Book Review: Aftermath by Kelley Armstrong

There are not many times that 2 students that don't even know each other recommend a book to me in a short period of time. This is such a title.

• Skye's mom no longer wakes her with silly songs - she is mentally ill and often doesn't get out of bed until noon.
• Skye starts the day with a granola bar and a juice.
• Skye's brother, Luka, leaves for school early with his friends, because "Something's up."
• Skye's best friend Jesse (more than best friends?) passes her a note with some GPS coordinates - a hint that he wants to meet up.
• Jesse asks her out ON A DATE. Life is good.
• And then - they  are asked to go to the office. There has been a school shooting, at the high school where their brothers attend. Skye's brother was involved in the shootings, Jesse's brother is dead.
• Forty-four hours later, Skye and her belongings are in the back of her grandmother's car as they move away.

The story continues three years later. Skye's parent's divorce and her grandmother's ill health has made it neccessary for her to move in with her aunt and suddently she is back in the community where the shootings occured. ~~~Imagine. ~~~~

In this book you will: walk in Skye's shoes, walk in Jesse's shoes, experience bullying, discover a mystery, and enjoy a love story. This is the story of the ripples that are generated by a single event that takes place during a very short period of time.

You can find Aftermath on the shelves of the Nashua South Library.

 

Book Review: Ghost by Jason Reynolds

This book starts like this: 

"CHECK THIS OUT. This dude named Andrew Dahl holds the world record for blowing up the most balloons... with his nose....

But the main character, Ghost, soon shares, "I probably hold the world record for knowing about the most world records. That, and for eating the most sunflower seeds. 

This is a book about running. Ghost is running from his past (no spoilers) and toward a something new.  This is a book about new beginnings. About forgiveness and second chances. About moving on. AND it is a book about actual running - on a team. 

I love it when I find a novel about sports that is really about the sport, about more than the sport but a book in which the sport is featured - not just as an aside. And this is that book.

Grab some sunflower seeds (they have them at the dollar store - they even have different flavors) while you crack open the shells, crack open this book. 

You can find Ghost by Jason Reynolds on the shelves of both the Nashua Public Library and the Nashua South Library. Then read the sequels: Patina, Sunny, Lu

 

Book review: House of Salt and Sorrows by Erin A. Craig

Flesher read this book and had this to say:

Are you looking for a very dark gothic novel? If so, you may have found your book. House of Salt and Sorrows offers everything a gothic novel needs - a little love, some mystery, and a whole lot of horror. 

Annaleigh is one of 12 sisters who are slowly dying off, by a series of unfortunate events? But are these deaths totally random or does an evil root tie them all together? This retelling of the Brother's Grimm tale of The Twelve Dancing Princesses will leave the reader guessing until the end.

If soft cozy romance novels are your thing - turn the other way. This book is DARK.

Mrs. H also read this book: 

   Reading this story was way outside of my comfort zone as I don’t usually reach for fantasy novels or horror stories (especially those with blood and gore - and this novel delivers in these areas) but I was looking to read something different. This story follows middle sister Annaleigh as she tries to uncover how her older sister really died and disprove the idea that her family is cursed. Annaleigh's investigation is filled with ghosts, monsters, horrible nightmares and creepy visions with a bit of romance also. The plot twists in House of Salt and Sorrows gave the novel a psychological thriller feeling at times and this book made me think I was losing my mind right along with Annaleigh! Overall, I enjoyed this novel with its mix of ball gowns, romance, gods, magic and mystery - I just couldn’t read it right before bed. 

Other teens enjoyed this story as it is a recent nominee for the NH Flume Award. The book is available in our library (on the Flume display) and can also be borrowed from the Nashua Public library as a print book, ebook or audiobook.

 

Book Review: Black Brother, Black Brother by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Here we have a salmon salad and peanut butter sandwich (on gluten-free bread). AND Black Brother, Black Brother. How can life get better than this? You may not be brave enough to try my sandwich, but this book is worth tasting.

Black Brother, Black Brother is about biracial siblings who start attending a new school. However, their experiences are very different. Trey is the popular athletic kid but Donte is seen as a problem. What is the most visible difference between the boys? Trey is light colored, like their Norwegian-descended father,  Donte has his African American mom's coloring. 

One bully really makes Donte's life miserable. Alan is the captain of the fencing team and the bain of Donte's existence. Donte decides that the only way out of his mess is to get retribution and decides to beat Alan at his own game - fencing.

In the end notes of this book, Jewell writes that her own biracial children, one with light skin and the other with darker skin, have had very different experiences growing up in the USA. She says, "My grandmother taught me that everyone is a 'mixed-blood stew' and that diversity of appearance (skin color, hair and eye color) are to be celebrated. Everyone is human and everyone carries an ethnic heritage that results from the origins and journeys their ancestors made." 

Reading Black Brother, Black Brother reminds us that we need to celebrate our differences - it is those differences that make our world an interesting place to live. 

You can find this book on the shelf at the Nashua South library.

 

Book Review: The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

This book was a recommendation from my daughter. I finished this at the end of last week and I just want to turn to the first page and read it again. The end of this book offered me a perspective that I didn't start with and now I want/need to start over. 

This is about books, and love, and life, and death. It is messy and funny and heartbreaking. 

"We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.

I am thankful for this book. I borrowed it through my SORA account which is connected to my Nashua Public Library Libby account. You can connect your accounts too. 

 

Book Review: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl / Harriet Jacobs

Happy February. Did you know that it is Black History Month? "Every month should be Black History Month", you say? I agree. But I still wanted to take the time to read something about Black history this month and selected this book. 

So what is spectacular about this book? I found it enlightening and a bit brain twisting. Wikipedia tells me that this book was originally published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Bent. Here Harriet (Linda in the story) shares her story of living in slavery. By some standards she was lucky. Jacobs reports, 

"I was never cruelly overworked; I was never lacerated with the whip from head to foot; I was never so beaten and bruised that I could not turn from one side to the other; I never had my heel-strings cut to prevent my running away; I was never chained to a log and forced to drag it about, while I toiled in the fields from morning till night; I was never branded with hot iron, or torn by bloodhounds. But though my life in slavery was comparatively devoid of hardships, God pity the woman who is compelled to lead such a life!"

BUT - she served a lecherous master who would not free her. She was afraid of what he would do with her and her children. She was afraid of what happened to slave girls at a certain age because they offered their masters value in their ability to produce more slave children. She was afraid to be around him. She was afraid that she would lose her children. She was so afraid  of remaining with her master that she escaped slavery to hide for many years. But I don't want to share more. Read this book. The light it sheds on being both slave and female is mind boggling. 

You can read this book via the Project Gutenberg site: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

 

The Gift of our Wounds: A Sikh and a Former White Supremacist Find Forgiveness After Hate / Arno Michaelis and Pardeep Singh Kaleka

Can you imagine living a life as a white supremacist? Stewing in hatred for people you have never met, that you have never gotten to know? Creating music that spreads that hate hoping to create a good future for your children? Believing that a white world void of the diversity of many types of people is how we should live?

Can you imagine going to your Gurudwara (house of worship) on a Sunday morning only to be stopped by police because there has been a nearby shooting? Finding that the shooting was in your Gurudwara and your father is there and your mother is there and you can't get there. Panic is setting in and you cannot learn what it is going on?

Arno was that former skinhead and when he heard about the shooting he just hoped that he wasn't responsible for recruiting the shooter. Pardeep was that Sikh who soon learned that his father was killed. Later they meet each other and forged a way to move forward together through their pain in order to create a more peaceful, harmonious world. Together they created an organization that promotes caring, kindness, and mutual respect. 

This is their story.

(You can find this book on the shelves at South or Nashua Public Library. It is also available through NPL's Hoopla.)

Book Review: Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger

My Book reading fail: I started reading this book three times. I had read postive books reviews and wanted to like it, but it just felt awkward to me. I hate the cover (It looks cold and snowy but it is set in the summer in Texas), and I just felt disconnected to it in some way. 

I started wondering why I couldn't get started. Because it is set in Texas, I wondered if the language was messing me up. Maybe I wasn't getting the patterns of a Southern drawl. So I borrowed an audio copy. Well that didn't work, the narrator was terrible - whiney and Northern US sounding. But I heard enough of the story through the audio that I was invested in the book and managed to read through to the end. 

Ellie is a Lipan Apache in an alternate United States, a place where magic and monsters live in the same place as cell phones and pistacio ice cream. Ellie's (Elatsoe) magical power is that she can bring ghosts up from below. She enjoys her dog, Kirby, as much dead as alive - and there are some advantages to having an invisible dog (If I had one, it would always accompany me to school!) But with her connection to the dead, some strange things can happen. The night that her cousin died he came to her in a dream and told her that he had been murdered and asked that she protect his family. And here we go into the pages of a magical murder mystery.

Where can you find this book of ghosts and monsters and magic? Try the shelves of our library. You can also read in through SORA if you connect your account to NPL, and Hoopla (through NPL, but skip the audio - trust me when I tell you it was terrible.)