"We Were Liars" by E. Lockhart

4 of 5 stars. 

The Basics: Cadence is a Sinclair. Her family is wealthy and owns their own island where each of her grandfather's daughters have their own house. She and the Liars (Johnny, Mirren and Gat) enjoy each other's company every summer until a fire changes everything. Her cousins, Mirren and Johnny, are the closest things Cadence has to best friends. They are all a few months apart, Cady being the oldest. She falls in love with Gat and they become inseperable every summer.
During Summer Fifteen, everything changes which causes Cady to have terrible headaches and unexplained amnesia. We don't find out the truth about the Liars until the end of the book.   

My Thoughts: This book was wonderful! I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was definitely confused about some parts of the novel because I didn't know what to believe. I couldn't figure out if Cady's perspective was true or if what she was seeing was accurate. Then, when I got to the end of the book, I was like, OMG, I have to read the whole book over again. LOL!
Lockhart does a great job in building the reader's suspense because you want to keep reading to figure out what happened leading up to Cady's accident. One thing that did annoy me was the extensive metaphors. Figurative language is great, but when it confuses the reader completely, then that's a problem.
I did participate in the read along at Bookish Lifestyle. Click here for discussion one and click here for discussion two.

~Remember, teachers read fun stuff too!

"A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorraine Hansberry

5 of 5 stars!

The Basics: This play follows the Younger family during the mid 1900s (around 1950/1960). Three generations of the Younger family live in a small two-bedroom apartment on the south-side of Chicago. The matriarch of the family, Mama, is expecting a large insurance check from her deceased husband. Walter Lee Younger, her son, has big plans for the money which include investing in a liquor store with a man the family deems as unfavorable. As the play continues, we learn that Ruth has some unexpected news, Walter disappoints his family, and Beneatha is learning what it means to be a women with her own ideas and dreams. 

My Thoughts: Where has this book been all of my life? OMG! I feel like I've been missing out. This classic should have been something I read a long time ago. The plot is reminiscent of the true life of an African-American family during this time period. The characters have so much to give to the audience and can be analyzed so deeply that it makes a great novel study. My eighth-grade students read this as part of an interdisciplinary project. We did not get to analyze the book as much as I would like because it was during first quarter (the busiest and craziest time of the school year).

Throughout the book, I wanted to hate Walter, but I found that he was struggling with the weight of the world. He wanted to fight against stereotypes and be everything that the world told him he couldn't be. He just went about doing it the wrong way. I love that Hansberry allows us to grow with the characters and understand their perspective, though we may not agree with their approach.

~Remember, teachers read fun stuff too!  

"Fairest" by Marissa Meyer

4 of 5 stars.
 
The Basics: This novella was published after the third book in the Lunar Chronicles series by Marissa Meyer. The setting of the book starts before Cinder and continues to coincide with some of the events in Cinder as well. This novella gives the reader background of Queen Levana and her sister Channary. Throughout the series there is discussion of Princess Celene, Queen Levana's cruelty and life on Luna. These things are the focus of Meyer's novella...which precedes the release of the last book in the series, Winter.

My Thoughts: Ok, so I started to feel sorry for Levana as the novel continued. Her sister, Channary, was really the evil one. Levana never knew what love was. She never experienced it with her mom, dad, or sister. By the way, the cruel way in which Levana's parents died seemed to be reflective of the kind of kingdom they ran. Channary continued their seeming disregard for family, selfishness, and lack of caring for the people of Luna.
It shocked me how promiscuous Channary was, which may have ended up causing her death.
Either way, the whole royal family is a royal mess. Then, Levana made matters worst when she fell in love with Everett and pretty much forced him to marry her (soon after his wife died). What kind of craziness is that? How can you force someone to love you, who clearly wants little to do with you. Then, she manipulated her image so that she looked like his dead wife, Solstice. This biatch is absolutely loony. 
I did like that we were able to get insight into Levana's life, because though she is cruel, we got to learn how she got that way. I also wanted to know about her issue with mirrors and now we know that she is probably the most ugly person (inside and out- though what her sister did to her was cruel and unusual). And, what she did to the rightful Princess Celene is horrible. How can you do that to your niece?

So, these are my predictions for Winter after reading Fairest:
>Queen Levana will certainly lose her crown to Winter.
>Cinder (aka Celene) will marry Kai, making her the queen and becoming an ally to Queen Winter.
>Mirrors will be reinstated on Luna.


~Remember, teachers read fun stuff too!

"Chinese Cinderella" by Adeline Yen Mah

4 of 5 stars.

The Basics: This short, but intriguing novel follows the story of Adeline Yen during her childhood in Tianjin, China. I read the book last month so many of the smaller details have escaped me (which irks me, but the busiest time of the year has commenced-the beginning of a new school year). Adeline considers herself the “Cinderella” of her family because her mom died after giving birth to her and her father and siblings (specifically her older sister) seem to harbor some resentment towards her. Her father, a rich business man, remarried quickly after their mother died and treated her five stepchildren like… stepchildren (eek!). Adeline chronicles her story of a father who didn’t care what happened to her, being placed in a boarding school with little to no visits from her family, being separated from her aunt and grandfather which are the only two family members who cared for her well-being, and struggling to not follow the same fate as her older sister who was married off.

My Thoughts: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. At first, it seemed like something I would never read. This novel was part of the summer reading list for the eighth graders at my school. I read the book to become familiar with the novel so I could grade my students’ papers accordingly. I ended up enjoying this book more than I thought which lets me know that I need to expand my genre interests.

I will say this, in the beginning I thought Adeline was being a little too self-defeating. It seemed as though her stepmother disliked all of her stepchildren, not just Adeline. As I continued to read, it became painstakingly obvious that Adeline’s father could care less about Adeline. He didn’t even know her birthday. He was Ok with the decisions made by his new wife in dealing with her stepchildren. She treated her two children exponentially better than her stepchildren. I would like to know what happened to Adeline’s aunt, her brothers, and even her older sister after Adeline went away to college.

Remember, teachers read fun stuff too!