Welcome

Welcome to my newest blog. I've decided that it's easier to find my name on the web rather than my other blog site, Teen's Pen. I've decided to move my posts over to this page and design it differently to reflect more of the books I am writing. So, this blog will have different features such as ABOUT ME and DREAMING DANGEROUSLY, which is exclusively about that book, and TEEN'S PEN will be about writing tips. I'm also adding a page about books I've read and reviewed.

For One More Day

For One More Day by Mitch Albom

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I finished this in like two hours, but I loved it. I had to reread the prologue and the epilogue too, since there was a bit of the unexpected. I love how Mitch Albom mixes reality with what occurs in the mind. It makes you wonder what reality really is - is it just what exists presently in our own mind or is it what the constructs outside of our own minds dictate. Since I wrote a lot about what happens in the mind and I have been thinking about it so obsessively for my three YA novels, I love to ponder this question.

I bought this book a couple of years ago when it first came out and I allowed this little gem to sit on my shelf that long without reading it. I love it though and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves their mother or who has contemplated suicide to read it. Wonderful and quick read. Excellently written and edited.



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Just Finished Reading Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Overall, the book was okay. If someone never saw pictures like those before and had never read anything about kids with superpowers before, they might like it more than I did. The peculiar children were difficult to distinguish from one another because the characterization was so shallow. Even Ellen, who is one of the main characters did not seem to have much depth, and the fact that she falls in love with her childhood sweetheart's grandson is just in a word...creepy. I think this book would have been way more interesting from the viewpoint of the grandfather and told from the time period of when he was a boy. The main character, Jacob, was kind of hard to like. He redeems himself by trying to save everyone, but this book could have been better. A little more humor, a lot more characterization of minor characters so we can at least tell them apart, and a love interest who wasn't already in love with the main character's grandfather would have improved this book and I would have given it a higher rating. With this said, I still liked the book as something a thirteen or fourteen year old boy might read and will recommend it to those students who I think might enjoy its "peculiarities."



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Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Across the Universe by Beth Revis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Amy, a teen from the 21st century is frozen, along with her parents, and spends 250 years, flying in the bottom of a space ship toward a new planet. Her parents are to be part of the group who helps terraform the new planet to make it habitable for more Earth colonizers. However, she is woken fifty years before the ship, Godspeed, is scheduled to land because someone unplugs her and leaves her to die.



Luckily, Elder, a young man who is being trained to become the leader of the people who inhabit the ship, finds her and helps her get medical treatment.



As Amy tries to figure out the ship and why she was unplugged along with several other people, who end up dying, Elder tries to figure out why certain information is being kept from him by Eldest, the leader of the ship.



This book reminded me of Lois Lowry's The Giver, Jonah and Elder are very similar in that they both grew up in their dystopian societies. Amy reminds me of Wanderer from Stephenie Meyer's The Host. She is like a fish out of water and is often in danger from the strange, genetically altered humans who have grown up on the ship. Like Wanderer, Amy has a strong sense of the value of human life. So does Elder, but he has been so misinformed by his society, that Amy has to inform him of the realiities of human history as much as she can remember.



Wonderfully developed characters and setting. The ship, itself, is almost a character, too. I did figure out one of the characters before Amy and Elder figure it out; however, I still wasn't sure if he/she (not revealing that) was a good person or an evil one.



A real page turner.



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