, but he is not the type to settle down. Everyone has watched him flirt his way from girl to girl. So when Hollis catches the King’s eye, she assumes that Jameson will quickly lose interest and move on.

Hollis has grown up at Keresken Castle among other daughters of nobility, most of whom hope to catch the King’s eye. So when King Jameson declares his love for Hollis, she is shocked. Hollis soon realizes that along with the extravagant presents and fawning attention, this new life brings expectations—expectations that make her wonder if she’s really cut out for life as a royal.

With a visit from the King of Isolte on the horizon, Hollis sees a chance to prove to Jameson—and herself—that she has what it takes to be queen. But when she meets an Isolten stranger with the mysterious power to see into her heart, she realizes the future she wants is one she never dared dream of.

Even though the story is told from Hollis’s point of view, it is hard to understand why King Jameson would want her as his queen. Hollis’s behavior is immature and self-serving. She doesn’t want to be a good queen for the sake of the country. Instead, she wants to be a good queen so others will admire her. This is reinforced when several characters, including Hollis’s parents, do not believe Hollis’s behavior is fit for a queen. Hollis’s self-serving nature makes it hard to relate to her struggles.

While The Selection Series by Kiera Cass is an engaging, action-packed series, The Betrothed has a weak plot and underdeveloped characters. For example, masked men kill everyone at a wedding. However, the murders are never investigated and the only death that seemed to matter was the death of Hollis’ husband. In addition, the conclusion is anticlimactic and unbelievable. The Betrothed is appropriate for middle school readers who may find the simple romance entertaining. However, most readers will want to skip The Betrothed for a more compelling romance such as What Light by Jay Asher or Pugs and Kisses by J.J. Howard.

Sexual Content

  • While on a boat ride, Hollis believes the King thinks she is “irresistible.” Since there are other people around, the prince “was forced to settle for placing a warm kiss on my cool forehead. It was enough to send new waves through my stomach, and I wondered if every moment with him would feel like this.”
  • Hollis knows the King has kissed other girls and wonders, “if his not kissing me yet was a good sign or a bad one.”
  • The King kisses Hollis. She “leaned into it. To finally be kissed was a wondrous thing, and to be kissed by a king was even more thrilling. Jameson drew me close, holding my chin and pulling away when he deemed the kiss long enough.”
  • While alone, Hollis and Silas kiss. “Silas cupped my cheeks, holding me with such tenderness that I felt everything inside my body melting. I could feel the calluses on his fingers as they traced the edges of my face, and I couldn’t help but compare the feeling to that of Jameson’s perfectly smooth hands.” They break apart when they hear footsteps coming.
  • Hollis and Silas kiss again. “It was so easy, like falling into the rhythm of a dance or taking a deep breath. Kissing Silas was like something that had always been waiting for me, something I knew how to do without thinking. His hands went up into my hair, holding me tight, and his lips moved feverishly. . .”
  • Hollis and Silas kiss and she thinks “it was the most beautiful thing, to be free and alone with Silas.”

Violence

  • At a wedding, masked men come and kill everyone in the house. One girl survives. She tells her mother, “They came with masks down and swords drawn, stabbing at anyone in their way, even the maids.”

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • Hollis invites some friends to her apartment. Wine is served and Hollis “picked up a glass of ale.”
  • During a festival, wine is served. The king is seen with “the chalice in his hand, amber ale spilling from one side.”
  • At a wedding, the guests have “goblets of ale.”

Language

  • A girl whose parents are divorced, is called a bastard. The girl tells Hollis, “When everyone was muttering that I was a bastard, you ignored them.”
  • When Hollis decides to marry Silas, Hollis’ mother calls him “your pig of a son.”

Supernatural

  • When Hollis leaves the king to marry Silas, some believe she is a witch. “With the way the king was acting, someone said you must have cast a spell on him to drive him to such madness.”

Spiritual Content

  • The King asks Hollis, “Do you ever thank the gods that you have me for a king and not that grouch, King Quinten?”
  • When King Quinten comes to visit, the King says, “The Lady Hollis and I welcome you as my father did, as a fellow sovereign, placed by the gods, and as a dear friend.”
  • During a celebration, someone says, “Let us today renew our devotion to King Jameson and pray for his life to extend for many years, and for his heirs to be plenty!”
  • During the celebration, the King says, “I pray for our kingdom to prosper.”
  • At a wedding, masked men kill everyone present. Later, Hollis says, “I am grateful. I know that living through a situation where I surely ought to have died is a gift but I cannot think of why in the world the gods would spare me.”
  • When Hollis goes to look for Silas’s mother and sister, she “prayed that if I stayed on this course, I’d find them.”

 

The Unbound

In the sequel to Victoria Schwab’s The Archived, Mackenzie Bishop’s adventures as a Keeper of the Archive continue. At the same time, she must balance going back to school and figure out her relationship with Wes, her best friend, and fellow Keeper. But Mackenzie is still haunted by Owen Chris Clarke, the History who almost killed her and nearly brought the end of the Archive. Owen frequently visits her all-too-realistic dreams, and Mackenzie starts to question her sanity as the Archive’s other mysteries close in around her.

But her dreams aren’t the only things haunting Mackenzie. A string of disappearances follows her path, where she was the last person to interact with each of the missing persons. Plus a mysterious man keeps watching her while she’s traveling to and from school. As if that wasn’t enough, she keeps blacking out and waking up with no recollection of what happened. Is a lack of sleep, or something more sinister haunting Mackenzie?

The Unbound is shades darker than The Archived both in atmosphere and content, which helps to enhance the mystery of the Archive and its employees. As the stakes rise, it becomes clear that the reader knows little more than Mackenzie, who struggles with the trauma of almost dying and being manipulated by Owen in the last installment. Some plot points revolve around Mackenzie’s parents, who fear that Mackenzie is depressed, self-harming, and acting out. However, much of the trouble that Mackenzie encounters is because of the Archive and her nightmares. By the end of the novel, Mackenzie is ready to heal her relationships with her parents, Wes, and, most importantly, herself.

The back-to-school setting helps balance the darkness of the Archive and Mackenzie’s nightmares. Although school is not a completely safe location for Mackenzie, school is the one truly normal place that she and Wes experience. At times, their friends provide comic relief and tell Mackenzie more about Wes, who is notoriously secretive.

School also helps bring Mackenzie out of her inner world and the world of the Archive. In many ways, having friends and going to school pulls Mackenzie back into the realm of the living. In both The Archived and The Unbound, Mackenzie spends her time straddling the line between living and dead, between the real and imagined. But in this installment, Mackenzie becomes a more seasoned Keeper while also learning how to live her life.

The Unbound is an exciting follow-up to the darkly magical The Archived. The end neatly wraps up this book and provides a bridge to a potential third book. This book does continue the adventures from The Archived, so The Archived needs to be read first. This book is a must-read because Schwab’s creative prose wonderfully captures the world of the Archive and Mackenzie’s journey, through interesting discussions about grief, trauma, and the scars that we all carry. The dead never truly leave us, but as Mackenzie learns, sometimes it’s necessary to let go and embrace the living as tightly as we can.

Sexual Content

  • Mackenzie and another Keeper, Wes, are friends who spend a lot of time haplessly flirting, though Mackenzie insists that they aren’t dating. However, they do act like they’re dating and Wes sleeps in Mackenzie’s bed. Mackenzie narrates, “I catch his hand, music flaring through me as I draw him to the bed.” They do not have sex.
  • Since Mackenzie and other Keepers have the power to “read” people and objects, another person’s touch tends to be really noisy and overwhelming for Mackenzie. Wes kisses her regardless, and she describes, “The way his lips smiled against my jaw, his now-familiar noise—that cacophony of drum and bass—pressing through me with his touch before I could find the strength to tell him no.”
  • Cash kisses Mackenzie. She says, “His lips are warm and soft, and my head fills with jazz and laughter; for an instant, it feels sweet and safe and simple. But my life is none of those things, and I realize as the kiss ends that I don’t want to pretend it is, and that there is only one person I want to kiss me like this.”
  • Wes and Mackenzie kiss again. Mackenzie describes, “I kiss him, not gently but desperately.” The description lasts for a page.

Violence

  • Mackenzie has frequent nightmares about Owen, the History who tried to kill her in the previous novel. Mackenzie says, “I dream of him dragging the jagged side of his blade across my skin as he murmurs that the ‘real’ Mackenzie Bishop must be hidden somewhere under all that flesh.” This nightmare happens often, and he usually stabs her in the dream, “[driving] the knife forward into [her] chest.”
  • Mackenzie’s little brother Ben “was killed last year on his way to school” in a hit-and-run. His death plagues the family.
  • Wes has a rough home life, and Cash describes Wes’ parents’ divorce as “brutal.” When Wes retreated for a year, not contacting his friends at all, and then returned, Cash gave him a “black eye” for abandoning them. They are still good friends.
  • Mackenzie dislikes the family therapist because she assumes incorrect things about Mackenzie and she convinced Mackenzie’s mother to throw out Ben’s stuff after he died. Mackenzie recalls once that “the one time we met face-to-face, she saw a scratch on my wrist from a pissed-off History and was convinced I did it to myself to feel things.”
  • On her way home from school, two guys attack Mackenzie with a pipe and a knife. She blacks out and wakes up to the two men laying on the ground, “covered in blood.” Mackenzie has no recollection of what she’s done. She notes that one man’s “nose is broken. Blood is gushing down his face, and one of his legs looks like it’s bent at the wrong angle.”
  • Mackenzie runs over a jogger with her bike by accident. “The collision is a tangle of handles and wheels and limbs, and we both go down hard on the concrete.” Other than scrapes and scratches, both are ok.
  • A girl named Bethany goes missing, and Mackenzie learns from her classmates that Bethany’s home life was rough. Her mom had remarried and the situation was turbulent. One girl notes that “sleazy dude [the stepfather] has been there all of a week when he’s home alone with Bethany and takes a go at her . . . She did what any self-respecting Hyde schoolgirl would do. She punched him in the face. But when she tried to tell her mom what happened, she said it was Bethany’s fault.”
  • Someone attacked Cash, and he shows up to school with a “cut beside his eye [and] a bruise darkening his jaw.”
  • Owen, the History that tried to kill Mackenzie in the previous novel, is back, though Mackenzie doesn’t know how. He attacks her at school and kills a passerby. Mackenzie describes, “I hit the ground and roll over and up onto my feet again as he lunges forward and I lunge back. Or at least I mean to, but I misjudge the distance and the toppled shelves come up against my shoulders an instant before he forces the bat beneath my chin.” This continues for several pages.
  • Owen kills one of the Crew, another Archive employee, at the dance. The Crew “crumples, and before he can recover, Owen takes his head in his hands and snaps his neck.” A fight scene with Owen, Wes, Mackenzie, and several other Crew continues for several pages after this death.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Mackenzie takes medication for her headache and then promptly blacks out. When she wakes, “the drinking glass is lying in glittering pieces on the counter, my hand wrapped around the largest shard. Blood runs between my fingers where I’ve gripped it and down my other arm where I’ve carved a single deep line.” She has no recollection of what happened.
  • Mackenzie’s mother drugs Mackenzie to make her sleep. Mackenzie describes the moment when she realizes that her mom slipped a sleeping pill into her drink. She says, “At first I think I’m about to have another blackout, but those happen fast, and this is slow like syrup.”

Language

  • Dallas, the therapist, says to one Crew member, “I’d tell you not to be such an ass, Zachary, but it would be a waste of my breath.”

Supernatural

  • Mackenzie is a Keeper who returns wandering Histories, or ghosts, back to the Archive. The Archive is “a library of the dead, vast and warm, wood and stone and colored glass, and all throughout, a sense of peace.” Mackenzie travels between worlds and encounters quite a few dead people.

Spiritual Content

  • none

by Alli Kestler

Stormcaster

Pirate Evan Strangward has been hunted by Empress Celestine for most of his life. Being able to control the weather can only protect him for so long. Now, he’s looking to the Fells for allies to take the fight to the Empress. Evan must warn the queendom that Empress Celestine and her bloodsworn army won’t wait forever to invade.

After four years in Arden, Ash sul’Han is on his way back to his home in the Fells. It’s a chance to see his mother and sister, and all the friends he left behind. But once he finds out his sister, Lyss, was taken by Empress Celestine, he’ll stop at nothing to get her back and save the royal line. Ash might not trust Evan, but he needs the pirate’s help if he wants to infiltrate Celestine’s stronghold and end the war before it gets out of hand.

Stormcaster, the third entry in Chima’s Shattered Realms series, is a wonderful installment in this epic tale. The story primarily follows Evan Strangward and Ash sul’Han. Stormcaster goes back in time to show the beginning of Empress Celestine’s rise to power, as well as Evan’s reason for opposing her. Destin Karn’s backstory is also explored. While this backtracking is extensive, it’s a well-thought-out and interesting addition to the story.

When the backstories are caught up to the present, the rest of the main characters are reintroduced. Ash sul’Han, who was absent from the previous novel, is finally back in the picture. When he makes it home to his queen mother, he finds the world completely changed. Ash is a lovable character, who has matured from his rebellious stage. Now he is willing to do whatever it takes to protect his family. As he struggles to work his way back into a world he doesn’t recognize, Ash embodies the themes of maturity and loss.

Overall, Stormcaster is a fast-paced ride. Since most of the main characters are back in action, each chapter shows the reader another part of the world, creating a fleshed-out and believable setting. Luckily, the shifting views are easy to follow. The story focuses on bringing together most of the main characters, so they can plan how to stop Empress Celestine. Will Ash finally reunite with his sister? Will Evan be able to take down the Empress that’s been hunting him? Readers will find out in the final installment, Deathcaster.

Sexual Content

  • When Evan and his shipmate Brody look at Empress Celestine, Brody thinks she’s beautiful. Evan notices Brody “was gazing at the young captain in a way that he’d never looked at Evan.” Later, Evan thinks about his love life. “There were other, less complicated lovers in the ports on both sides of the Indio, boys who offered sweet kisses and warm embraces.”
  • Evan and Destin have an ongoing romance. While sitting close together, “Destin put his hand on Evan’s arm, setting his heart to flopping like a beached fish.” However, Destin is afraid of love. “He’d learned his lesson well—that love was as risky as mercy.” Evan thinks, “Do not fall for this dangerous, moody, mercurial boy. It will lead you to heartbreak or worse.”
  • After confiding in each other, Evan “gripped Destin’s coat, arched his body up, and kissed him firmly on the lips.”
  • Destin’s parents have a terrible relationship. Destin tells Evan that his father “kept pounding on my mother—trying to get her to admit to cheating on him. He didn’t want to believe I was really his.” Later on, Evan asks, “If he didn’t love her, then why couldn’t he just set her aside and marry someone else.”
  • When Ash’s mother, Raisa, speaks about her marriage, she says, “I’m glad, now, that I married young, so that Han and I had more time together. It was twenty-five years, but it just flew by.” Later, she tells Ash, “Falling in love in wartime is chancy, just like having children. We’ve had a lot of pain, but a lot of joy, all the same.”
  • Madeleine, younger sister to the new King Jarat, says, “They were talking about all the women they’d had, and would have. Jarat said Father never bedded a wolf, but he would, and even a wolf could be tamed.”

Violence

  • Destin and Evan talk about killing. Destin says, “Killing is always personal. It’s the second-most-intimate thing that can happen between two people.”
  • When Destin and Evan are captured by Destin’s father, the two are forced to fight each other. Evan punches Destin, and then, “Destin somehow wrenched free of his captors, lurched forward, wrapped his hands around Evan’s neck, and began to squeeze.”
  • Adrian talks with his mother, and thinks, “Your daughter Hanalea went into the borderlands, and was murdered. Your son went south, and became a murderer.”
  • Hal fights members of Celestine’s bloodsworn warriors. During the fight with a horselord, Hal “drove his sword beneath his rib cage, all the way to the hilt.” Later, Hal cuts off a man’s head. “The head splashed into the water, but the body continued to stagger around, spraying blood from its severed neck until it tripped over a rock slab and went down.”
  • One of Celestine’s bloodsworn cuts down an old man. “It seemed that one of them wasn’t moving fast enough, because his horselord guard unslung his blade and cut him down.”
  • Destin says his father beat his mother. Destin’s father, “beat her all the time. Half to death, once or twice. Sometimes at court, but mostly at his keep on the Bittersweet. He kept a full time mage healer to patch her up again.”
  • After Evan calls Destin’s father a monster, Destin says, “Oh, he is. He started beating me, too, once I was too big to ignore and still too small to defend myself. . . If I had to do it over again, I’d have opened his throat and stabbed him through the heart with a poisoned blade and cut off his head and hung it over my door.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Hal talks to his former subordinate, Bellamy, at a tavern. Bellamy orders a “Small beer. I’m on duty in a little while. On second thought, I’ll have bingo. A double.”
  • Lyss bumps into Breon. Breon tells her, “There’s a lot of rum around, if that’s appealing.”
  • Destin thinks about King Jarat and his entourage. “They were more than happy to take the young king under their tutelage in the study of drinking, hunting, dicing, wenching, and swordplay.”
  • One of King Jarat’s loyal men comes home drunk one night. Destin sees him as he “stumbled to the garderobe and unbuttoned his breeches, hurrying to unburden himself of excess ale.”

Language

  • Hell is used a few times. For example, when Evan first meets Destin, Destin tells him, “To hell with your bloody books.”
  • Damn is used occasionally. For example, when Evan thinks about his job as a shipmaster, he thinks, “He was damned by his own success.”
  • Bastard is used a few times. Once, “When Destin inquired about Lucky Faros, saying he’d heard good things about the young captain, Kadar had informed him that Faros was an ungrateful, greedy, unreliable bastard he should steer clear of.”
  • Kadar, the streetlord of Evan’s city, tells Destin, “Go suck the Breaker’s balls.”

Supernatural

  • Wizards, also known as mages, are commonplace.
  • Wizards and mages produce a power called “flash” constantly. Destin describes flash, “like a kind of magical vapor that dissipates as soon as it appears. Amulets allow us to accumulate enough to work significant charms. Power transfers to it through skin, when you touch it.”
  • Destin talks about amulets. “They’re used to store and control magical energy, something we call ‘flash.’ There are other magical tools as well, such as talismans to protect against magical attacks, all made by upland clans.”
  • A blood mage is a type of mage that uses blood in their spells. Brody, Evan’s subordinate, says, “They make people drink their blood, and turn them into slaves.”
  • Destin is a mage. Evan notes that Destin “had an entire menu of nuanced magic he could work using his amulet and specific words spoken in the wetland language. Power including immobilization, persuasion, interrogation, and the like.”
  • In Arden, magic is considered a sin. Destin tells Evan, “Back home, magic is considered to be the work of the Breaker, a misfortune, nonetheless, can be put to use for the greater glory of the crown.” He later says, “A mage is a precarious thing to be in the wetland empire, because of the church. The king finds us useful, but he is as changeable as spring weather when it comes to the tension between magic and religion.”
  • Evan is a stormlord, a mage that uses weather magic. When Destin attacked Evan, “A storm surge of magic welled up in him, and electricity crackled across his skin, as if the power that seethed beneath it was leaking out.” Later, Evan “didn’t consciously reach for power, but it came unbidden. Small whirlwinds erupted all around his feet, sucked up a mixture of sawdust and straw, flung it in the soldier’s face.”
  • Jenna is one of the magemarked, a group of people that have unique abilities even among mages. Destin tells Evan about Jenna’s abilities: “She claims to be clairvoyant—that she sometimes sees images of the future, sees people as they really are, or can tell when someone is lying.” Later, he also says, “She heals quickly, and is resistant to flame. In fact, she develops a kind of armor for protection.”

Spiritual Content

  • Kadar, Evan’s former employer, thinks about his gods. He thinks, “It seemed that Omari Kadar, street lord of the Tarvos waterfront, had been abandoned by the gods.”
  • Evan is worshipped by his Stormborn pirate crew. “In the space of four years he’d gone from being a kind of shipboard mascot to being ‘Lord Strangward,’ the central deity of a Stormborn cult.”
  • When Evan and Destin get a new ship, Evan wants to perform a ceremony to the gods. Destin’s mother says, “I hope you don’t plan to sacrifice a goat and make us drink the blood. The goats, I need.”
  • When Ash tells Lila about his mistakes, she says, “If you want absolution, go to a speaker or priest. I’m hardly in a position to give you advice.”
  • Ash’s mother tells him, “Some speakers say that we must wait to be rewarded in the next life.”

by Jonathan Planman

To Fly Among the Stars: The Hidden Story of the Fight for Women Astronauts

It’s the 1960s, and the United States and the Soviet Union are locked in a heated race to launch the first human into space. NASA selects seven men, superstar test pilots, and former air fighters, for their first astronaut class – the Mercury 7. The men endure hours of difficult tests, taunting by fellow pilots, constant media attention, and the public pressure of representing America in a whole new frontier.

But away from the media buzz, there are others quietly fighting for the same opportunity. Thirteen women, accomplished air racers, test pilots, and flight instructors, are putting themselves through those same grueling tests, hoping to defy the era’s boundaries for women and earn a seat aboard a space capsule themselves.

To Fly Among the Stars tells the story of seven men who hoped to ride rockets and thirteen women who dared ask for a fair chance to soar to the stars. Unlike many books, To Fly Among the Stars takes a look at the Mercury 7’s heroic deeds as well as their flaws. Some of the men’s partying, squabbling, and flirting ways were a stark contrast to the women’s behavior. The women had to overcome many obstacles in order to become pilots, including having to look like proper ladies as they flew. Even though these thirteen women were never able to realize their dreams, they took the first steps in breaking the glass ceiling for female astronauts.

Countless individuals worked behind the scenes to land the first man on the moon. While To Fly Among the Stars focuses on Mercury 7 and the 13 women who dreamed of going into space, the large group of characters makes it difficult to keep track of each individual. Often, a chapter will have a few paragraphs on one person and then jump to another person. The shifting topics make the story confusing.

To Fly Among the Stars highlights the brave women who dreamed of going into space and focuses on the discrimination they faced. While this is a valid point, the Mercury 7’s mistakes and bad behavior also become a focal point. The author states that “Accepting women as astronauts would mean that NASA—and all its feverish fans—would be forced to acknowledge that female aviators could do exactly what male aviators could do. And that might threaten the heroic, ultramasculine, tough-guy status the astronauts enjoyed.”

Black and white photographs help tell the story and the back of the book contains a two-page glossary. The difficult vocabulary, quickly changing topics, and the vast list of historical people make To Fly Among the Stars best for strong readers. The book would be excellent to use as a source for a research paper or a school project; however, those who are not interested in the history of flight will find the book difficult to slog through.

 Sexual Content

  • After Shepard went up in a space capsule, he had to go to a briefing. “During one interview, a pretty secretary delivered Shepard a cup of coffee. As she left, one witness reported watching ‘Shepard’s brain get up, leave the room, and follow her down the hall.’”
  • At a party, two astronauts performed a racist routine. “It was a cruel characterization of both homosexuals and Hispanics.”

Violence

  • Bill Odom, an air racer, “pushed his little green plane to nearly 400 miles per hour before losing control and punching right through a suburban home, killing not just himself but also a resident woman and her baby.”
  • Pilot James Vosyka died during an air race. “A wing on his racing plane collapsed on a hard turn, and his aircraft slammed into the ground in front of 12,000 spectators.”
  • Several times, the story talks about pilots shooting down MiG’s. For example, Wally Schirra “went on to shoot down another MiG in Korea.”
  • Many women joined the WASP in order to fly and help in the war effort. However, some men didn’t approve of women flying airplanes and played dangerous pranks on the women. After one prank, “Betty Taylor Wood’s airplane slammed into the ground near a runway, killing both Wood and her passenger. . . Someone had dumped sugar into the plane’s gas tank.”
  • During a training exercise, a pilot “ejected but died when he and his parachute slammed into the hard desert sand.”
  • Rankin had to eject during a high-altitude flight. “Immediately after exploding through the glass canopy of his cockpit, Rankin was overcome by the searing, stabbing cold. . .. His exposed skin froze almost instantly before going blissfully numb. And then the real pain started. . . His abdomen swelled. His skin stretched. Blood sprayed from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Rankin made it to the ground alive but barely.”
  • When an engineer joked about astronaut Shepard’s bad attitude, “Shepard picked up an ashtray and whipped it at the engineer’s face. He missed his target by a hair.”
  • Several astronauts were killed “during a practice launch when a spark caught inside their Apollo 1 space capsule. Three men burned to death right there on the launch pad while dozens of ground crew members sputtered and coughed and tried frantically to claw the capsule door open.”

      Drugs and Alcohol

  • John Gleen was a military pilot who had “flown angry, confident, and even–dangerously—rip-roaring drunk.
  • A woman pilot had to listen as “a drunk senator slurred his sexist judgments.”
  • A woman pilot was married to an alcoholic. While the woman was in astronaut testing, her husband called her every night. “He was drunk, angry, and cruel.”
  • Some astronauts partied at Cocoa Beach. “They drank too much alcohol and pulled elaborate pranks on one another. They flirted with women who weren’t their wives.”
  • The astronauts liked the pool at Cocoa Beach and the manager “went to great lengths to keep their parties stocked with alcohol, girls, and food, and free from the press.”
  • One of the astronauts had to convince a reporter not to print a photograph of a “drunk astronaut getting frisky with a strange woman.”
  • As training continued, “Shepard’s booze-fueled hijinks were becoming more public. . .” Shepard “was clamoring onto nightclub stages, drunkenly giggling racist jokes into microphones.”

Language

  • After a flight, a pilot “flipped the jet the middle finger.”
  • NASA was working hard “on new procedures to prevent the next guy from pulling another boneheaded screw up.”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • During a launch, someone “said a silent prayer for Glenn’s success.”
  • Sunsets “made Glenn think of his Christian faith and miracles and the mysteries of existence.”
  • Millions of Americans watched Glenn’s mission. As they watched, they were “praying and fretting. . . They pleaded for his safety. Oh please, oh please.”

Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier

The United States may have put the first man on the moon, but it was the Soviet space program that made Valentina Tereshkova the first woman in space. It took years for the U.S. to catch up, but soon NASA’s first female astronauts were racing past milestones of their own. The trailblazing women of Group 9, NASA’s first mixed-gender class, had the challenging task of convincing people that a woman’s place is in space. But the women soon discovered that even NASA had a lot to learn about making space travel possible for everyone.

Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier follows Mary Cleave and Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, among others. Many people, including Valentina’s own mother, didn’t think women were capable of becoming astronauts. Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier takes a humorous look at the gender stereotypes that women astronauts had to overcome. For example, as the first American woman in space, Sally Ride faced great pressure from the media.

Once NASA allowed women to train as astronauts, men realized women were capable of completing difficult tasks. Despite their differences, every astronaut works as a team to complete essential tasks. When Mary finally went into space, she talks about the beauty of space as well as some of the difficult aspects of space flight, such as how difficult it is to use the bathroom with no gravity. While the book has some lighter moments, it also reminds readers, “when you made a serious mistake in this job, it cost lives. We’ve lost three crews: Apollo 1 in 1967, Challenger in 1986, and Columbia in 2003.”

Even though Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier is a graphic novel, it packs a lot of history into a short amount of text. Since the text rarely uses people’s names, keeping track of the huge cast of characters is difficult. The back of the book has several pages with pictures of different astronauts, but these pages do not include names. Younger readers may become frustrated by the difficult space language as well as the unique font that is used when the Russians speak. One example of a complicated sentence is when Mary said, “That’s because of the 1X resolver’s IMU BITE, we needed a GNC spec 1on CRT 2.”

Strong readers who have a love of history and space will enjoy being introduced to space history, astronaut training, and life in space. The often humorous artwork excellently shows the characters’ feelings through facial expressions. Most pages contain two types of text. The characters’ words are shown in white quote bubbles, while the narrator’s thoughts and basic information appear in the square, blue boxes. Each page contains 2-13 complex sentences.

Even though Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier focuses on women, the graphic novel will appeal to both girls and boys. In the end, the book shows that with hard work, dedication, and perseverance, anyone can become an astronaut. The last panel shows a diverse group of women who are the “future astronauts.” Everyone who dreams of going into space should read Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • None

 Drugs and Alcohol

  • When Mary interviewed for NASA, she was nervous so she tried to be funny. After she got the job, she says, “I didn’t have a beer just before going to John Young’s office for my first assignment.”
  • When they first get to space, some astronauts take ScopeDex which is an anti-nausea drug.

Language

  • During a test, one of the astronauts says, “good lord, doc.”
  • When Mary joined NASA, “I got one more welcome gift. Nicknames, thanks to my assignments and my degree. Sometimes my fellow astros called me ‘Sanitary Fairy,’ sometimes ‘Crap Com.’”
  • “Oh God” and “my God” are both used once. When Mary looked at the earth from space, she says, “My god.”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • While the astronauts were getting ready to go into space, someone prays, “Dear Lord, don’t let these guys screw up.”
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