books by review

Trigger  By Susan Vaught Trigger Warning. This story contains extremely sensitive content.  This story by Susan Vaught, has become one of my absolute favorite books of all time.       This story takes place after a very traumatic event for the main character, Jersey Hatch. We don’t know him before this event, we have no idea of who he used to be, and we don’t meet him after he wakes up and starts his recovery.  We meet him after all of that, after three+ hospital stays and all of the family therapy and occupational and physical therapy sessions.  We met him as he reenters the world. At first, the plot seems to be geared towards figuring out what happened to him. We know he’s coming home after a horrible accident that took the vision of his left eye, his control of the left side of his body, and a hole in his brain. He retained most of his awareness and ‘smarts’ but his ability to read social cues, and control and organize his thoughts was affected...

The Alchemist  by Paulo Coelho          Most of the books I usually consume are of the darker nature, ones that deal with dystopias, tragic characters and situations, along with a painful  joinery against an enemy. The Alchemist, is not like the rest. This was a very uplifting, light, and charming story about a boy taking control of his life.  It talks about taking control of your own life, making the best of every situation and going where life takes you. It speaks of a personal legend, which is discussed below in my comparison of free will and fate in the story below. I loved how this book was written, it had a lot of flowery language, but it is short enough where that is not overwhelming, and Coelho paints the world around the main character, Santiago, beautifully. I felt a sense of wonder and how while reading this book and after. I am defiantly going to recommend it to some of my friends and family memb...

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz This book by Saenz and was first published in 2012 and since then has won four esteemed Awards: the American Library Association, the Stonewall Book Award, the Pura Belpre Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. Let us dive into the review. Summers were mostly made of sun and heat, but summers for me were about the storms that came and went. And left me feeling alone. Did all boys feel alone? The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain , (Saenz 293-294).  The protagonist and the second leading role of this book were both named after ancient philosophers and political thinkers, who are famous for their writing about logical thinking and reasoning on different attempts to understand the world around them. Aristotle is one of the most well known philosophers of all time, and the name “Dante” was probably based off of Dante Alighieri, who was an Italian poet, phi...