Salem Falls

So I haven't really been in a readin mood lately. it took me almost a month to read Salem Falls because I got into it,but I couldn't really stay into it that long. In the beginning it starts out a little confusing; all the characters are introduced separately and it tells a bit about their pasts. Eventually they all tie together. Jack has just gotten out of jail for sexual assualt, Addie runs the Do-or-Diner like her life depends upon it since her daughter died, and everyone just falls into their story. By accident and on purpose. it seems like everything in the world is against Jack, just an ordinary guy who raped one of his students; or so everyone believes. But in Jodi Picoult's world nothing is as it seems until the very end, when you begin to find out what really happened.

Review/Description

Jack St. Bride comes to Salem Falls, after his release from prison. The former teacher and soccer coach wants to start a new life following a wrongful conviction for statutory rape. Unfortunately, Salem Falls turns out to be the wrong place to do it. He has no trouble landing a job at the local diner and winning the trust of the diner's eccentric owner, Addie, but the rest of the town is suspicious. Things get dangerous when manipulative 17-year-old Gillian Duncan, whose father owns half the town, gets interested in Jack and tries to seduce him with Wiccan love spells. Then Gillian is assaulted in the woods, and Jack is accused of the crime. As the courtroom battle unfolds, many secrets are revealed, and Picoult's characters are forced to confront the difference between who people are and who they say they are. The difference is considerable: despite the townspeople's aura of virtue, by the end of the book we're hard pressed to find any women who have never been raped or threatened, or any men who are really innocent of violence.

Until We Meet Again

A True Story of Love and Survival in the Holocaust

This was a really good nonfiction book. It reads just like a novel. Most holocaust stories are really depressing, but this one even though it has some really sad parts and the characters have to go through so many struggles, their love for each other lightens up the story a little. it shows how even though you may be all alone memories can keep you going. it even has a happy ending. If you have to read a nonfiction book for school I definitely recommend this book. What happened to the Jewish people was horrible, and i had never really read anything that detailed what they went through like this book.

Review/Description

In 1942, Korenblit's parents, Manya and Meyer, were teenagers in love in Hrubieszow, Poland. But they were also Jewish and soon found themselves torn from their families and each other as they were shifted from camp to camp. Before they were separated, though, the two promised to meet in their hometown at the end of the war, which they did--two of the fewer than 200 surviving members of the 8000-strong Jewish community that had lived in Hrubieszow before the war. The writing here just is not as powerful as the facts, however. One strategic choice depletes much of the suspense: Korenblit reveals in an introduction that while researching the book, he discovered one of his mother's brothers living in England. It's a fantastic detail, initially well told, but by the end, when it is repeated, it sounds pedestrian. Other techniques lessen dramatic effect. For example: while in the camps, Manya kept an ersatz diary, jotting down daily events in terse lists such as ``Cyvia, joy, horrible condition, no hair, Cyvia better, new friend, replaced shoe, washed dress, farmwork'' which she rolled into tight cylinders and concealed in her hair. Rather than relying on the lucidity of those original notes, Korenblit and Janger imagine what Manya would have written had she had the paper and the time.

Lock and Key

Dessen inverts a familiar fairy tale:

What if Cinderella got the prince,

the castle and all its accoutrements,

but wasn’t remotely interested?

Lock and Key was ok, but it didn't measure up to some of her other novels. It fell into about the middle of them. The ending was what made it a little less apealing, even though the story was good. It didn't ever really say if Ruby and Nate got back together in college, but I guess a story can't end exactly the way I want it to. It is a pretty good book to read with a lot of family problems for the characters to overcome, which makes it a good character realization book. It deals with some parental abuse in Nate's case but not that much. I would say this book was good enough to recommend but definitely doesn't beat Just Listen or the Truth About Forever.

Review/ Description

]After her mother abandons her, Ruby Cooper is flying below the radar of officialdom and trying to make it to her 18th birthday, when she’s busted by the landlord and turned over to social services. Ruby gets taken in by her estranged sister, Cora, who left for college a decade earlier and never looked back, and Cora’s husband, Jamie, the wealthy founder of a ubiquitous social networking site. Resentful, suspicious and vulnerable, she resists mightily, refusing the risky business of depending on anybody but herself, and wearing the key to her old house around her neck. All the Dessen trademarks are here—the swoon-worthy boy next door who is not what he appears to be; and the supporting characters who force Ruby to rethink her cynical worldview, among them the frazzled owner of a jewelry kiosk at the mall. The author again defines characters primarily through dialogue, and although Ruby and her love interest, Nate, sound wiser than their years, they talk the way teens might want to—from the heart.

Persuasion

So like Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion started out really dull, but got better towards the middle of the story. In the begginng it's hard to determine the main character, but then Anne emerges and takes over. I really liked Anne's character, even though she was a little suttle. The ending was wonderful and the story was really touching about how love could wait eight years and be revived. It takes awhile to get used to the language, and understand the story. I recommend this book to anyone who had read Pride and Prejudice and even anyone who hasn't.

Review/Description

Persuasion follows the unfolding of the relationship between Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth. Anne is persuaded by a close friend and mentor to reject the marriage proposal from Wentworth. Seven years later the two are reunited and discover the mutual feelings they still have for each other. Circumstances have changed on both sides though and it's left to be discovered whether Anne marries Wentworth or is persuaded to marry William Elliot, her cousin and heir to the Elliot estate. Persuasion is charming, though the plot lags a bit at times. Through the different class distinctions of her diverse set of characters, Austen illustrates the abundant snobbishness in the nineteenth century. Anne, though, is lovable in her humbleness and lack of pretension.

A Great and Terrible Beauty

This book really disappointed me because the story had the potential to be really good, but the direction the author went just really made the book suck. You can figure out what is going to happen before it does and I got really aggravated at how easily she let the main character get mainipulated. Overall it was a waste of my time to read and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Even though the ending made up for a little bit of the story it didn't overthrow the way it unfolded. Apparently there are more in the series but I don't know if I'm going to read them.

Review/Description

It’s 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma’s reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she’s been followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence’s most powerful girls—and their foray into the spiritual world—lead to?

Identical

Do twins begin in the womb? Or in a better place?

Ok so this book was extremely weird. Usually I like Ellen Hopkins books even though the ending suck, but this book twisted so bad at the end I was in shock. Besides having odd content it was ok until the end when it took a major turn. Being a story narrated by two different people I assumed it was two different people.......I was rather shocked. Dealing with touchy subject like molest, drugs, and cutting it isn't appropriate for anyone younger than probably 13 at least. If you like stories that suprise you this is something you'd like.

Review/Description

Kaeleigh and Raeanne are identical down to the dimple. As daughters of a district-court judge father and a politician mother, they are an all-American family—on the surface. Behind the façade each sister has her own dark secret, and that's where their differences begin. For Kaeleigh, she's the misplaced focus of Daddy's love, intended for a mother whose presence on the campaign trail means absence at home. All that Raeanne sees is Daddy playing a game of favorites—and she is losing. If she has to lose, she will do it on her own terms, so she chooses drugs, alcohol, and sex. Secrets like the ones the twins are harboring are not meant to be kept—from each other or anyone else. Pretty soon it's obvious that neither sister can handle it alone, and one sister must step up to save the other, but the question is—who?

Marley & Me

The heartwarming and unforgettable story

of a family in the making and the wondrously neurotic dog

who taught them what really matters in life.

This was a really good book especially if you are a dog lover. Of course the ending is sad, but all the classic dog books are. At times Marley and Me was hilarious, touching, and devastating. It was written really well and an overall enjoyable read. It has a few parts that aren't that bad, but possibly not suitable for younger readers. I watched the movie before I read the book and it did a pretty good job sticking to the story. I recommend this book to everyone.

Review/Description

John and Jenny were young and in love, with a perfect little house and not a care in the world. Then they brought home Marley, a wiggly yellow furball of a puppy—and their life would never be the same. Marley quickly grew into a barreling, ninety-seven-pound steamroller of a Labrador retriever who crashed through screen doors, flung drool on guests, stole women's undergarments, devoured couches and fine jewelry, and was expelled from obedience school. Yet Marley's heart was pure, and he remained a steadfast model of love and devotion for a growing family through pregnancy, birth, heartbreak, and joy, right to the inevitable goodbye.