I read The View From Saturday for school. It did have good themes and symbols, but not much really happens, you know? Nothing to catch my attention. This book basically teaches you about kindness, being present (hard to explain that one- I'm no English teacher!- not yet anyway...), human connections, and journeys of self discovery. In this book Ms. Olinski, a teacher coming back after ten years of teaching the sixth grade, now a paraplegic from a car accident is in charge of making her team for something called a Quiz Bowl where four students must come together, for a team, and answer questions to eventually beat the other teams in you school, then your town, state... And Ms. Olinski chooses, Nadia because she is observant (they all are), Ethan because he is kind and like Nadia, waiting to "come out of his shell", and Noah because he is very intelligent. Ms. Olinski must choose one more child, which she has no idea how. Maybe Ham Knapp, who she doesn't know was the one who erased "paraplegic" (which she wrote on the board so the students wouldn't ask questions about her wheel chair) and wrote "cripple," she thinks that was Julian, who she caught at the black board trying to erase cripple before Ms. O sees. But in the end she chooses Julian when she sees just how awful Hamilton is as a person. The group are all connected in a web, Nadia and Ethan's grandparents just got married, Noah was the best man at the wedding (long story), and Julian was saved from bullying by Ethan. They call them selves the Souls, and go on to win the quiz bowl.
I also read Generation Dead by Daniel Waters. In this book teens who are dying in many different ways are starting to come back to life and become a term called "differently biotic." Phoebe, the main character and her friends, Adam and Margi, join the club of differently biotics and Phoebe begins to date one named Tommy (even though her best friend Adam would take any bullet for her - read to see what I mean- because he loves her) but what they don't know is that a football player on Adam's team used to have a girlfriend who died and didn't come back (not all teens do) so now he hates "Zombies." And the football star, Paul, goes insane. He starts to see Phoebe as if she were Julie, the dead girl. And now since he hates the Zombies, all because of his girlfriend troubles, he wants to kill all of them, which he tries and in some cases succeeds to. So when he shoots Phoebe, o tries to at least, things go horribly wrong.
Also read was Breathless by Jessica Warman, which was sorta kinda inappropriate but you do get hooked onto Katie's character, though I like Mazzie, her mysterious, angry, totally lovable roommate the best. There is drinking and smoking, which i honestly hate reading about, but with I did love the idea of the story. In this story Katie's brother Will and her suddenly went from poor in the woods to rich in a hell-hole town. But when Will starts to get teased at a young age, he finds pills and eventually gets drug-induced schizophrenia. So when he get worse and worse, visiting from his mentally hospitals only over X-mas and summer breaks, Katie's unlikable parents (until the end sort of - the dad smokes and the mom drinks to get the pain away) send her off to an elite boarding school. Everyone asks her where she comes from and why since almost no students come in your 2nd year of H.S. (except for Mazzie), because most start at the beginning of the 4 years. This book is spread out between all three years of her high school years. So she can't get rid of the pain and lies, says her brother is dead. She suddenly is friends with two very popular girls, and has one of the most handsome boys in school as her boyfriend, even though he is super religious and she's well not. The only way for her to survive the pain of missing her crazy brother is to swim, which she is fantastic at. Only Mazzie, who comes to be her best friend, knows the truth about Katie's brother. But things go horribly wrong when Mazzie and Katie go back to visit Katie's parents for the first time. Will has a freak out, conspiracy's against their parents, and ends up threatening to shoot either himself or his father, who are locked up in Will's bedroom (Will does indeed have a gun.) So Will gets put away again. Katie freaks, she thinks she hates Will (who she has loved some much her hole life) and Mazzie is there for her. She has to keep swimming. But things get shockingly worse and Will kills someone working at his hospital and gets put in Jail with the mentally insane. When one of Katie's popular, awful, bratty friends Estella (whose relative worked in court on Will's case) finds out the truth, she tells everyone, and no one seems to care about Katie anymore, not even herself, except for Mazzie and Drew, her boyfriend. But Katie spirals and when she doesn't get into Yale, which all of her teachers said she was a shoe-in, she goes to Harvard with Drew, even though she broke up with him because A. she cheated on him and B. they have nothing in common beside swimming. I like the end of this book, a look into Katie's life when she's 10 years older, 28. I wish Jessica Warman would write this book in Mazzie's prospective, it would be fantastic. Well, that might just be because I wish she was real I love her character so much! As of 4/20/10 Lady Gaga's Bad Romance was the number one most viewed video on YouTube with 185,247,313 views (on of 4/20/10). It would take 108,554.3615 years to watch it that many times.
4/20/10 was my birthday!!
Love, Lizzy S.
125 books down, 109 days to go!
For the record: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, E!
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