Book Review

Robert Beatty fans will not be disappointed in his new novel Willa of the Wood. He sticks to his themes about the importance of having family and friends as he writes about Willa, who has neither.

Willa finds herself alone with a clan that doesn’t care about her and humans who try to kill her, but just when she feels the most alone, the forest helps Willa, and she ponders one kindness that contradicts everything she’s learned. All the events steadily build to the climax where choices are harder than ever, and Willa has to decide if she should do what’s right even if it will hurt her in the process.

Beatty’s writing is rich with sensory details about the Great Smoky Mountains, Willa’s home, with its gigantic mountains, flowing rivers, still lakes, and lush forests. Beatty also compares nature to people and man-made tools, like when he writes that people are alike to wolves because they both hunt and kill what they need to survive. Willa also idolized the wolves because of the way they work together. She longs to be part of their pack and hunt alongside the wolves.

There are many secondary characters who shape Willa’s life. Willa learned the most from her grandmother who taught her the old ways of their people and how to use her powers in good ways. The leader of Willa’s clan, the padaran, taught Willa a lot, too. Most of his teachings were wrong, but they influenced Willa’s decisions since she trusts him.

The plausible dialogue between Willa and those characters shows Willa’s age and curiosity as she asks many questions and wonders about her place in the world around her.

Beatty writes about so many themes as Willa wanders the woods, but the most important one is about having a family and friends to guide you and support your decisions. Each time reading Willa of the Wood reveals more of Beatty’s themes.

Beatty’s usual magic is included which means Willa of the Wood is a fantasy book. Much like the Serafina series Beatty wrote, myths become reality, and Willa has some magic of her own.

The beautiful scenery mixed with brilliant themes make this novel one of the best. Lovers of the Serafina series will appreciate and enjoy Willa of the Wood because of the main characters’ many similarities, like their love of nature and forests and their longing for adventure. Serafina even makes an appearance in the novel, so if you like Serafina or if you want to disappear into a twelve-year-old girl’s mind with the beautiful scenery of the Great Smoky Mountains, then read Willa of the Wood.

Imagine this, crime is not punished by prison, but by changing the color of the prisoner’s skin, and public shame. This is what Hannah faces in When She Woke by Hillary Jordan. Hannah had been changed to the worst color imaginable. A color representing murder. She is red.

Hannah finds herself in a difficult situation in When She Woke. Love has driven her to change the course of her life. Maybe forever. Worst of all, she is caught. Now she has to live her life as a red.

Hillary Jordan tackles themes of love, loss, and the weight of your choices in When She Woke by using colors to represent crime and discrimination. Some of the best things about this novel are its sensory details, such as describing what skin changing feels like. It is paced very fast, and the characters all go through changes in the book as they face different problems.

The genre of this book is science fiction and is set in a futuristic United States. Hannah is from a small town in Texas, a very Christian community.

Readers will be taken on a journey of self discovery with Hannah as she grows and matures. This is a story that any teen will enjoy, If you wants a story that creeps you out, and makes you think, pick up When She Woke at the nearest library.

Maria Polizzi is a high school student, and this is her third publication. She found she enjoyed writing two years ago, and it is something she plans to continue doing as she moves forward in her education.

You all have read some amazing books but, I bet you haven’t read the book Rash by Pete Hautman. It’s an outstanding book. This book has a New York Times Notable Book of the Year Award. It has some great details and that is why I love this book. It’s  also quite fast paced, and it’s a great book for kids older than nine years old.

This book starts off with the main character, Bo Marsten talking to his grandfather about track and field, and how the USSA (United Safer States of America), is because students have to wear padding and helmets for track, as the USSA is making everything safe.

Hautman’s, Rash is about how to control your anger. It’s about self identity— finding how you really are.

Bo Marstens’ family is really crazy because in this year, 2074 almost everything is illegal and the Marsten family has some serious anger issues. Bo’s dad and brother are both in jail for ten years and are picking shrimp shells as their punishment.

There were many major characters in Rash, including Bo, like Rhino, Bork, and Hammer. The antagonist, the character that provides a contrast to the major character, is Karlohs. Anything he did annoyed Bo a lot.

Bo’s character  developed as time passed, and I liked the message and that we shouldn’t have to get angry all the time. So the next time you’re in your local library or the one closest one to you check out Rash by Pete Hautman. You’ll be glad you did.

Michael McLaughlin is fourteen years old and going into eighth grade at St. Patrick’s School in Rolla Missouri. His favorite genre of food is seafood.  He loves to watch or play baseball,  and since he’s from Missouri his favorite team is the STL Cardinals.  In Michael’s words; “A cool thing about me is that I’m actually adopted, and I’ve been adopted for about eight years now, and it gave me the chance to be writing this auto-biography and I’m so grateful for what this family has done for me.”

Imagine your sister is chosen for a death match. You save her by making yourself a volunteer for her. This is Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. The story is about a sixteen-year-old girl named Katniss Everdeen who saves her sister. She steps up for her as a tribute and will fight for her, even though she knows it’s tough.

The themes of this story are friendship, family, freedom versus enslavement, and materialism. Friendship and familial bonds are figured as a form of resistance, and Katniss’ friendships with Gale, Peeta, Cinna, Haymitch, and Rue help her survive the Hunger Games, even though she is going to miss every single one of them when she’s fighting and starving to death.

Although Collins has a lot of characters in the book, the changes throughout the book are different between characters. Katniss is a lot tougher and is a lot more brave, Peeta is also stronger and braver but he also gains trust in people, and Gale is scared and he just wants Katniss to live,— but he’s brave trusting she won’t die.

Some themes in the book are never giving up on family and friends— even if you just want to die because you’re in so much pain. Keep on living and try as hard as you can to succeed and see them after all is done, and hug every single one of them, and when you do you’re so happy

Hunger Games does have a sequel as well; the other books are Catching Fire which is the second book, and Mocking Jay is the third. The fourth that’s an add-on and is a prequel to the others is The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

I loved this book and the idea that we should never give up on family and our friends. So the next time you’re in your local library or the one closest one to you, pick up Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

Michael McLaughlin is fourteen years old and going into eighth grade at St. Patrick’s School in Rolla Missouri. His favorite genre of food is seafood.  He loves to watch or play baseball,  and since he’s from Missouri his favorite team is the STL Cardinals.  In Michael’s words; “A cool thing about me is that I’m actually adopted, and I’ve been adopted for about eight years now and it gave me the chance to be writing this auto-biography and I’m so grateful for what this family has done for me.”

Pride and Prejudice is the epitome of the enemies-to-lovers trope wrapped in a slow-burn romance, beloved by readers for centuries. In fact, even Jane Austen herself described the novel as “my own darling child.” It’s easy to swoon over the fierce chemistry between the two main leads, but Austen’s novel is chock-full of other protagonist-worthy characters who barely make a dent in the original story.

Take Mary Bennet, for instance. Plain, awkward, and decidedly not rich, with four stunning beauties as sisters and a nagging marriage-obsessed mother, poor Mary seemed to always conveniently blend into the background of any conversation, with that being her sole object in any social outing. In fact, in the original novel she’s only given seven spoken lines in total!

But the self-professed “dull and unremarkable” Mary is to be struck by Cupid’s arrow in Nancy Lawrence’s Mary and the Captain, a feel-good satisfactory novel brimming with unlikely romance, unexpected redemption, and, of course, unfavorable first impressions.

It’s two weeks until Christmas and Mary Bennet is desperate for some peace and quiet–far away from her contriving, gossipy mother who, regrettably, had not been relieved of her fixation to see all her daughters wedded. A nice family reunion at Netherfield with Jane and Bingley seems just the ticket, but Bingley’s cunning sister Caroline throws a wrench into Mary’s plans. Caroline’s brother Robert is smitten with her dear friend Helena Paget (a beauty and lady and heiress, oh my!), and what better way to bring the two together than have them settled in Netherfield for Christmas under her watchful eye?

Captain Robert Bingley comes to Netherfield intent on courting and wooing the lovely Helena, but nothing is to go as planned. There’s an old adage among the enlightened that warns against rooming with one’s best friend for fear of revealing a whole new and potentially unfavorable side of them, and that applies too to staying with the subject of one’s infatuation in close quarters, as Robert finds out soon enough.

As Miss Paget’s true and decidedly less attractive personality masks her outward beauty, Robert becomes more intrigued by shy, awkward Mary Bennet. His evolving perception of Mary mirrors that of the reader, as Lawrence’s firm steering of events and the plot allows the reader to gradually gain a much more favorable impression of Mary than Austen’s meager rendering in the original. Though romance is indeed a significant and appealing motif of Lawrence’s composition, Mary’s personal character development is the true melody that sings out, as always intended.

Mary Bennet had always been more of a self-effacing introvert: “She had never mastered the art of carrying off such social niceties. She would stutter and stumble, or–even worse–sit in strangled silence, unable to conjure up a viable thought to add to a conversation.” And when presented beside her sisters– elegant Jane, witty Elizabeth, enthusiastic Kitty, and lively Lydia–compounded by “being the only plain one in the family,” it’s easy to see why Mary doesn’t offer many agreeable first impressions.

In the original novel, Mary unknowingly embarrasses her family with a poor pianoforte performance at a ball, and demonstrates an inability to read-the-room with her solemn words of “comfort” for Elizabeth regarding her sister Lydia’s elopement: “Unhappy as the event must be for Lydia, we may draw from it this useful lesson…”

Interestingly, Austen attributes these moments of social slip-ups to Mary’s “pedantic air and conceited manner,” strikingly similar to Elizabeth originally chalking Darcy’s actions to his pride. But while Darcy’s pride and other failings were eventually forgiven,

with Austen awarding him a happy ending, Mary seemed to be condemned to a loveless life for posterity as “the only daughter who remained at home.”

In today’s literary world, however, the very components of Mary’s situation that undermined her in Austen’s novel–minor character, misunderstood, hazy resolution–gives her the greatest potential to be her own heroine. Nowadays, introverts like Mary are met with more compassion and curiosity than scorn and rebuffs, elevating them from mere character foils to proper protagonists.

Her awkwardness, which, in Pride and Prejudice, had been a subject of subtle mockery, becomes a means of relatability with the reader. Sure, she does bust out a pedantic line or two from the admittedly mundane Sermons for Young Ladies, Volume One when feeling particularly desperate, but her efforts and attempts to be more socially aware gives her an unwaveringly sincere voice that is not at all conceited and instead endears her shy, bookish nature to the reader.

Mary may be a clumsy conversationalist perturbed by strangers and prone to stowing away in the library to avoid them, but she proves she’s more than willing to leap out of her comfort zone when help is needed. And all the reading she’s done has made her an intelligent young woman, whose wits and excellent memory quickly become of great value further into the story. As for Mary’s connection to her piano, Lawrence provides the instrument with stronger symbolic value, turning it into a cathartic outlet for when things go wrong.

As much as Mary’s journey to find her own voice was engrossing, Lawrence may have bitten off more than she could chew by wedging in a secondary redemption arc for Caroline Bingley, the master manipulator herself. Though Caroline certainly had the potential to become an absorbing heroine, Lawrence resorts to the now popular “Disney villain” treatment of a tragic backstory that attempts to make up for all the character’s past offenses. Caroline’s blossoming romance with a kind vicar is also peppered sporadically throughout the story and is admittingly sweet, but its overall ambiguity and vague resolution makes it fall flat satisfaction-wise.

Nonetheless, fans of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice will no doubt find Lawrence’s infatuated lovers just as compelling as Elizabeth and Darcy, who unfortunately don’t make a direct appearance in the novel but play an important role nevertheless. However, while Elizabeth and Darcy’s clear chemistry despite, or rather, because of, their contrasting personalities designated them as one of literature’s most popular “ships,” Mary and Robert’s romance is absorbing not because they seemed destined to be together, but because they appeared not.

Their love flickers with the raw, tender passion of patience and trust, burning slowly and steadily to a satisfying ending where our “Mary, Mary, quite contrary” will finally, finally, get the man she deserves.

Hetian (Carol) Xu is a rising senior at Amador Valley High School in California. She serves as the editor-in-chief of the award winning school newspaper, Amador Valley Today, and has been recognized by the Scholastic Writing Competition and Goi Peace Foundation for her writing. In her spare time, she enjoys snacking on brownies, watching Korean dramas, and lounging around with a splendid book.

It is a strange experience to pick up a book imbued with death. On lifting When Breath Becomes Air from the library shelf and reading the summary, I sensed a subtle shift in the air — or perhaps within me. I stood beneath the artificial lights, surrounded by the sounds and movements of life, grasping death in my fingers.

Unsettled but deeply intrigued, I leafed through the memoir, feeling the fragments of shattered dreams, relationships, and life permeate the pages. I paused as my eyes fell across a poem, Caelica 83 by Baron Brooke Fulke Greville, inscribed in the opening pages:

You that seek what life is in death,

Now find it air that once was breath.

New names unknown, old names gone:

Till time end bodies, but souls none.

Reader! then make time, will you be,

But steps to your eternity.

The lines beckoned to me like a sliver of light beneath a closed door. Breathless, I turned the knob, descending into the depths of meaning and mortality. Fear, sorrow, joy, confusion, peace enveloped me in waves. Can the presence of death cause such a contrast of emotions? It can, it seems. Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s life, the epitome of juxtaposition, pulled me from the heights of occupational utopia to the depths of mortal uncertainty. Yet, his words dispelled the silence of death, filling it with moving anecdotes from his personal and medical experience.

When I picked up this book, I expected a compelling but technical lecture on dying from a clinical viewpoint. But what I found transcended this presumption. I found compassion where I thought only mechanism occurred. I found hope where I thought only shadows reigned. I found a soul struggling to make sense of life’s meaning in the face of death. And is not that the story of humanity?

When Breath Becomes Air opens a window into the life of Dr. Paul Kalanithi. The son of first-generation immigrants, Kalanithi grew up in Kingman, Arizona. From an early age, his life was cluttered with nature, literature, and a burning ache for knowledge. Kalanithi’s mother, dissatisfied with the curriculum at his public high school, helped ameliorate the syllabus, a factor that aided in Kalanithi’s Stanford acceptance letter. After earning a B.A. and M.A. in English literature and a B.A. in human biology from Stanford, Kalanithi received an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University. At this time, Kalanithi realized that he desired “direct experience”; “it was only in practicing medicine,” he writes, “that I could pursue a serious biological philosophy.” By pursuing a path in medicine, Kalanithi hoped to answer “the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.”

After attending Yale School of Medicine, Kalanithi entered a residency program at Stanford. During his internship, he encountered suffering and death — things he had only read about in books — first-hand. In his observations, Kalanithi guides readers through the waiting rooms and the sterilized offices, unveiling scenes of profound loss and quiet hope. Through these raw accounts, Kalanithi sets the stage for his own tragedy. He prepares readers in part one of the memoir for his wrestle with death in part two. When the results arrive, a glaring image of stage IV lung cancer, Kalanithi is under death’s shadow, grappling with his mortality through the words he weaves.

What struck me most about Kalanithi’s writing is the degree of empathy with which he conveys not only his anguish, but that of his patients. In one poignant scene, Kalanithi describes relating the option of brain surgery to a terrified patient. He acknowledges that he could have listed to her “all the risks and possible complications… [documented] her refusal in the chart,” and departed. However, in line with the resolve he made to treat his “paperwork as patients, and not vice versa,” Kalanithi gathers her and her family together, and they discuss the options. In doing this, Kalanithi writes that he “had met her in a space where she was a person, instead of a problem to be solved.”

Conversely, while in the trenches of death, he cautions readers of the “inurement” and objectivity that can arise through this persistent confrontation. Kalanithi entered the field with noble intentions, yet, he admits, he felt at one point that he was “on the way to becoming Tolstoy’s stereotype of a doctor… focused on the rote treatment of disease — and utterly missing the larger human significance.” In the end, technical excellence is not enough. Mechanical words and statistics cannot balm the wound of fearful uncertainty; true healing lies in the relationship between doctor and patient. “Before operating on a patient’s brain, I must first understand his mind,” Kalanithi explains. By separating the physical from the mental, the tangible from the intangible, Kalanithi can recognize the patient not as an object, but as a soul, a being in possession of an “identity,” “values,” and knowledge of “what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end.” At heart, technical excellence without relationality is like a stained glass window without light. In a society that too often reduces human beings to numbers — the effect of a worldwide prosopagnosia — Kalanithi urges readers to view humanity as a group of individual beings, not a mere collection of data.

Once Kalanithi was diagnosed with cancer, his perspective on death changed. Kalanithi writes:

I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely.

Previously, as a doctor, Kalanithi saw death as the force he grappled with to attain several more grains of time. In relation to himself, like many human beings, he viewed death as inevitable but not imminent. Death’s shadow was omnipresent, but it was forgotten amidst achievement, distraction, and the sense of immortality that accompanies the two. But now, as a patient encountering the fatal presence in his own body, he felt it. He tasted it. At the pinnacle of his career, Kalanithi was greeted with his finitude.

And his response?

Finding meaning in the life that remained. To acknowledge one’s mortality is to acknowledge time’s transience. In the face of these two giants, Kalanithi searches for what is significant and what makes his life meaningful. This search results in two significant decisions: the decision to have a child and the decision to write this book.

Kalanithi explains, “If human relationality formed the bedrock of meaning, it seemed to us [he and his wife] that rearing children added another dimension to that meaning.” At heart, this line confirms one of the memoir’s underlying messages: life’s meaning is rooted in relationality. Kalanithi found value in his relationships with his patients, his family, his friends, the world, and God.

When Breath Becomes Air is both practical and deeply personal. It reads as both a guide to living well and a love letter to Kalanithi’s daughter. Death is integral to the memoir, laced between the lines and stamped in the cover Kalanithi never held. Like his life, the book was half-finished; his wife and a team of editors worked to publish it posthumously in 2016. Even so, the memoir radiates with life — as Kalanithi quotes Samuel Beckett, “birth astride of a grave.” In Kalanithi’s poignant reflections and in the promise of his child’s life, death and life compose the pages of the memoir.

When Breath Becomes Air offers readers a new perspective on mortality, an echo of memento mori, and reveals, through Kalanithi’s life experience, how to live and find meaning when breath is still breath.

Although of American descent, Abigail Blessing was born in Pakistan and has lived nearly all fifteen years of her life in Malaysia. From an early age, she has been intrigued by the dark and the deep dimensions of life, prompting her to take an interest in topics of art, death, isolation, and morality. When Abigail is not penning stories or essays, she takes pleasure in reading classic literature, wading through nature, playing the violin, and blogging at abigailblessing.com.