Category: Uncategorized

Book Reviews, Uncategorized

Red Riding Hood, Sarah Blakely-Cartwright

India
Grandma, what big eyes you have!
The better to see you with my dear…
Grandma, what big ears you have!
The better to hear you with my dear…
Grandma, what big teeth you have!
The better to EAT YOU WITH my dear!

Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s Red Riding Hood brings us down from the fairy tale world and back to where the original story of all of our beloved story time memories come from. Blakley-Cartwright puts a dark twist on the story of Little Red Riding Hood while also making it a love story. Valerie, Red Riding Hood, is caught in the middle of a love triangle she has a man who she is in love with, a man who is in love with her, and then the wolf who wants her. In her small village, terror strikes along with death as the werewolf attacks her sister, killing her as the first human victim. As the village wants revenge the hunt for the werewolf comes to the forefront of everyone’s mind. The only problem for Valerie is that her and the werewolf have a bond that makes the werewolf want Valerie without remorse. Because of this Valerie has to make a decision of who to be married to or who to spend the rest of her life with.

After I finished this…in one day, I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about the book. It was great at bringing out the suspense and making the reader suspicious of all the characters to who the werewolf could possibly be, but in the end I was left unsatisfied and wanting to know more, and did not get my answers. I have not seen the movie, so I cannot make a comparison to the two, but it definitely grounds you to how the original fairy tales were told children, and not the sugar coated versions we tell today. Until next time.
Keep Turning the Pages,
90s Born Reader
Book Reviews, Uncategorized

The Help, Kathryn Stockett

India

The Help by Kathryn Stockett is a novel that can be eye opener to some. In The Help a young woman, Skeeter, decides that she is tired of what happens in Jackson, Mississippi to the help and to all the black people in her area. To stir things up she decides to write a book called, The Help, to show life from the point of view of the help. In order to do that she first had to find women who were willing to put their lives on the line to tell their stories about those who employ them. Not only did it affect the lives of the black women, but also alienated Skeeter from her friends, and the only man she ever had a relationship with. Writing the book brought out the courage in each of them and gave all of these women a purpose.

I highly recommend reading The Help. This story makes you laugh, cry, smile and feel invested in each one of the characters lives. The story is written so that different chapters are written from the perspective of different people, Skeeter, Minny, and Aibileen. The main controversy that I have heard about this novel is that it is written by a white woman, and some people in the black community don’t always like when someone tries to show how life was for the black community. Sometimes there is a lot of sugar coating and making it seem like the black community was okay with what was happening during that time. Other than that I personally loved the book and would most definitely recommend it to others. Until next time

Keep Turning the Pages

90s Born Reader

Book Reviews, Uncategorized

What Happened to Goodbye, Sarah Dessen

India

Sarah Dessen‘s What Happened to Goodbye was not unlike any of her other books. In this novel a young gir, Mclean Sweet,l has been incredibly hurt by her parents scandal, and messy divorce. By the end of the custody battle she has decided to live with her dad who is a restaurant consultant. Because her dad has this time consuming job, she has to move around a lot making her constantly move away from friends and what she knows. This also makes her come up with a new identity for herself in each new place, from personality, involvement, and even her name. Mclean and her dad finally stop at a place that she grows to love, and accidentally starts to allow people into her life, and into her real name. It’s not until her relationship with her mother completely breaks that things start taking a turn for the worse.

What Happened to Goodbye, has the same sequence of events like in every other Sarah Dessen novel. Of course I love every single one of them and it never takes me more than 3 days to read them. In every novel, a girl has a hard life, someone particularly a boy changes her life, her life hits rock bottom, and then all of a sudden everything is good again. I enjoyed reading the novel because parts of it always touch my heart and makes me think about my own life. If you’re a hard core Sarah Dessen fan like myself you should definitely read this heart touching story. If you’re not a hard core fan, I still recommend this novel. Until next time

Keep turning the pages,

90s Born Reader

Bookish, Uncategorized

The Deathly Hallows: Movie vs. Book

India

Normally I start off my posts by saying what the novel is about, but if you do not know what Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling is about then SHAME ON YOU!! If you do no know then you have missed out on a whole phenomenon of reading and movies that spread through the world, and into the hearts of every age group.

Before the last movie came out, and after I bought my midnight showing tickets with my friends, I decided that I was going to reread the seventh Harry Potter novel, much like the rest of the world. With the interruption of working at a summer camp, I quickly had to read the whole novel in 4 days. I managed to do it and finished the story the night before the movie came out.

The next day when I went to go to the midnight showing I had the whole story fresh in my mind, and I do believe that was my downfall in enjoying the movie. The movie had a completely different flow than the book did, with parts of the movie not meshing well with the book and wrong lines said that were not in the book. I also believe that the movie did not do a very good job of keeping the tension in the movie that the last few pages of the novel had. By the end of the movie I was not sitting on the edge of my seat understanding all the information that happened.

If I look at the movie separate from the book then yes, it was a very well put together movie, and I quite enjoyed it. I actually took my sister for her birthday because it came out on the same day. The movie did a very good job with the battle and what was going on in there, but it left out a lot of the information, which I thought was the best part of the whole story.

As usual we all have our own opinion and these are my opinion. I plan on seeing the movie again and maybe now that the book is not as fresh in my mind I will be totally engrossed in the movie as I planned. Until next time,

Keep Turning the Pages and in this case Watching the Screens

Book Reviews, Uncategorized

After the Leaves Fall, Nicole Baart

India

After the Leaves Fall by Nicole Baart looks into the world of a young girl with a twisted family. Julia has had to deal with so many more issues than a normal girl by the age of 9 has had to deal with. When she was younger her mother left her and her father without looking back, and a few years later her father dies unexpectedly. When a girl has grown up in the church and then nothing but bad things happen to her it’s hard to remain close to her faith. Luckily she had her grandmother and a lifelong best friend of Thomas. Through these two she manages to get through middle school and high school without any other disasters. When she gets to college she believes that she has found the perfect guy for her, but he happens to be someone of authority. She is willing to break the rules a little bit, but rules are not always meant to be broken. Soon she notices that her life becomes awfully close to that of her mother’s.

I of course cannot tell a lie, and I do have to say that this book though still very good, is predictable and is like all other teen angst novels, about life, love, and abandonment. It’s a good easy read, but be prepared to know every twist and turn of the story before it happens.

Until next time, keep turning the pages

90s Born Reader