Struts & Frets

So, on Sunday, I went to the Library to print stuff. Mum made me get a book. Well, the teen section sucks. Stuff I’ve never heard of before, nothing that seemed friendly and opening. Then, there was a light green spine with the word ‘Frets’, and, being a guitar player, I immediately picked it up… And finished it last night around 8.

 

‘Struts & Frets’ by Jon Skovron is about a 17-year-old boy named Sammy Bojar who plays guitar in his very dysfunctional band, Tragedy of Wisdom. (In the very beginning, it explains that Sammy wishes it was ‘Tragedy of Reason’ because ‘Wisdom’ made no sense.) Anyway, the band is made up of skinny TJ, their drummer; Rick, the gay bassist; and Joe, the terrifying, ill-tempered frontman; and, as previously stated, Sammy, who plays guitar and writes songs for the band.

Early in the book, he realizes that his best friend, Jen5 (Jennifer, Jenny, Jen, and J had already been claimed by the four other Jennifers in their class) really likes him. Then they start dating. Tragedy of Wisdom enters a Battle of the Bands…

 

It’s difficult to explain without too many spoilers. Sorry. 🙂

 

Anyway, I really enjoyed this book. It really explains how difficult it is to keep together a band that doesn’t really even work well. But it was an amazing book, and I’d totally suggest it to anyone who likes music and explanations of reality. It’s great. I actually read it a ton, and now I’m reading it again, it was that good.

Lock and Key (Sarah Dessen)

So, as school got out on tuesday and I went to Hattie’s house that day, and I was dragged to her 4H meeting half an hour from our hometown, she had me read (yet another) of the books she has gotten from book fairs in the library at our school. So, in the course of the two to three hours, I got thirty or forty pages into this book.

 

In this novel, nearly-eighteen-year-old Ruby Cooper has been living alone with her mom since her older sister, Cora, left them to go to college. Ruby’s mom dissappears, though, and Ruby finds herself living with Cora, her husband and CEO/founder of social networking site UMe.com, Jamie, and their yappy, scared-to-death-of-the-oven-and-smoke-detectors, little-bitty dog, Roscoe. On her first night, Ruby tries to run off, but she can’t find the gate to the wooden fence behind Cora aand Jamie’s house, so she happens to meet Nate Cross, their neighbor, as he’s swimming laps in his pool.

 

Eventually, of course, Nate and Ruby end up together. And, even better, Cora and Ruby find their mom – in a rehab clinic in Tennesee.

 

Nate won’t make it easy for Ruby to help him with his hot-tempered, semi-evil dad, Mr. Blake Cross. And she wants to help so much, but he just doesn’t want her to. They break up, but, as predictable as every book targeted to the teenage girl, they get back together.

 

The last part of the book was hardest to understand. Cora and Jamie are taking Ruby somewhere, but it is never specified.

 

But I enjoyed this book. My twelve-year-old brother kept trying to talk to me in the car, but I was reading. And anyone that knows me understands how little I will tolerate when it comes to interruption of exciting, recreational literature. Better, though, is that I was texting Hattie the entire time.

 

Read the book. Read this blog. Comment. Buy the book. Support me.

North of Beautiful (Justina Chen Headley)

So, my best friend (more like sister), Hattie, had me wait forever to read this book about a girl from Colville, Washington, with a huge, obnoxious, obvious port-wine stain on the right side of her face. For those of you that don’t understand, a port-wine stain is a birth mark that kind of looks like wine was spilled on your face. And Hattie told our friend Tony he could borrow it. Why he’d want to read a teenage girly book, I have no idea.

 

So, the girl, Terra, has gone through all this laser treatment and nothing has worked. Then one day, as they’re going back home, Terra nearly runs over a sixteen-year-old Chinese boy, Jacob, and Terra and her mother go with Jacob and his adopted mom, Nora, to go visit Terra’s big brother Merc in China. Then Terra goes on to find true beauty and accidentally falls in love with Jacob, even though she has a boyfriend, Eric, at home. So, et cetera, et cetera. Eventually Terra breaks up with Eric and Jacob and Terra can live happily after.

 

Now, I have four more things to say. 1.) This was an excellent book. Each time I uncovered something in the book, I would go up to her the next day and totally flip out. “Why didn’t you tell me that, Hattie?!” 2.)  Get it. Like I said. Great book. 3.) Hattie and I wonder – is it Merc like Mercer Island, but without the -er, or is it Merc like Mercury without the -cury? 4.) Please respond to these reviews. Also give people this site address. I want more readers. The more readers I get, the easier it’ll be for me to publish a book.

 

Thanks for reading! ~Flik

David Clement-Davies

So, back last year, in seventh grade, I got some books from Barnes and Noble for a Christmas present, but I couldn’t get into them. So, I traded them in for two books – “The Sight” and “Fell”. The first one is about the life of this pack of wolves – how they started by the Human Dens and the Stone Den in a cave Palla (the Drappa or female leader) was born in, the cave Palla’s nurse, Brassa, nursed Palla and Palla’s half-sister, Morgra. This book has this big adventure where Larka (a pure-white female named after the newly-fallen snow, and they soon find she has the power of the Sight) and Fell (Larka’s black brother named for Palla’s father, who towards the end of the book is found to have the Sight, too) and how this pack slowly dies off, Brassa first, and eventually the Sikla (Omega) dying, too. Larka has to kill Morgra and a prophecy must occur. At the end though, I started crying. I’m a sap now, because I didn’t cry in “Shiloh” or even “Sounder”, but I cried when a talking white she-wolf falls to her death. (Actually, she is barely alive after the fall. Lord Vladeran finishes her off. More info in Book 2.)Then Fell goes off to become a Kerl, or loner wolf, which is weird to the wolves, or Varg, because Kerls are basically weirdos in the wolf-world.

In the second book, “Fell”, Fell must find a teenager, Alina, disguised as a boy named Alin, who will “affect nature itself”. Alina has been told she is a changeling child, but she finds out that she is actually of noble blood. Alina and Fell most confront Vladeran, kill him. Vladeran has been in contact with Morgra’s spirit – she died from the same fall Larka suffered. So, Alina then meets a boy, Catalin, and at the end they’re pretty much going out, but you can’t say that because this book takes place in somewhat-Renaissance Romania.

So, read it! If you have a Kindle like my Aunt, Frances, http://justfrances.com/, get it. Go to the library, buy the book, borrow it from a friend, but this is a great book for a fantasy fan. So, as I said before, read it!