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.

The Hunger Games

Breanna Simpson
January 19, 2012
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
374 Pages
6 out of 10

This quarter I read the hunger games for my independent read. This book was different from all of the other books that I normally read. It wasn’t my favorite book by any means, but I would recommend it to someone that enjoys reading fiction stories.
The Hunger Games takes place in North America in a capital of Panem. The capital is a very strict and ruling government. Each year one boy and one girl between the ages of twleve and eighteen are sent to the hunger games. The hunger game is a fight to death on live television. The contestants used many different types of weapons to compeat against their component. The story follows a sixteen year old girl, Katniss Everdeen, who already has a tough life. She is chosen for the hunger games in place of her sister and she couldn’t be more afraid. Katniss goes through many hardships throughout the book. She learnes to fight for survival, and support her mom and sister. She makes friends and loses them, along with killing people and then regretting it in the end. This story is very interesting, and at times can get confusing but I think many of you will enjoy it.

Born to Run

Ryan Boquist

Author: Chistopher McDougal

Pages:272

Born to run is about the authors main quest is to find the answer to his running aliments. The book starts with the main author’s trip to Mexico. In Mexico he finds these Indians called Tarahumara Indians. They live in the Copper Canyons in Chihuahua state, Mexico. It is not a very easy journey getting to be able to meet the tribe but once he does it is well worth it. He finds out that the tribes people were pretty much born to run.

As children the Tarahumara have running games and it is not uncommon for the 80 year old men in the tribe to go for an all day run up to or over 50 miles a day. He also found out that the tribe members lived very long lives and also had no foot problems even though they only ran in sandals on the rocky mountain trails they had to run on. The key to their success was there foot wear and running technique. Naturally we were made to run from toe to heel but with modern day running shoes they change your stride to an unnatural heel to toe stride. The answer to the authors running aliments had been fixed. With time McDougal’s running problems had slowly faded away.

This book also has tips for ultra marathon (50 mile races) runners and runners who just want to improve their time. The tips were from the Tarahumara Indians and other barefoot runners. Even if you don’t run this is a very interesting book just to find out about the history and mechanics of running.

I would recommend this book to anyone. This book deserves a nice 10 out of 10 rating. There wasn’t anything really wrong with the book and I really enjoyed reading it. Born to run stared the “toe shoe movement” which shows that this book can be very influential.

Michael Oher: I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness to the Blind Side and Beyond

Ben Swift

Mrs. Diamond

Author: Don Yaeger

5 of 5

Michael Oher was a young black kid living on the streets of Memphis who had no place to call home, and had a mother who neglected him and was a crack addicted. But when the Tuohy a white upper class family with a daughter and son took him in Michael could now say he belonged somewhere.

While living with this family he found the love and ability to be a football player, this was just a kid of the streets that had never played before but he was good. He had the size to play and be good. He went through his senior year struggling with school but he found ways to keep his grades up and play football. He was one of the top Offensive Line man recruits and he received offers from University of Tennessee, Louisiana State University, University of Alabama, Auburn University and Ole Miss University where he played his college ball. He played all 4 years and then went on to the NFL draft in 2009 and was picked 23 overall to the Baltimore Ravens. Oher is apart of the starting Offensive line for the Ravens.

Among the Hidden

Dorothy Crowell
Title: Among the Hidden
By: Margaret Peterson Haddix
Rate: 10/10
Pages: 153
This book is about a boy named Luke. At the beginning of the story Luke is mad that all the trees around his house get cut down. The reason why is because there is a law that says families cannot have more than two children. Luke is a third child. He use to be able to go outside because he was hidden enough in the trees but now he cannot go outside and he also cannot go near any windows or anything. Luke thinks his family is being a little bit too careful because they are also not letting him eat at the dinning room table with them.
Luke lives up in the attic and one day he found vents that he could look out to see outside. Through those vents he saw lights on next door and it was the middle of the day so he was thinking that meant there was another third child next door. He was able to sneak out of his house and get next door and he was right. He met another girl named Jen who was another third child. The 2 of them set up a system so that they can meet up on days.
One day when Luke went over to Jens house the two of them start talking about what it is like to be a third child. Jen told Luke that she some day is going to go to do a rally with the government and say that they need to change the law. The reason the law is set is because with the amount of people there are and also the amount of food there is it is set so people do not starve. The thing Jen wants to tell the government is that not every family has a kid or if they do they don’t have two children so if some people have three or more kids they will fill in the spaces for the families without kids.
Luke decides not to go to the rally but Jen still does it. She knows some other third children from the computer and she talks them into doing it. The results do not end up how they wanted it.
To find out what happened at the rally you will have to read the book. I really enjoyed it. It is also the beginning of a series.

Mr. Marcoux: Guest Speaker on Vietnam after reading The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Hi everyone!

I wanted to provide a place for you to respond to yesterday's amazing guest speaker. We all love Mr. Marcoux, and yesterday you saw another side of this beloved teacher. Please share what message from his talk that you will carry with you forever.

Warmly,
Mrs. Diamond

The Help

The Help
Kathryn Stockett
464 Pages
Kateri Bean

After every librarian and Mrs. Diamond told me over and over to read The Help, I finally did. It looked giant and not super exciting, so I wasn't too sure I'd like it has much as they said I would. But, I did. In fact as soon as I started I couldn't stop reading it.

It dealt with a side of the civil rights movement I had never thought of before. I didn't realize just how horrible the lives of African American maids were. While these women were free and not slaves, they still were treated very much like an animal in the households where they worked. That being said, there were a few houses where the maid was treated as part of the family; these maids were the lucky ones. This book is a real eye-opener to not only how maids were treated, but how they went about their lives.

The way the book was written, you got the point of view from three very different characters. This made the book go very quickly and also made it next to impossible to put down. Another reason the book was so engaging is the way it was written: the characters all have unique voices with accents, and the way it's written you can really hear the their voices in your head. You'll come away from this book talking in a deep southern accent if you aren't careful!

As I mentioned, this book is told by three different characters. Each of them has their own struggles, but together they unite against their shared struggle: racism. The three of them, along with a few followers, manage to change not only their town's point of view, but their state's.

If you are interested in the civil right's movement, American history, or just a heartwarming story, I suggest you read The Help!

Defiance

Author: Nechama Tec
Pages: 296
Rating: 7-10

Defiance is an amazing book about a group of four brothers trying to survive the Holocaust. The brothers are Jewish farmers that live in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. The country is currently called Belarus and borders Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania. Early in the book the parents of the boys are killed by the SS death squads during the early days of the invasion of the Soviet Union and the brothers decide to hide in the woods with the other survivors. The oldest brother Tuvia Bielski becomes the leader of the small group and his younger brothers, Zus, Asael, and Aron, and they build a small camp in a forest in Western Belarus. Their survival is difficult and they survive by hunting and stealing from those who cooperated with the Nazi invaders. Eventually they meet a group of Russian Partisans and agree to help them fight the Germans. The newly formed Bielski Otriad and the Russian Partisans do not always agree and there is a lot if internal disputes but Tuvia's leadership brings the groups together. The reason that I chose this book was because I have been to the country of Belarus and I love to learn about the history and culture of the country. I cant believe that I may have been in the same place that these incredibly important historical events happened. I don't even know how to describe how much more important and realistic these events feel to me after understanding the culture of this country, and meeting possible family members of the Bielski group. By the end of the war Tuvia and his Bielski Otriad had saved hundreds of Jews and their descendants now number in the thousands. His story is not well known but if you are interested in learning about the Second World War or the Holocaust then I would highly recommend this book. It is a different story than many other Holocaust books because the Jews in this book not only survive but they fight back.

Sing You Home by Jodi Picoult and Trouble by Gary D. Schmidt

I read two books over vacation. The first was recommended to me by my childhood best bud Aimee; she knows I love Jodi Picoult and music. You can imagine how happy I was to learn Jodi included a CD of music to accompany her latest story. The books starts with couple (Zoe and Max) trying to conceive. Their heartbreaking ordeal leads to life changes that allow new people to weave into this gripping storyline. The story brings up dramatic questions about loving others and how we learn to forgive.

Mrs. Culkin and Mrs. Bogert have been encouraging teachers to read books by Gary D. Schmidt, our visiting author this year. After reading background on a few of the books, the storyline of Trouble stood out most. Henry endures a crippling loss that ultimately teaches him significant lessons about himself. He has to face the truth about those he should know best, and learns to befriend others to help him heal emotional wounds. Our teenage protagonist, Henry, seeks to climb Mount Katahdin…and come on the other side stronger. I enjoyed the read and believe it would be something each of you would enjoy for different reasons. :)

The Lovely Bones

Alice Sebold

328 pages

Rating 8 out of 10

The Lovely bones is no ordinary book. The book starts out with telling about a girl named Susie Salmons life. Then all of a sudden someone she least expects, kills her. Life can be full of mysteries. Her father, mother, sister, and brother are left wondering what happened, who committed this horrible act to their loved one. What makes this story really different is Susie, after death still can't move on she is stuck watching her loved ones from this place. She even can see her killer, and desperately wished that she could tell someone she knew who did it. This person took everything from her at the young age of 14. The book shows how much a family struggles and the impact that Susie's death had on each one of them. No one would have ever even thought that this could happen to someone so close to them, yet it did. While viewing what is happening on earth Susie discoverers just how much she is missing out on. She would never be able to grow up, how was that the least bit fare, she also didn't understand why her killer hadn't been caught yet, why no one didn't look into the guy just a little bit more. Yes he was very smart but if investigated they would find something on him. There were many mixed emotions in the book. Anger, no one knew who did it and they were angry that there really wasn't anything they themselves could do about it. Hurt, the salmons would never be the same. Happiness, the family couldn't stay sad or even upset all the time, they had to still find happiness in the world. The Lovely Bones shows that things happen in your life that you can’t always control, it may hurt for awhile, but you have to try and stay strong, and learn to live and smile again. In Susie's case she had to come to terms with her own death in a way. One thing that i really got out of ready the book is the life lesson that you should pretty much live like there is no tomorrow, you never know how short your life will be. I would recommend this book to anyone, it seems like the kind of book that anyone could pick up and enjoy it.