Nightshade

Naomi Maguire

Nightshade

Andrea Cremer

4/5

Nightshade is the story of a worrier that transforms from wolf and girl whenever she is in danger, upset, angry, or just needs the release of the woods. Her name is Calla and she will change her world forever. Her world is as it should be until she saves someone she should have left for dead, but she couldn't leave him. She doesn't know why but she just broke a rule of the Keepers. Her masters, the people her and her ancestors have worked for, for centuries. There are two packs that the keepers say must unite. This means Calla being an alpha has to marry the other pack alpha and make the pack one. She has known this all her life. Known who she will be with for the rest of her life, but things change as Shay, the boy she saved becomes the person she must befriend. There is a connection there that shouldn't be. Cal's choices will affect her pack greatly and there safety so she must follow the elder's rules and marry Ren. As Calla's friendship with Shay blossoms things become more complicated and she must make a choice. Her pack or Shay. This book is full of twist and turns. Making you wonder and surprising you with things you wouldn't expect. To know what happens you should enter the world of Calla and see the world in a different perspective. I recommend this to anyone who is interested. I loved it.

The Invisible One

Tiffany Richards

The Invisible One

Stef Penney

Rate: 3/4


One of the books that I read this quarter is The Invisible One by Stef Penney. The book takes place in the eighties. It is about a private investigator named, Ray Lovell. He wakes up from an awful nightmare and he is lying in a hospital bed. He has a paralysed right hand. His memory is very foggy. Before this, he was investigating Rose Wood, a girl who has been missing for 6 years. Its strange because she happened to go missing right after marrying her husband. Lovell keeps pursuing to interview the husband but time after time no piece come together. Throughout the book the author gives bits and pieces of what happened to make the reader keep onreading, but it still didn't keep me intrigued.

I honestly did not like this book that much. The beginning started off great but then as the book went on the narrator was shared and it was hard for me to follow. I don't really recommend this book to many people unless you are very good at dealing with multiple different scenarios at once. I'm disappointed in the outcome of this book, but I'm almost positive that someone will enjoy it.

Mike Gagnon's Independent Reading

This book is set in the late 1800's in London. It starts by Montmorency stealing a jewel from a museum. He has been a thief for years, and is very good at it. While stealing this jewel, he is discovered and falls from a roof, and is knocked unconscious. Montmorency wakes up to a doctor doing tests on him. He is in jail, but every week he in released for shows on the medical work he had done to him, which was the most impressive work anyone had seen at the time. Doctor Farcett had done incisions, and they were spectacular. While in prison, Montmorency creates a brilliant plan for when he returns to society. He creates two characters... Montmorency and Scarper. Scarper is an everyday construction worker man, while Montmorency is rich and goes out on the town at night. He uses the sewer systems to steal from the richest people in London, then retreats to his crappy home as Scarper. Once he collects enough he distributes the goods to different jewelers and becomes rich for his second personality, Montmorency. While doing this he meets a man named Fox-Selwyn. He is a very wealthy man, who's father was once king of a different territory. By the time they are friends, Montmorency is in full affect, and Scarper is left behind. But tragedy strikes when Montmorency finds out that Fox-Selwyn is also close friends with Doctor Farcett, and is scared his secret of thieving may be called out.

Ben Rubio: None of Us Were Like This Before

Ben Rubio

None of Us Were Like This Before
By Joshua Phillips

(9/10)


None of Us Were Like This Before

None Of Us Were like This Before is a great book. It’s a story about soldiers changing from thugs to men, and it also illustrates that the damaging legacy of torture is not only to bear by the detainees, but also by American soldiers and the country to which they’ve returned. The soldiers punish the detainees if they disobey them. It’s kind of harsh because they tie their hands up and tie them to the highest rung on the jail bars and they won’t let them sleep. They’ll put loud and noisy music close to their ears. Adam’s mother is upset by what they have done to the Iraqi detainees, but after they talk she understood what troubled Adam. She wanted to take Adam to Las Vegas, but Adam refused to. He said he wouldn’t handle the noise. After the vacation, he went to Alaska for some training and didn’t like it there- he’d rather go to Iraq because he thinks that he has more purpose there. He’s thinking twice whether to stay or go back home and be with his loved ones, but Adams mom asked him what he will do there. “What’s your plan for attack?” She made Adam realize that it was his dream since he was still a kid, and then he stayed put in Alaska. In August 2004, Adam’s mom got a call from the US forces letting her know that something tragic happened. She’s assuming that Adam survived. So the book tells how the US forces turn to torture. It tells how a group of ordinary soldiers , ill trained for responsibilities forced upon them, turned to degradation and abuse. They believe that torture was both effective and necessary.

I chose this book because I want to know more about the real life of the soldiers. My great grandfather is a veteran from World War II. He fought for America. He is still alive but doesn’t talk much about his experiences. I have four uncles that belongs to the Philippine Army, they haven’t experience an international war yet because Philippines doesn’t get involve in big wars, but they fight for the law. They fight the rebels who are trying to take over the government.

Holes

Dave Donovan

Author: Louis Sachar

Pages: 231

Rating: 8/10

The book Holes is about a teenage name Stanley Yelnats (a palindrome), who is wrongly convicted of a crime of theft that he did not actually commit. He is sent to a juvenile delinquent camp called Camp Green Lake, which ironically has no green whatsoever, as the lake had completely been dried up for decades. Here he meets many other delinquents such as Zero, Magnet, Squid, Barfbag, Armpit and X-Ray. The daily life at the camp is that the boys must dig a hole a day, large enough for their shovel to fit within it in any direction. At this camp, Stanley befriends a boy named Zero, who is clearly not a popular kid at the camp. At the camp, Stanley discovers the true meaning of a rough lifestyle; he only has 2 jumpsuits, on for digging, one for everything else, his showers are only 4 minutes of cold water, he sleeps on a rotten cot, everything in the facility for relaxing is usually broken, and he struggles deeply with his task of hole digging. Stanley is soon accepted into the group of boys when he finds a fish fossil, and receives the name “Caveman” (he then joins Gieco). Stanley starts to adapt to the camp, and becomes better at digging the holes. Soon Zero decides to run on the wild side, after hitting Mr. Sir in the face with a shovel, he scampers off and nobody knows where he went. Soon after, Stanley’s emotions get the best of him and he runs away after Zero, and what they come to discover is very exiting……Louis Sachar is truly an expert at combining multiple stories from all different time periods and intertwining them to create one amazing climax of brilliant coincidence: this is what kept me hooked the whole time. I deeply enjoyed this book; it is a fairly quick read but packs a truly fulfilling plot that keeps the reader reading.

The Mostly True Story of Jack by Kelly Barnhill

The Mostly True Story of Jack

Kelly Barnhill

Length of book: 319 pages

Rating: 6/10

The book I read this quarter was one that I would not normally pick up and read but I decided to get out of my comfort zone and read it. This book is about a boy named Jack who was an outsider in San Francisco California. He lives with his parents who do not pay any attention to him until they get divorced and he is forced to go to Hazelwood Iowa.

In Iowa, Jack stays with his crazy uncle and aunt. In California he was used to feeling alone and almost invisible but in Iowa it was a different story. There is a bully in town that picks on Jack and he doesn’t know how to deal with the attention. It is a good thing that he made friends with Mary, Jack, Wendy, Anders and Frankie. There is also another secret, some people know Jack and want to kill him. Jack looks into the town’s past and looks in to the mystery behind why children have been disappearing there for decades and what his connection may be. He finds a book called “The Secret History of Hazelwood” that solves some of his answers.

I gave this book a 6/10 because I was so confused during most of it. The author really makes you think and makes you figure out things on your own. I did feel bad for Jack because he did feel invisible but I think everyone has felt that way in some point in his or her lifetime.

I learned that you can’t always trust your friends because in this book some of the friends he make are his enemies. It also brought up one of the quotes I live by, "everything happens for a reason" because in this book everything ties into each other and makes his parents divorce a good and bad experience for Jack.

Overall, this book was interesting and it kept me hooked. I would recommend this to people who are into those dark mystery books that unravel secrets.

Landon Allen - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

By Sherman Alexie

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is about a young Native American growing up on an Indian reservation with no promising future. Junior, the main character, is a small, scrawny freshman at one the high schools in the reservation and has a disease that puts to much fluid in his brain. Everybody in the town picks him on, except for his best friend, Rowdy. Rowdy is a big and tough kid and he used his size to protect Junior every chance he could. One day Junior gets fed up with one of his teachers and ends up getting suspended. His teach doesn’t get mad, but instead he gets sad because Junior is such a nice kid with so much potential. This teacher convinces Junior to transfer to an all-white school off of the reservation. Junior often wondered if he made to right decision to leave.

When Junior tells Rowdy that he is leaving, Rowdy beats him up and never talks to him again. He turns into an outcast from whole reservation. When he starts his first day at Rearden High School, his life doesn’t get any better. The girls make fun of his name, the boys still pick on him, and the teachers don’t give him a fair chance.

This book was written very well in a way that keeps high school students interested. Sherman Alexie used humor to make the hard to talk about subjects more comforting while still keeping the strong meaning. I enjoyed reading this book and I learned a lot of new perspectives from it. I recommend this to anybody looking for a funny book that still has significant values.