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Sunday, May 11, 2014

Book Review: Love Letters to the Dead

18140047Title: Love Letters to the Dead
Series: Standalone
Author: Ava Dellaira
Pages: 323
Release Date: April 1, 2014
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Source: Own

Summary: It begins as an assignment for English class: Write a letter to a dead person. Laurel chooses Kurt Cobain because her sister, May, loved him. And he died young, just like May did. Soon, Laurel has a notebook full of letters to people like Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Amelia Earhart, Heath Ledger, and more; though she never gives a single one of them to her teacher. She writes about starting high school, navigating new friendships, falling in love for the first time, learning to live with her splintering family. And, finally, about the abuse she suffered while May was supposed to be looking out for her. Only then, once Laurel has written down the truth about what happened to herself, can she truly begin to accept what happened to May. And only when Laurel has begun to see her sister as the person she was; lovely and amazing and deeply flawed; can she begin to discover her own path. 

Rating: 4

Review: This was the most real book I have read in a while. Laurel was so real. Everything about her, her emotions and her character was real and true.

At the end of Laurel's eighth grade year her sister May dies. May was Laurel's best friend and Laurel always thought her sister was perfect. At the beginning of the novel Laurel is entering her Freshman year of high school and she has to find a way to deal with so many things. She must accept that her sister is not here anymore and that her mother left to live in California. Laurel made me want to be her friend so that help her get through all this. But I could not because book characters are not real people so I could not help her.

The entire book is written in letters to dead people that Laurel admires. She writes to about having courage through hard times and she writes to them about death. The letters were Laurels form of a journal. Everything important and hard she would write in the letters. We were not giving tons of useless information about her we were giving the most important information.

The writing was beautiful. laurel is a Freshman in high school and most freshman cannot write half as good as Laurel, which might make people think this book is pretentious but it is not it is honest. Honest about the hardships of life, if people want life to be perfect that is to bad because life is hard. Though I have not had a sister who has died and my parents are note divorced i feel the same way as Laurel about a lot of things. She understands that life sucks. Sometimes I need to read I book not just escape my life but to find a way to get through it.

This a a beautifully heart-wrenching novel and I am so glad i was able to read it! Gayle Forman said that "[Love Letters to the Dead] broke my heart, and pieced it back together again." I agree that this book did break my heart but it did not quite put it back together again. I absolutely recommend that you read Love Letters to the Dead because this is a book that I will cherish for a long time and will never forget it. I feel like my review does not do this book enough justice because this book was beautiful.

Also please take a moment to enjoy the cover because this a one of the best book covers I think I have ever seen!

Favorite Quotes:
     -“I think a lot of people want to be someone, but we are scared that if we try, we won't be as good as everyone imagines we could be.”
     -“I know I wrote letters to people with no address on this earth, I know that you are dead. But I hear you. I hear all of you. We were here. Our lives matter.”
     -“And maybe what growing up really means is knowing that you don't have to be just a character, going whichever way the story says. It's knowing you could be the author instead.”
     -“Sometimes when we say things, we hear silence. Or only echoes. Like screaming from inside. And that’s really lonely. But that only happens when we weren’t really listening. It means we weren’t ready to listen yet. Because every time we speak, there is a voice. There is the world that answers back.”
     -“You can be noble and brave and beautiful and still find yourself falling.”
     -“There's more to life than being a passenger.”
     -“But we aren't transparent. If we want someone to know us, we have to tell them stuff.”

DFTBA
-Janussa

Friday, May 9, 2014

Poetry Corner #33


Anaphora
     By: Elizabeth Bishop

Each day with so much ceremony
begins, with birds, with bells,
with whistles from a factory;
 such white-gold skies our eyes
first open on, such brilliant walls
that for a moment we wonder
'Where is the music coming from, the energy?
 The day was meant for what ineffable creature
we must have missed? ' Oh promptly he
appears and takes his earthly nature
      instantly, instantly falls
      victim of long intrigue,
      assuming memory and mortal
      mortal fatigue.

More slowly falling into sight
and showering into stippled faces,
darkening, condensing all his light;
 in spite of all the dreaming
squandered upon him with that look,
suffers our uses and abuses,
sinks through the drift of bodies,
sinks through the drift of classes
to evening to the beggar in the park
who, weary, without lamp or book
      prepares stupendous studies:
      the fiery event of
      every day in endless
      endless assent.

DFTBA Have  a wonderful weekend :)
-Janussa

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Waiting on Wednesday #2


18599754
Say What You Will by Cammie McGovern

Summary: John Green's The Fault in Our Stars meets Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park in this beautifully written, incredibly honest, and emotionally poignant novel. Cammie McGovern's insightful young adult debut is a heartfelt and heartbreaking story about how we can all feel lost until we find someone who loves us because of our faults, not in spite of them.

Born with cerebral palsy, Amy can't walk without a walker, talk without a voice box, or even fully control her facial expressions. Plagued by obsessive-compulsive disorder, Matthew is consumed with repeated thoughts, neurotic rituals, and crippling fear. Both in desperate need of someone to help them reach out to the world, Amy and Matthew are more alike than either ever realized.

When Amy decides to hire student aides to help her in her senior year at Coral Hills High School, these two teens are thrust into each other's lives. As they begin to spend time with each other, what started as a blossoming friendship eventually grows into something neither expected.

Release Date: June 3, 2014
Publisher: HarperTeen

DFTBA
-Janussa

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Book Review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

15783514Title: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Author: Neil Gaiman
Pages: 181
Release Date: June 18, 2013
Publisher: William Morrow Books
Source: School Library
Goodreads | Amazon

Summary: Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.  

Rating: 3.5

Review: This book was so beautiful. The the cute love story kind of beautiful but the deep thoughtful, wonderfully written beautiful.This book is very unlike most of the other book I've read but it was very worth the read. The story was creative, different and very entertaining as you follow The main character through his adventures with Lettie. It's weird but that made me love it all the more.

This is a very hard book to describe, not because I would spoil it or because it's a bad book but because description would not do it enough justice. The writing is some of the most beautiful writing I've ever read. I do not have the writing skill to compare.

The characters were all so different and beautiful in there own way. It was truly marvelous how he explained all the characters. I just would have liked to learn more about Lettie and the Hempstocks because they're very mysterious. it is told from a first person point of view so we only know as much as the main character knows but I wish we could still find out more. There is a whole story to the Hempstocks we just don't know what that story is.

I don't know what else to say. usually I can say many things about books but this book doesn't need tons of explanation this book speaks for itself. I recommend that you read it so you understand what i mean but it was beautiful and I wanted to absorb every word.


Favourite Quotes:
“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”

“Books were safer than other people anyway.”

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”

“Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.”

DFTBA
-Janussa

Friday, May 2, 2014

Stacking the Shelves #2


New books!! :)
18140047   18295852   13447149
18243700   8306857   11735983
17383918   15811545
Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira 
The Geography of You and Me by Jennifer E Smith
Resist by Sarah Crossan
The Assassin's Blade by Sarah J. Mass
Divergent by Veronica Roth
Insurgent by Veronica Roth
Allegiant by Veronica Roth

So many new good books! I'm so excited to read hem and I finally own all the divergent books :)

DFTBA
-Janussa