Not Worth a Look
I would seriously caution any parents to read through the book first before allowing their son or daughter to do so. Within are scenes involving graphic descriptions of sex.
A Story Worth Reading- Maybe
The War That Saved My Life, by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, is a highly acclaimed historical fiction boasting awards from an extensive list of periodicals and, most impressively, was named a Newberry Honoree after its publication in 2015. Parents need to give this book’s themes some careful consideration, however, before passing it on to their children. Ada Smith was born into terrible hardship in 1930s London. The story picks up when Ada is ten years old and forbidden by her mother from leaving the family’s dingy one-room apartment. This, and the…
The Champagne Will Never Taste So Good
“In the basement, when she wrote about her life, Liesel vowed that she would never drink champagne again, for it would never taste as good as it did on that warm afternoon in July” (357). In the last eight years I have mostly lost the habit of writing in the margins of books, instead keeping shorthand notes with page numbers near the beginning of the volume, or making digital notes files with transcriptions. I think this change must have been motivated by the constant need to useevidence to support claims I…
A Seafaring Man Learns the Ropes
Often perplexed, always resilient, Hornblower struggles through, learning his trade in a world of danger and duty. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, by C.S. Forester, chronicles the early career of one Horatio Hornblower as he cuts his teeth in the Royal Navy. A modern protagonist, Hornblower suffers from a number of imperfections, among them physical gawkiness, introvertedness, and a strong tendency toward self-criticism, that would likely undermine the progress of his career, were it not for certain mitigating, and ultimately triumphant qualities. These qualities—primarily a kind of…