The Bookmark

Angel, Ann. (2010). Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing. New York, NY: Amulet Books. ISBN: 978-0-8109-8349-6                 I’m typically not a fan of biographies. They have a tendency to be a little dry and to sugarcoat some of the facts to favor the subject. This is not your standard biography! It is full of pictures, both black-and-white and color, and is brutally honest about who Janis Joplin was and what she went through. Before, I wanted to party with her. Now, I want to give her a hug and tell her its ok to just "be."                 Before this book, of course, I knew who Janis Joplin was. I knew she was a smoking, drinking, drug-using rock icon. This book introduces Janis as a slightly rebellious frizzy-haired high school student in Glee Club. It turns out, she spent her entire (short) career feeding off of the love from her fa...

Stead, Rebecca. (2007). First Light. New York, NY: Random House Children’s Books. ISBN: 978-0-375-84017-3                 This book is like a childhood fantasy come true, (sort of). In it, there is a society of people living inside a polar ice cap! Did I mention that the society was mystically gifted with abilities like binocular-eyes and ears that can comprehend even speech patterns of animals? I know I always assumed that was what was going on in the North Pole.   In First Light , we are immediately alerted to the fact that part of this does not take place in the normal world we know of. A boy, Matthias, talks of paper being a sacred commodity in his land and suddenly we know that we are not in Kansas anymore.                 Matthias and Thea, our main characters, live under ice and the characterization of their city Gr...

Quintero, Isabel. (2014). Gabi: A girl in Pieces. El Paso, TX: Cinco Punto Press. ISBN: 978-1-935955-94-8                 This is a young Mexican-American girl’s coming of age story. We get to live out her perspective of what it is like to not be Mexican enough for the Mexicans and not American enough for the Americans, which is something I think a lot of people struggle with. The dichotomy of being part of two cultures can be a very delicate one that is hard to balance. Gabi struggles between her disappointment in a meth junkie father and a very strict, conservative Catholic mother. She has to deal with her mother projecting her personal failures onto her daughter and that cannot be easy to handle at the age of 17.                 There is some “adult content” in the book, but it is the reality that teens face now days. Sex is...

Garcia, Kami & Margaret Stohl. (2009). Beautiful Creatures. New York, NY: Little Brown and Company. ISBN: 978-0-316-04267-3                 Being the whimsical, southern lady that I am, I thoroughly enjoyed this book (and plan on enjoying the rest of the series). It takes place in Gatlin, South Carolina, home of the southern belle and where people are expected to act just so, (they often meet expectations). Ethan seems to be your average small town young man, full of the desire to get up and get out. He goes about his life feeling like he’s missing something and then suddenly bam, a new girl moves to town and he is inexplicably fascinated by her.                 We, as readers, get to follow along on their journey to be together despite the odds and familial input. The world is out to get them, literally, and they manage to...

Block, Francesca Lia. (2001). Echo.   New York, NY: HarperCollins Publisher. ISBN: 0-06-028127-8                 This was a very odd book to read. It threw me off a little and I found myself rereading a page more than once. I was honestly not sure I was enjoying the book until the last quarter. The character names are all very whimsical and similar, (Echo, Eden, Eva, Storm, Thorn, Smoke) and their storylines are intertwined in some way or another. Essentially, this is a book about love. Not feeling loved, being jealous of love, all-consuming love, unhealthy love, losing love, never forgetting love. The protagonist, Echo, travels from place to place chasing love in a few different forms. She starts off trying to earn love from her father and not feeling deserving of it. She jumps from lover to lover, and this novel isn’t shy about masturbation or sexual encounters, in order to try to find the perfect ...

Kwame, Alexander. (2014). The Crossover. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. ISBN: 978-0-544-10771-7                 You do not have to play basketball to enjoy this book, but it helps! Even if you were unfamiliar with how basketball is played, the love for the sport is still incredibly clear through the words and actions of Josh and Jordan Bell. Their father was a Euro-League basketball champion and it is obvious that they live to make him proud and to be his legacy.   Ball is life for them and their father, even though their mother, a high school principal, things there are other priorities as well.                 This book is not your average teen novel. It is written by a smart, athletic boy who chooses to speak in hip-hop rhymes through out the story. This is appealing in and of itself because it m...

Smith, Andrew. (2013). Winger. New York, YN: Simon & Schuster. ISBN: 978-1-4424-4492-8                The back cover of this book has snippets of things famous writers have said about “Winger” but I didn’t pay any attention to them. “This book broke my heart” was the gist of it. I believe in developing my own opinions, so here is my main thought: This book broke my heart!!! I cried. I had trouble reading the last few pages through the tears that made my mascara run and eyelashes stick together. Oh, my, goodness. I was so upset my 3-year-old came and hugged me. That being said, please read this book!                 Ryan Dean is our protagonist and, for the most part, he is a normal 14-year-old.   He is smart and mischievous. He plays sports. He likes girls. He thinks about sex every few minutes (or seconds). Seems pretty normal until you realize that he...

Satrapi, Marjane. (2003). Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. ISBN: 0-375-71457-X This book made me realize how little I really know about how war works. I am a product of a fairly peaceful nation (any wars I am familiar with took place over-seas) and so this showed me a completely different perspective of what could have been my childhood. Up until recently, the US has kept most war violence on foreign shores, but there has been a lot more violent activity here than in the past. After reading this book about Marjane Satrapi’s childhood of occupation and suppression, I wondered if that is the type of place my daughter will grow up in, or more likely my granddaughter.   Will she be prepared? Will she be as quick-witted and determined as Satrapi was in her youth? Satrapi was a feisty child! She read about war, studied the history of her homeland in a way most children find punishing and involved herself in war-efforts whenever possible. Seeing ...

      Green, John. (2008) Paper Towns. New York, NY: Dutton Books. ISBN: 978-0-525-47818-8 I’m not new to the world of John Green and I understand that he like to take perfectly normal people and make them seem amazing, but I did not like Margo. After reading this book, I still do not like Margo. I just can’t. In the first few pages she is touted as this amazing creature that graces the neighborhood of Quentin, our narrator. She is pretty, popular and charming! She’s got it all, except that she has a tendency to run away with the intention that people come looking for her to prove how much they love her. Margo shows up at Q’s house and demands he come along on her revenge tour of the city and the two wreak havoc all night. Then, she just vanishes and everybody is concerned and looking for her. Margo leaves clues for the searchers and Ben painstakingly follows them, even the dangerous and obscure ones! He even skips his own prom to go find her only to find that...

1.        Ness, Patrick. (2008) The Knife of Never Letting Go. Cambridge, Ma: Candlewick Press. ISBN: 978-0-7636-3931-0 I found this book to be very strange and confusing in the beginning. There is so much the reader does not know about the world they are immersed in that it almost soured me on the whole experience. I am very glad, however, that I stuck it out and kept reading. The story is about Todd, and his dog Manchee, and New World. It seems to be almost post-apocalyptic since people have fled Earth and found a new planet to live on, doing much the same as Americans did the first time we decided a new land was ours. They killed the natives and made their own rules. In Prentisstown, just like the rest of the planet, men can hear each other’s thoughts, all of them. They call it noise and it seems terrifying! Nobody has secrets and even the animals can talk. The only upside to this is that Todd’s dog Manchee can talk, and if that isn’t a dream of ...

1.        Crutcher, Chris. (2007) Deadline. New York, NY: HarperCollins Children’s Books. ISBN: 978-06-085089-0 Mortality is something that we all have to deal with at some point in our lives, but for most of us, that time comes a little later than the beginning of our senior year of high school. Ben Wolf was not so lucky. He found out he had a terminal blood disease at the ripe age of 18 and chose, against recommendations, to keep it a secret and not get any treatment. Instead, he goes on making the absolute most out of the year or so he has left. He becomes a football hero, gets the girl, makes new friends and is generally loving the remainder of his curtailed life when his illness finally catches up with him and he has to start telling people.   Spoiler alert: He dies in the end and you will cry when his brother reads his speech. I’ve never read about a person approaching mortality this way. Usually they make a show of going through the st...

1.        Ruby, Laura (2015) Bone Gap. New York, NY: HarperCollins Children’s Books. ISBN: 978-0-06-231760-5 This book really surprised me! I went through half of it before realizing that it is a tantalizing combination of reality and fantasy that is hinted at just enough to keep the reader wondering if they imagined a monster just like the protagonist.   Finn watched his brother’s “girlfriend” (no label involved) be kidnapped and blames himself for not stopping or identifying the kidnapper. It seems like his brother Sean and the whole town of Bone Gap blame him too. The only person who doesn’t seem to blame him is Priscilla, Petey, the local beekeeper’s daughter who is ridiculed herself for being strange.  It is Petey that realizes that Finn is more than just “Moon Eyed” and actually has a condition in which he cannot identify people by their faces. She spurs Finn to save Roza from a character akin to the “ trickster ” popular in mythol...

        Myers, Walter Dean.(1999) Monster. New York, NY: HarperCollins Children's Books. ISBN: 0-06-028077-8 I have to start by saying that I’ve never read a book that took a form quite like this one. The font is the first eyecatcher because it looks like handwriting. The reader learns quickly that it is meant to be a diary for a teenager facing a 25-year jail sentence. What we don’t know for a while is if he is guilty of a crime or not. Steve is the writer/narrator and it is his diary we are reading. He is/was in a film class that has inspired him to turn his experience into a film as well, so he is recording his version of the events in the form of a script. This format lends itself to the storyline because it all feels completely real. The “handwritten” diary entries trick the reader very cleverly. The script format presents the details in a neutral, cold way that allows the reader to develop their own idea regarding Steve’s guilt, though the questioning...

Anderson, Laurie Halse. (1999). Speak. New York, NY: Square Fish. ISBN: 978-0-312-67439-7 On the outside, this book is about the trivial things a teenager goes through. On the inside, it is like watching a slow-motion car wreck from inside the car. The narrator gives us the perception of living through a rape attempt and the various parts of life that disintegrate after. Melinda seems like a normally troubled teenager, albeit a little more anxious than her peers, starting high school. As it turns out, she is far more troubled than the reader thinks because a senior attempted to rape her at a summer party. This caused her to spiral into a very lonely, dark place and nobody looked close enough at her to notice the change.  Melinda is such a neutrally likable protagonist that its easy to imagine her being a friend, classmate, student or sister. She is shy and reserved and nobody really knows her. From a teacher’s perspective, this book broke my heart. It made me wonder...

1.        Alexie, Sherman. (2007). The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.” New York, NY: Little, Brown & Company. ISBN: 978-0-316-01368-0 Life is hard for a 14 year-old. Life is especially hard for the narrator of this novel, Arnold Spirit aka Junior, who is a resident of the Wellpinit Reservation. Arnold has to learn the hard way that ambition and intelligence are not always appreciated when he decides to transfer to a local “white” school where the teachers are there by choice and not necessity.  His relationships with his old friends are tested while he tries to develop relationships with strangers who don’t understand him. For a smart kid, he is terrible at expressing himself socially and instead chooses to draw fun cartoons to express his frustrations with life.  This book could be very relatable for any person who feels like they don’t quite fit in. I had a lot of trouble finishing this book. Not because it is badly ...

Perez, Ashley Hope. (2015). Out of Darkness. Minneapolis, Mn: Carolrhoda Lab.  ISBN: 978-1-  4677-4203-3      Beware, this book has side effects. It is perspective changing.  Following the life of Naomi and her younger twin siblings, Beto and Cari, this story is heartrending. It is set in New London, Texas in the 30s and revolves around the booming oil field industry. Naomi’s mother is gone and her stepfather Henry is taking care of the family. It is clear from the beginning that there is a lot of tension between Naomi and Henry, but we don’t learn until much later in the novel why she hates him so much. Henry is shaping her into the woman that her mother used to be so that he can marry her. Naomi feels very differently about him. Her hatred is well earned by Henry when she is just a little girl and he sexually abuses her. Naomi meets, and falls in dangerous love with, Wash, a young black man with very high hopes for his future. Neither of them are r...