Lovely, Dark, and Deep by Justina Chen (Review by Anya W. '20)

Lovely, Dark, and Deep by Justina Chen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Viola Li has a Plan. After the end of her first trip with her aunt, to Africa, she's working on several more bake sales to raise money for the causes she's written about. A few more of her scheduled vacations, and she'll have just the right resume for acceptance as a journalism major to her dream school in Dubai.
Except, as it turns out, sometimes the malaria vaccine can give you extreme, permanent, photosensitivity. Thanks to her professional disaster manager parents, Viola's entire life and all her plans for the future are permanently deconstructed within a week. All that's left now is figuring out how to cope.

Chen's novel is a good beach read, and typical YA. The romance, while not badly-written, is not particularly epic-it would have had the same impact as a friendship. However, her writing is excellent at evoking empathy within the reader, and breathes life into her main characters.
-Anya W. '20



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The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo (review by Anya W. '20)

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What's a girl to do when she's got too much to say and no one to pour it out to? Fill journal after journal with words turned into verse, spilling her story across pages for no eyes but her own. A diary of free verse is an indulgence Xiomara can allow, one not banned by the strict rules of her cold home, but what about a poetry club? A boyfriend? A crisis of faith? Covering for her brother? As the walls close in, Xiomara has to grow up and decide what's important, and how far she's willing to go to keep it.

Acevedo's freeform masterpiece is a touching and realistic portrayal of adolescence. She perfectly captures the mindset of someone on the verge of adulthood--the contrast between affection and suffocation day in and day out. -Anya W. '20

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Amatka by Karin Tidbeck (review by Sophia G. '21)

Amatka by Karin Tidbeck
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amatka by Karin Tidbeck is a rare treasure that avoids all the cliches other modern dystopias tend to fall into. The world we are transported to is foreign and yet not so. We follow a woman who relocates to a foreign colony because of her job change. In her exploration of her new surroundings, she begins to question the order from which she came. The characters we are introduced to are real in an almost literal sense, the book makes you take a different look at both yourself and the people around you. The book is classified as ‘surrealism’ and it is certainly that. If you are one for reading books which are always perfectly logical and have a lack of ambiguity, this read is not for you. If you are interested in the function of language, the concept of necessity, the promise of revolution, or leaving behind all that is known, check out the book today.

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Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (review by Ms. Stone, STEM teacher)

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When high school junior Lydia turns up dead in the lake, every member of her bi-racial Chinese-American family examines the events in their communal life leading up to that moment. Vis-a-vis this fictional family, author Celeste Ng explores racist stereotypes about Chinese Americans. She also sheds light on the devastating effects of parental pressures on student academic performance. - Ms. Stone, teacher

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The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (review by Andrew R. '17)

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The premise of The Golem and the Jinni has an irresistible sort of cosmic balance to it: when a female homunculus named Chava and a male fire spirit named Ahmad collide in nineteenth-century New York, earth meets fire, the mythology of the West means that of the East, the Judeo-Christian tradition collides with one far older, and the ancient past meets the modern era. If only this novel could shed its affected writing, its chronically flat characters, and about a hundred and fifty pages, it might be able to meet this impressive potential. Wecker makes the unfortunate decision to relay the entire story in a faux-historical voice, weighing her sentences down with unwieldy vocabulary and convoluted syntax in a misguided effort (like so many other writers of historical fiction) to stay true to the literary style of the time she portrays. Uninspired prose might be excusable, but, in my view, weak characters are not; populating a fantasy world as Wecker does with transparent characters, single-minded and invariably “good at heart,” is a cardinal sin in any sort of fiction. I have to give the author credit for the alluring symmetry of her premise, but her execution is unremarkable and doesn’t nearly deserve the 500 pages it takes up.

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Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (review by Andrew R. '17)

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Americanah bears all the hallmarks of the traditional epic story: between the protagonist Ifemelu’s emigration from Nigeria to the other side of the Atlantic, sparking a long process of depression, race-inspired musing, and eventual financial success, and her childhood friend Obinze’s thwarted attempt to make a life for himself in London, the novel encompasses all the heartbreak, alienation, and self-realization that characterizes the best epic novels. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has crafted a novel that handles a difficult topic—race relations, especially in the cultural interactions between African-Americans and non-American blacks—incisively and powerfully while refusing to pander to the reader’s opinions or reservations. Every character (and, given the prodigious heft of this novel, there are many) is treated with a rare mixture of sympathy and harsh honesty, resulting in a cast that strikes the reader as impressively human. Maybe the conclusion, when Ifemelu comes to terms with the personal changes her decade and a half of Americanization has wrought, trails off less powerfully than a novel of this magnitude deserves, but overall Americanah easily proved one of the best books I encountered all year: utterly convincing and unapologetic, the kind of book that it would be a shame to miss.

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X: A Novel by Ilyasah Shabazz (review by Andrew R. '17)

X: A Novel by Ilyasah Shabazz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The premise of Ilyasah Shabazz’s most recent novel, X, is so unusual as to seem off-putting at first: in a narrative geared specifically toward young adults, a fictionalized Malcolm X plays out the early part of his life, starting with his exodus from Michigan to Boston and ending just before he begins the outspoken racial and religious activism for which we remember him today. The story is doubly odd because the author, the daughter of Malcolm X himself, has taken the liberty to novelize her famous father’s turbulent life—and in the first person. I’m not sure how, but Shabazz has taken this dubious stew of almost overambitious narrative points and crafted a surprisingly engaging story, which, although it contains hallmarks of the young adult genre like forbidden love and coming-of-age internal conflict, also features pacing and setting that are remarkably sophisticated for a YA novel. (Most of the first six chapters takes place on a largely uneventful train ride, and it takes a measure of patience to get to the meat of the book.) The protagonist Malcolm, even if he bears suspiciously little resemblance to the more weathered and polarizing Malcolm X most of us are familiar with, is a memorable and magnetic character, and this narrative of his life is strange in concept but impressive in execution.

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Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich (review by Andrew R. '17)

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, a sort of novel-in-stories that unflinchingly paints a portrait of Native American life in the modern world, opens with a beautifully elaborate family tree: the names get progressively more Catholic, the adoptions and marriages and remarriages more convoluted, as the generations pass. It’s a fitting way to begin this collection. Almost every person on the tree is featured either as a narrator or as a protagonist of one of the stories, but in my mind the three members of the oldest generation mentioned are the real heroes of Love Medicine. The lives of Nector Kashpaw (introduced in “Wild Geese” as a brash young tribesman), his future wife Marie Lazarre (still a teenager in “Saint Marie”), and their sometime ally Lulu Lamartine (who comes of age in “The Island”) are chronicled in full, from adolescence to old age, and it’s their obsessions and fatal flaws that ultimately give the book wings. Love Medicine has a rocky start: its younger characters, not nearly as complex or engaging as their grandparents, open the collection in a less-than-impressive introductory sequence. But the later stories are beautifully enough rendered to do their subject, the Ojibwe nation, proud.

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (review by Andrew R. '17)

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Maya Angelou, the beloved and decorated author who passed away just under a year ago, is known equally well as a poet and a memoirist, but reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has left no doubt in my mind as to which part of her legacy is more accurate. Dr. Angelou was a poet. Yes, Caged Bird is a prose memoir, one that spans Angelou’s adoption by her grandmother (at age three) to the birth of her first child (at age 17), but the book is written like no autobiography I have ever encountered: the language possesses a lyricism and a flow that very little poetry, much less prose, can lay claim to. In fact, Caged Bird often felt like a long, simple poem, free of the intimidating erudition that so often accompanies book-length verse. Although Angelou writes in the voice of maturity, her narrative convincingly portrays the confusion of a young black child in the Deep South—and the portrait of racism that results is painful and jarring. Caged Bird is more than the sum of its parts: it’s not a poetic memoir or an autobiographical poem, but a beautiful and frightening vision of our country’s past. - Andrew R.'17

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World and Town by Gish Jen (review by Andrew R. '17)

World and Town by Gish Jen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gish Jen is a wittier Amy Tan: her novels and stories, usually told through the perspective of first- or second-generation Chinese immigrants to America, fearlessly tackle religious issues, the mystery of death, and the folly of American culture, all without forsaken the signature lightness and incisiveness of her prose. World and Town is split into five narrative sections. One follows Sophy Chung, the daughter of Cambodian immigrants, who takes refuge in fundamentalist Christianity to escape her past sins; another follows Everett, the scorned and scornful backwoods lover of a born-again evangelist. The majority of the book, though, is from the perspective of Hattie (Hăi dì) Kong, an aging immigrant whose existence in the Southern town of Riverlake is somehow more American than any of its native inhabitants. As Hattie struggles with her religion and heritage (and messes with those of her neighbors—she can’t help herself), Riverlake becomes so vivid and complex that it feels as real as life to the reader, and sometimes realer. While Sophy’s and Everett’s narrative voices were not always convincing, World and Town was as a whole engaging, even addictive. Strongly recommended for readers who enjoy having their beliefs challenged and their prejudices called out. - Andrew R. '17

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Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (review by Andrew R. '17)

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In Daniel Keyes’ beloved short story "Flowers for Algernon,” a mentally retarded adult named Charlie Gordon undergoes a miraculous surgery that nearly triples his IQ, plunging him headfirst into a world of intellectuals even as he comes to terms with his life before the operation. Here, in Keyes’ later novelization of the same narrative, Charlie’s IQ still rockets up at a dangerous pace—but instead of having to accept his shameful past as an adult with the mind of a child, the newly-created genius must also navigate a crushing tide of memories and feelings that his old brain could never have handled. Watching Charlie stumble through his new life, even more confused and emotionally shredded than he had been with his old IQ of 70, is just as tragic as a novel as in the short story format. My only issue is that it was much more difficult to suspend my disbelief about the miraculous surgery and its effects for three hundred pages than it was for thirty. Those who have never read either “Flowers for Algernon” should pick one and get started immediately, but I’m not sure it’s worthwhile to read both variations on the same theme. - Andrew R. '17

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Four by Veronica Roth (review by Catherine H. '17)

Four: The Transfer by Veronica Roth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Four is a collection of several short stories that help clarify the background of the character Four in Veronica Roth's Divergent series. This book has several sections that begin with his Choosing Ceremony and end a short while after he meets Tris. I found this an intriguing read and thought it was nice for a quick read. I would recommend this to anyone who read and enjoyed the Divergent series. - Catherine H. '17

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Timebound by Rysa Walker (review by Catherine H. '17)

Timebound by Rysa Walker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rysa Walker's Timebound, the first installment in the Chronos Files, is a very thought provoking read. Kate's grandmother, Katherine, comes to town and announces that she is terminally ill and would like to spend more time with her granddaughter, which seems like a reasonable request. However, Kate's mother insists that her grandmother is selfish and that she shouldn't go. But Kate notices a strange medallion that glows a brilliant shade of blue that her mother can't see but her grandmother can. Upon confronting her grandmother about it, she learns that her massive headaches have been caused by shifts in the timeline and that her grandfather is stuck in a different time, trying to create a religion and change history to benefit himself. Kate also finds out that this medallion is a CHRONOS key that lets her travel back in time. Before she can start training, another shift occurs and her parents disappear from the timeline, having never met each other and never having had her. She must now carry the key with her at all times or else disappear forever. It becomes her mission to go back in time and warn her grandmother so that she can restore her timeline. This book made me think about time travel in a different way. Even though there are several timelines that are mentioned, the story is straightforward and easy to follow. I recommend this book to anyone interested in time travel. – Catherine H. ‘17

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Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood (review by Elizabeth S. '16)

Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Cat's Eye details the life of stream-of-consciousness narrator Elaine as she reflects as an aged artist on her years growing up in the time after World War II in Toronto. Elaine has recently returned to Toronto in order to manage a retrospective gallery of her own critically acclaimed work. She reconnects with specters from her past, like the phantom Cordelia who tormented her as a child, whom she now sees and hears everywhere she goes even though she is long gone. Atwood captures Elaine's apathetic, passerby-like thoughts and describes her world in the most visceral way, making her writing a true joy to behold as it brings the story to life. Atwood also uses Elaine as a lens through which she can explore her own judgments and thoughts about growing up as a girl through elementary, middle, high school, and university, finding love, hate, strength, and weakness in all of these events that seem so cataclysmic when undergone for the first time. Cat's Eye is a true masterpiece, recommended to anyone for a more adult spin on a coming of age story.

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Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson (review by Elizabeth S. '16)

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Though intimidating because of its subject matter, Wintergirls yields a reward high enough at the end to make reading it well worthwhile. Anderson's writing is always visceral and heartbreaking, but the harsh reality of eating disorders makes it even more gritty. When I was not transfixed by the story, I was admiring Anderson's writing style and the perfect way that she captures the first person speaker, Lia. Lia's best friend Cassie was recently found dead in a motel room of an overdose. The book details their past together, including Cassie's bulimia (which eventually led to her downfalll), Lia's anorexia, and the pact they made together when they were younger. Lia's anorexia resurfaces, for the guilt that Lia feels about Cassie serves as a trigger. The author's voice is strong in this book, with truly believable characters and a singular writing style. I recommend this book to any reader looking to really feel for a character and who isn't at risk of being triggered by the subject matter. - Elizabeth S. '16

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Glass by Ellen Hopkins (review by Nikita R. '16)

Glass by Ellen Hopkins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Suddenly dealt with the responsibilities of motherhood, Kristina Snow must somehow raise a child while battling her addiction to “the monster,” known as crystal meth. Despite her love for her child, Kristina finds herself becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the monotony of her daily life in comparison to the excitement of her past. In Glass, the second sequel in the Crank series, Ellen Hopkins once again brings to life the story of a confused, desperate teenager who has become swept up in a world she is not ready for. Although the average reader has not necessarily shared Kristina’s experiences, any teenager or adult will understand her emotions and decisions. This book is a must-read, for teenagers especially. – Nikita R. ‘16

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Earth Girl by Janet Edwards (review by Monica K. '14)

Earth Girl by Janet Edwards
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Despite the two star rating, don't be fooled - Earth Girl features some strong writing, promising world building, and a powerful, independent female lead. The setting has a genuine science fiction feel and is set centuries in the future, long after the first portal and colonization of another planet. In this futuristic society, our protagonist, Jarra, is the one in a thousand born with an immune system unable to handle other planetary atmospheres. As part of an ostracized minority, Jarra decides to get back at society by spending her first year of her history degree in an archaeology course filled with "exos" from offworld planets.

The first half goes from pretty good to stellar (see what I did there?), as Jarra leaves her class in the dust with her history expertise. Unfortunately, the second half stagnates. Descriptions become tediously long, a cringe-worthy decision on the author's part leaves the last third irritating to read, and in the end the plot fails to move much. However, while I did not like this novel, I still believe that Janet Adams is a promising writer and would recommend Earth Girl to fans of Ender's Game and the like. – Monica K. ‘14


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The Rise of Renegade X by Chelsea Campbell (review by Monica K. '14)

The Rise of Renegade X by Chelsea Campbell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I would just like to say: The Rise of Renegade X is a seriously cool read, whether you're a hardcore comic book fanatic, a lover of The Avengers/Thor/the next major superhero movie, or none of the above. Set in Metroville, the city with the highest concentration of superheroes and villains in the US, the novel introduces a world where every young hero and villain gains their power, their acceptance in respective training academies, and a H or V on their left thumb on their sixteenth birthday. Damien Locke is just one of the many villain hopefuls waiting for his sixteenth birthday. However, he is in for a nasty surprise when an X instead of a V materializes on his thumb. The novel follows his crazy adventures as he finds love, the true identify of his father, and his own true self as well. Even with its refreshing, hilarious take on superhero mythology, the element of the novel that really carries the story is Damien's warped, obnoxious, highly entertaining personality. Highly recommended to fans of the superhero genre and those in the mood for a fast-paced, engaging read. – Monica K. ‘14

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Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (review by Meilan S. '17)

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Middlesex, by Jeffery Eugenides, is a book that crosses boundaries. Not only is the subject matter, the story of a pseudohermaphrodite, Callie/Cal struggling with self-identity, fresh, but the book also encompasses several genres. It begins as a historical novel as we explore the lives of Callie/Cal's parents and grandparents. It shows the scientific side of his condition, as well as how it affects him emotionally, from confusing crushes to the hybrid emotions he feels when trying to be a girl. Furthermore, it is told in an uncommon narrative voice: first person omniscient, which adds to the fresh feel of the novel. The book is an enthralling masterpiece, and despite the extraordinary events that unfold, Eugenides is able to keep it grounded with Callie/Cal's narration, which is extremely relatable and realistic. Without a doubt, Middlesex is a fantastic book, and I whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone looking for an exciting and satisfying literary journey. - Meilan S. '17

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