Book Recommendation: Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

Not only am I recommending this because it is a great book, it is also because other than the Alex Rider series, no other book had ever effected my writing as much as this book did.

            The story is about a girl named Cather “Cath” who is a student about to go to college. She has social anxiety and doesn’t like crowds so living alone in a dorm scared her tremendously. Her roommate Regan is a scary and intimidating upperclassman, but she eventually warms up to Cath and helps her overcome her anxiety slightly. She gets accepted into a junior level writing class as a freshman taught by a best-selling author. However, after submitting one of her “Simon Snow” fanficitons for one of her class assignments, she gets a reality check that although she put work and effort into her fanfiction, it is considered plagiarism in the literary world. Throughout her first year in college she must juggle her anxiety, her love of the fictional character Simon Snow and her desire for him to end up in a relationship with his best friend Baz, her twin sister Wren who is out every weekend getting drunk, Regan’s ex-boyfriend Levi who constantly hangs around her room bothering her, her unstable father who struggles with his advertising job, a boy named Nick who she writes stories with in her spare time, her mother she never wants to see again, and her internal struggle about whether or not she’s cut out to be a fiction writer.

            This is a great story over all with an amazing plot and amazing characters to go along with it. You really can’t help but empathize with Cath throughout her journey in college and you really hope for the best for her. The reason I like it so much is because although it is a young adult book, it is for an older age group within the genre, which I really appreciated. This was also a great book for me to read at this time considering the fact that I read it the spring before I started college.

            I think this is a great coming of age novel for an older audience, and I really recommend high school students, especially those about to go off to college read this book. I think those with anxiety would also find this book helpful if they’re afraid of going to college. I think they could really relate to Cath’s character, and she could serve as a role model to them on how to get through college. I would also recommend it to anyone who is considering going into the creative writing field, because this book really gave me a good outlook on writing and other things of that nature.

            The reason this book affected me so much was because of one thing very small think I learned about writing. Considering the book follows Cath’s dream of becoming a fiction writer, writing plays a huge part in the story. One piece of advice Cath’s professor tells her when she’s about to give up on writing it to “write about what you know”. That statement had such a huge impact on my writing ever since reading that book.

            It’s most evident in a lot of my ANGA stories where I write about things that I have experienced or can relate to in my life such as going to college, living in Michigan, or being an only child. I began to take little bits of things I learned from personal experience and I began to incorporate them into my stories, even if it’s only a small part of it. I began to realize that this actually helped my writing become better, and it helped me to write something I was proud of. Relating my personal experience back to a fictional story helped me connect with the story better, and overall helped it to become more realistic and emotional. Write what you know is now advice that I would give to any writer, because I do think can really help out when writing.

            Overall, the book had an interesting plot with relatable and realistic characters. It was a bit of a cute comedic romance, but there’s wasn’t too much romance to consider it a full out romance story. The main plot really follows Cath and her personal journey through college, and her struggles and successes are something I think all people can learn something from.

~K.M.D.

Book Recommendation: The Alex Rider Series by Anthony Horowitz

This is a book series I feel highly obliged to recommend to everyone because this is the book series that first got me into writing. Up until I read this book series I was reading very girly books such as The Clique Series, which used to be some of my favorite books. This series changed the types of books I enjoyed reading, which untimely led to me writing my first book.

It happened when I was in seventh grade when we were forced to participate in battle of the books for our literature class. One of the books we could read was the first Alex Rider book, Stormbreaker. I read this book only because I was very underwhelmed by the other choices; none of them seemed that interesting to me. After I finished the book I was amazed by it and I thought it was the best book I had ever read in my life. It automatically got me interested in the action/adventure genre of books and pulled me away from the girly high school boy problems books.

Thus began my fascination with spy books, so I went and read the rest of the series, along with two other spy series, The Young Bond series and the Cherub series. All three of these series are by British authors, and I even had to order the entire Cherub series on Amazon because only the first three books in the series were available in America at the time.

So after reading all of these books, I noticed the common theme that they all had male protagonists. Alex Rider and Young Bond only have a couple female characters in the entire series and the female characters in Cherub are very sexualized and not portrayed in a very good light. I then found the Ghallager Academy series, which does have a female protagonist, but it is very girly and focused too much on romance and other stupid problems other than spying for my liking. This is when I decided I wanted to write a book about a girl spy who could solve problems by herself without the help of a guy, and still be focused around the actual concept of spying instead of romance. So, The Year of the Elephant was born.

So you can see that the Alex Rider series set off a chain of events that really introduced me to the writing community, but now I will explain why the series is a good one. The series has nine books in total, with eight telling Alex’s story and the other the back story of a slightly minor character. Alex Rider, a recently orphaned fourteen year old boy is recruited by MI6 to be a spy, because no one would suspect him of being one. The whole series is almost like a coming of age story for Alex. The entire series takes place in about the course of two years, and he has gone through a lot in those years. Although coming of age is a very common theme in young adult books, and it also includes the clichéd boy left an orphan theme, I think this one is unique. It shows his coming of age through a very action packed story, while also showing the real problems of the adult world. Alex is basically the only teenaged character in the whole series, and he finds himself thrown into a world filled with adults and their problems expected to adjust to it just like that.

The missions that Alex goes on in these books are also very unique and very interesting. *SPOILERS* His adventures are far from boring as he faces many evil people and organizations. In Stormbreaker he stops evil computers from releasing a virus to millions of school children while also having a run in with a giant jellyfish. In Skeleton Key a Russian mad men with his mind set on communism tries to adopt Alex as his son. In Eagle Strike he finds himself abandoned by MI6 to take down a billionaire who threw Alex into a nightmarish real life version of a video game. In Ark Angel he literally goes into space to stop a floating hotel from crashing into the pentagon. And that’s only naming some of his adventures. However, I think one of the best plotlines of this book involves an organization named SCORPIA and an assassin named Yassen.

            This plot line is subtly woven in to the entire series, although it does get a few books of its own as well. In the first few books Alex comes face to face with a mysterious assassin named Yassen who has a connection to his past he doesn’t seem to understand. Yassen eventually tells him to investigate an organization named SCORPIA to find out the truth about his past where he finds out things about his father he had never thought possible. The last book in the series titled Russian Roulette tells Yassen’s back story and really brings the entire series full circle, leaving off at the point where the first book ends.

            Overall, this is one of my favorite book series of all time and it is a very action packed on the edge of your seat read. If you enjoy spies then this is definitely a series I would recommend to read. Even if you don’t like spy books, I still recommend you read it anyway.

~K.M.D.

Book Recommendation: The Eye of Minds by James Dashner

I just finished reading this book last night, having read mostly the entire thing in one day. I had bought the book months (maybe a year) ago and I only had the chance to get a few chapters into it before I got busy with school and other things.

One of the reasons it took me so long to finish was because I didn’t think it was that good to start off with. The book starts off slow and not very interesting to it took me a while to actually get into reading it. After I had bought the book, one Youtuber I follow named Joey Graceffa said in a video that he had just finished reading the book and that it underwhelmed him and he didn’t enjoy it very much. This is another reason why I stopped reading the book.

However with all that said and done, once I got to a certain point, I could not put the book down. This was probably about one hundred to one hundred and fifty pages in, which is a good portion of the book considering it’s only three hundred pages long. However, the last portion of the book really hooked me in with all of the action and plot twists and it really made me appreciate the book more than I did before.

What I really loved about this book was the ending. I had a couple of guesses about what was going to happen and I was very close, but I didn’t guess it exactly. I don’t want to give away the ending on here for anyone who wants to read the book, but I will tell you that if you are going to read it, stick around to the end because the ending makes the book worth it. I love the point the book ends on and I would’ve been perfectly happy if it ended there, however knowing that a sequel is coming out fairly soon, I am excited to read it to see what happens next.

To summarize the story, a boy named Michael loves to spend his time inside something called The Sleep, a virtual reality world that feels as real as real life, only you don’t die. His two friends Sarah and Bryson and himself are excellent hackers and use their skills often to manipulate the game to benefit themselves. One day Michael witnesses a girl ripping out her programming from the game and jumping off a bridge, killing herself not only in the game, but in real life as well. He then finds out that a notorious hacker named Kaine is responsible for her death and is holding other people hostage within the game, causing devastating effects to them in their real lives. Michael, Bryson, and Sarah are then asked by the VNS, a sort of virtual police to find Kaine’s base of operations so the VNS can stop whatever he has planned. However, on The Path to find Kaine, the three friends face many challenges and Michael find out something about himself he never knew before.

I would very loosely compare this book to the anime Sword Art Online. The premises of the two are very different, and SAO is heavily based on a romance while The Eye of Minds honestly has not romance in it at all. However I compare the two just because of the fact that they both are set in virtual reality worlds where and evil figure tries to trap people inside.

I would overall give this book a four out of five rating, just because it took me so long to actually get into the plot.

~K.M.D.

Book Recommendation: Divergent by Veronica Roth

Divergent is about a society in which people are placed into one of five factions: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Erudite, and Dauntless at age 16 where they must live for the rest of their lives. These factions are divided by certain values in life which include selflessness, bravery, intelligence, peace, and honesty.

It doesn’t sound so bad to start off with, but the people in this society are required to seamlessly fit into only one of these groups, and those who fit into several ones are considered dangerous, and labeled Divergent, just like the main character Tris is.

I personally enjoyed this book, for one, because I, love dystopian books, and two, I really liked the characters. No one wants to read a book where you can’t stand the main character. It’s stopped me from reading a book before, and I personally really like all of the characters in Divergent, even the annoying ones.

None of them were overly stereotypical or completely weird, but they all had realistic flaws and strengths. From Tri, Caleb, Jeannine, Christina, Al, Peter, Will, Eric, Four, and Uriah, Lynn, and Marlene (who I am very upset got cut out of the movie adaptation), all of the characters, no matter how annoying, were all well developed with detailed personalities, which was something I appreciated about it.  The main character Tris, although not my favorite character in the book *SPOLIER* decides to leave her family in Abnegation to pursue a life in the Dauntless faction.

Although she has some troubles adjusting the new life style at first, she does lean to fit in eventually, and eventually becomes the top of her peers, which was the one thing that annoyed me about the book.

Tri came from the Abnegation faction, which is the faction based off of selflessness, which meant she was deprived of many of the things in life most people enjoy, such as flavorful food. This also mean that although not in Amity, the peace faction, she did not have much training in fighting and physical things along these lines. The fact that she out of nowhere became the top of her class in fighting wise and “facing her fears” over the Dauntless ones who have trained their whole lives for the initiation, just seems unrealistic and thrown into the plot just because she was the main character.

The book is not only entertaining, but also sends a deeper message to the readers. This book shows how people in society are sometimes required to think in narrow-minded ways, and certain people who are stereotyped aren’t allowed to think in ways other than the way society thinks they should.

A movie adaptation of this movie is scheduled to come out sometime in early 2014. The trailed is already released, and although it looks accurate, as I mention earlier, I am still upset that they cut my three favorite characters, Uriah, Marlene, and Lynn out of the movie.

If you plan on reading this book, this is the perfect time to pick it up since the third book in the series, Allegiant, just came out!

~K.M.D

Book Recommendations: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseni

Although this isn’t normally a young adult book, it is still one of my favorites and I recommend it to anyone who is a young adult or older.

I actually had to read this as a school book originally. We had to write a research paper on a book from an approved list of books all by American authors. The Kite Runner happened to be one of those books, and I choose to read it, like a majority of my class did.

Not only did I write probably the best paper I’ve ever written before on this book, but I also had fun writing it as well, but that’s beside the point. Let’s get back to the actual book.

Now, unlike probably a lot of my classmates, this book left a long lasting impression on me. The writing was just beautiful, as was the story line in general, and even though the story wasn’t based on true events, I felt like the characters were real, and the author did an amazing job of developing the characters and giving them realistic personalities.

Although I’m not really sure what is was about this book that made me like it so much, I think it was basically this author’s style of writing. The writing just came across as very real and emotional, and I think it really helped to get the point he wanted to get across to the reader.

I also had a personal connection with this book because of the *SPOILER ALERT* adoption elements of the book. Being internationally adopted myself I think helped me to connect to the book more so than other people would have. Although my personal experiences don’t match up with those of the character who was adopted, it helped me realize what a lot of adopted kids go though in real life made me feel lucky because I didn’t have to go through that.

One thing in particular that I really liked about this book was the main character Amir. I just loved following his story throughout the book, from child to adult, and watching him develop as a character. His character development is one of the most important and interesting aspects of the book, and the author does a great job of developing Amir as a character. It’s almost like the reader is growing up with him.

Like I said before, I’m not really sure what else to say about this book or why I really liked it other than I thought it was really good. This was by far one of the best books I’ve ever read and I highly recommend it to everyone!