Review: Feathers

Title: Feathers
Author: Jacqueline Woodson
Category: Fiction, Children's
Rating: 4/5
Summary: 11-year-old Frannie is a girl who's lost hope—she lives on the poor side of the highway, she's seen her mama suffer through miscarriages and now she's pregnant again, and she sees the way girls treat her brother when they find out he's deaf.

Review: Frannie's teacher reads an Emily Dickinson poem that starts "Hope is the thing with feathers..." to her class, which gets Frannie thinking about hope. Then a boy who looks like Jesus shows up as the new kid at school, and Frannie is forced to grapple with her own understanding of hope, faith, and religion.

I finished this yesterday morning—about 36 hours ago—and I've been thinking about it off and on since then. That's rare for me. Usually, I finish one book, then move right on to the next. But this beautiful novel stuck with me. One of my favorite aspects of the story is how Frannie explores the idea of spirituality versus religion.

This would be a great book to read with your child because of all the interesting conversations you could have about the characters and what they go through.

Review: Cicada Summer

Title: Cicada Summer
Author: Andrea Beaty
Category: Fiction, Children's
Rating: 3/5
Summary: 11-year-old Lily has a secret she has to protect at all costs, which is easy because she doesn't talk anymore.

Review: This sweet story tackles heavy topics—guilt, crime, grief—but also has a good dose of humor in some parts. I liked it, but I can't say that anything in particular stood out to me as great.

Review: Breaking Dawn

Title: Breaking Dawn
Author: Stephenie Meyer
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Summary: The conclusion to Bella and Edward's love story.

Review: Of all the books in The Twilight Saga, Twilight has been my favorite. But I liked this final book about as much as I did all the others. As with most of Meyer's novels, I liked it but didn't love it. Yet I still had this all-consuming desire to read it in every spare moment of the day. So even though I had to wake up at 5:30 this morning and I knew Abby would be waking up at least once to eat, I stayed up til almost midnight to finish this puppy.

This was another great read, but I did have a couple disappointments. Stop reading here if you don't want me to spoil anything.

About halfway through the book, everything's all fine and dandy with no major conflict on the horizon, which was nice and all but it got pretty boring after a short while. I didn't really feel the impending doom of the Volturi until after this blissed-out section. And this isn't really a disappointment in this book but more in the others: Bella finally, finally, FINALLY saves the day. But she had to become a vampire to do it! That just rubs me the wrong way. I so wish Bella had been given some special quality, talent, skill, SOMETHING that she could have used in a pinch in the other books. She was always being rescued by the Cullens or Jacob.

With Harry Potter, his status as a wizard is unremarkable. What's remarkable and what saves the day time and time again is his character—who he is as a person. So it's easy to identify with Harry, and it's satisfying to read about how he saves the day.

Bella is just not a strong character. Not until she becomes a vampire, that is. And even then she's constantly belittling herself! I think the reason I was able to still get really into this final book is all the description of Bella's feelings for her daughter. Every time I read a passage about Nessie, I had this overwhelming urge to go smother Abby in hugs and kisses. I guess you could argue that the fact that she protected her daughter before birth shows strength. But how did she do that? She went running to a vampire bodyguard and sat back and let other people take care of her and decide the best way for doing so.

It's such a compelling plot and world, it seems such a waste that the main character is so completely and utterly weak.

Review: The Host

Title: The Host
Author: Stephenie Meyer
Category: Fiction
Rating: 3/5
Summary: An alien race has infiltrated Earth by using humans as host bodies. One of the last surviving humans is captured, and a "soul" is inserted into her body. But she's not ready to let go of her body, and she's certainly not going to make it easy on the intruder who's taken it over.

Review: This woman tells a great story, that's for sure. This book hooked a finger in my shirt and yanked me in with no mercy—just like the Twilight series. The difference is when I read the Twilight series, Abby was taking 30-45 minutes to eat every two hours, so I had plenty of time to read. Now she's 5 months old and taking only 10 minutes to eat every 3 hours, so that means much less time to read.

But—and I realize I'm self-nominating for the Bad Mother of the Year award here—I couldn't put this book down when Abby finished eating so I would dangle a rattle in one hand and use the other hand to read just.one.more.paragraph. Of course, that always led to another paragraph, and another, and another.

This story has the perfect love triangle—the host body is in love with one man and the alien living in the host body is in love with another.

With all that said though, some things in this book did disappoint me. Sometimes, I felt like there was too much descriptive text—I found myself skipping over descriptions of how the main character was feeling so I could get to the action. I guess I wanted more showing, less telling in some places.

But my bigger problem with the book is that, just as with the Twilight series, the main character's weakness really annoyed the crap out of me at times. I got a little tired of her getting hurt and being carried around by one of her two love interests. And I don't want to spoil anything, but the ending isn't exactly a stellar example of strength.

On a petty and shallow level, I was hoping to get what we haven't gotten in the Twilight series (yet at least—I haven't read Breaking Dawn), if you know what I mean. This is an adult book, for pete's sake.

But even with all that said, the story was intriguing and I'm glad I read it. It was a great ride.