The Last Smile in Sunder City 

by Luke Arnold

“You want proof, Fetch? Look in the mirror. You hold on to guilt like it’s a life preserver. So angry at yourself, and your mob, that you can’t smell the blood on the hands of the rest of us. But it isn't about you and your kind tonight. It’s just me. Sometimes, the one who looks like the monster turns out to be a monster.” (Arnold 169). 

There are three things you need to know about the main character Fetch Phillips. 

1. Sobriety costs extra.

2. His services are confidential. 

3. He doesn’t work for humans. 

As a man for hire in a world where magic has recently run out, Fetch has seen it all. Vampires no longer drink blood, werewolves are stuck somewhere between human and beasts, necromancers stopped raising the dead, and Satyrs disappear and humans are the only ones who make it out unscathed.

All except Fetch. 

He knows what killed the magic, what caused the death of thousands of people and the love of his life, and all the suffering thereafter. Fetch lives and operates in Sunder City which is still raw from the loss of the magic, and the few souls who are trying to move forwards, end up going missing.

Fetch is brought in to find a vampire who’s gone missing. As he looks around the city for clues and runs into old friends and enemies, we get to see that Fetch is more than the tough, drunken ex-soldier he pretends to be. After some well-paced flashbacks into Fetch’s past, it makes sense why he doesn’t work with humans, or really trust anyone around him. 

Arnold managed to deliver a story with multiple layers. Fetch is a deep character and unique from so many modern day protagonists. The first way he is unique is that he’s old. Well, old compared to most protagonists. At 30 years old, he has a wisdom about him and a more believable case of alcoholism because he’s had the time for that to develop. 

I wanted to add in a few quotes below, just because I liked them, and I want to say/write/type a few things about the first quote at the top of this review. 

“I like books. They’re quiet and dignified and absolute. A man might falter but his words, once written, will hold.” (Arnold 18). 

“Friends serve a purpose, but every man needs a few good enemies to remind him who he is.” (Arnold 226). 

“A good man is made through a lifetime of work. Great men are made by their monsters.” (Arnold 252).

Those are just a few nuggets of Arnolds writing that showcase his skills.

The line “Sometimes, the one who looks like the monster turns out to be a monster.”, formed a full circle for me. I mean, I feel like books nowadays make the “monsters” or villains, or antagonists beautiful. Their beauty adds to their charm and makes it harder to see them for what they are.

Arnold noticed this trend and framed it in the opposite way. Now, we all know to be suspicious of that beauty, but we aren’t looking at the actual beast in the corner of the room with claws and venom, but we’re still surprised when it uses them. 

So, long story-short, I’ve really enjoyed this story. There is a sequel called Dead man in a Ditch, and I’m excited to see where the story goes. 

:)

Emergency Contact 

by Mary H.K. Choi

 

I loved this story.  It was relatable, hard, goofy and sad. 

Penny leaves for college, and she is so ready, like most 18-year-olds are. To leave the town she’d grown up in and the people she’d grown up with. A fresh start, one that she chose. A break from her mother and boyfriend she doesn’t really like. 

Sam gets a fresh start of his own. A baby with an ex-girlfriend isn’t what he expected, nor passing out in public from a panic attack, or the girl that was there for him. And stays there for him, the one who became his only emergency contact.

Both think that the other only exist inside a screen, that a whole person out in the world can’t be in control of the words popping up.

When meeting in person can’t be avoided, it ends their distant friendship and forces them to finally see each other and what they were becoming to each other.

It’s a cute love story that gets heavy with real life shit. Bills, mother drama, work, and how a mental distraction affects every other part of life. How lonely college can get, and how life seems to take control and months pass before you notice.

I really related to Penny, not because I am overly prepared with supplies, or have mother drama, but because she is an introvert, and her train of thought doesn’t make sense to most people, her roommates are the interesting people, if she didn’t live with them, she wouldn’t exist in their universe. 

One passage I really liked was:

“Real life might be dazzling for other people. Those girls on the Instagram Explore page, visiting Disneyland with the love of their lives. Or else making out in cars with their hair whipping wildly in the wind. None of Penny’s memories were tangibly” page 239. 

That quote was so relatable because who hasn’t compared their lives with that explore page or wanted to be as carefree as others. 

        

Sam was relatable too, a down on his luck kind of guy, the grumpy baker who lived above the coffee shop. Relatable in a way that his life is overwhelming sometimes.

     

These two complimented each other so nicely, both were outsiders, had a hard time growing up, had to do it too fast in a way that makes it hard to connect with people their own 

age. 

The ending of this story was well done. Penny opens. Allows people back into her life, and she takes control of it.  She decides to take a trip to the beach even though its 3 hours away, just to be close to the water. The before Penny would say that the trip wouldn’t be worth it, that’s there’s no substantial value in taking that trip, but the new Penny just wants to take the trip for the fun of it. Decides what she wants, is worth it. She got out of her own way.

It’s a great read, I’m really glad picked it up! 

:)

The priory of the Orange Tree

by Samantha Shannon

This story is as interwoven as a wicker basket. There are so many cultures, religions, royals, and bad-ass characters that make this story feel like the epic fantasy that it is. 

There are about six sections of this tale, starting with The Stories of Old, which is all about setting up the exposition, and trust me, there’s a lot. Expositions are a readers nightmare, if you’re anything like me, you just want to already know what’s going on and to get to the ‘meat’ of the story, but you cannot enjoy the meat without understanding the table that it sets on. The exposition for The Priory of the Orange Tree is a testament to Samantha Shannon’s ability as a writer. Not only did she create all this lore from her imagination, but she also presented it in a way that is captivating and that inspires awe of these cultures. 

We are introduced to two main religions/cultures. One worships the Saint, which was founded 1,000 years before the story takes place. The Saint is known for banishing The Nameless One, who is the devil in dragon form. These believers all also take one of The Knights of Six Virtues as a sort of personal virtue. The six virtues are Fellowship, Generosity, Courage, Courtesy, Justice, and Temperance. 

The descendants of the Saint are the royals that rule in Viturdom, which consist of all the countries that worship the Saint. The royal’s family name is Berethenet, and ten queens have ruled since the marriage of the Saint and the first queen, who is called the Damsel. 

The queen during the time in which this story takes place is Sabran Berethenet. 

During the first 6^th of the story, Sabran is wed, which her queendom had long awaited. Though she was young, producing the next princess of the Saints blood was imperative to the security of the queendom’s future and the continuation of the Nameless One’s banishment in the Abyss, as all followers of the Six Virtues believed that the living bloodline of the Saint was the only thing keeping the Nameless One at bay

There are two types of dragons in this world. One is the fire-breathing wyrms of the west, who are considered evil accomplices of the Nameless One, and the water and sky-dwelling dragons of the East, who are seen as holy beings and protectors against the Nameless One.  

We follow a variety of main characters, most who are women. I liked that women were the main ones in power while they also kept a hold of being feminine as well. 

 Ead is a badass fighter, close servant to the queen, secretly has magic and uses it to protect the queen on orders of the Priory to whom she is secretly loyal too. She moved up in the classes’ despite being an outsider. 

Queen Sabran Berethenet who born of the saint and powerful women before her, her bloodline is believed to hod off the nameless one/ devil snake of evil. Refused all male suitors so far but being pushed to produce a female heir to secure the queendom.

Tane is orphan Guardian, part of the sea guard and dragon riders. Good friends with Isher, rival with Toushe. She’s worked her entire life to be a dragon rider, and dragons to her are alike to Gods. 

Loth is best friends with Sabran, perceived as a threat to suitors because of their closeness, friends of Ead, brother of Margret. He was sent away into Draconic countries to try and rescue Sabran’s father on a suicide mission. 

 My first thought after finishing this book was “what happened?”, and I mean that in a neutral way. I felt that it was almost anticlimactic in a way, with the biggest battle lasting less than a chapter, and the whole story felt more dragged out than it needed to be. 

The world building was beautiful, and I loved the culture and religions and how it was a play on Adam and Eve with the Orange trees as the apple tree with the special fruit giving women abilities and turning them into mages. I liked how females played roles that are usually male, like captains of pirates, and guardsmen.

About halfway through, however, I felt like the story has lost is steam and urgency. After the halfway point of the book, I felt like the characters were always traveling back and forth between countries for no reason.

The ending was abrupt I felt like we didn’t get to see the nations heal. I would have liked to see the world ten years later when Sabran and Ead were reunited and hear about how the religions merged.

I just felt unsatisfied with the ending. At page 600, I just wanted to be done with it. It started at a fast pace with a lot of world building that was needed but took a long time, and it kind of felt like that was all Shannon wanted The characters weren’t extremely deep in any way, and only a few faced major choices but most were just along for the ride. 

It didn't become my favorite book of all time, I doubt I’ll read it again honestly, but I liked the imagery. I feel like it would improve it to take out some fluff, make the pace faster and give it a sense of urgency. I liked the direction Shannon took this epic fantasy in, the house names reminded me of game of thrones, but I feel condensing the story would really help it. 

  

:)

Carve the Mark

Carve the Mark and The Fates Divide 

by Veronica Roth

    Young adult dystopian fiction author Veronica Roth is most famous for her series starting with Divergent. That series was the next big thing after The Hunger Games, it was made into the next movie series made off a dystopian fiction story. However, it ended in flames, in my opinion and at least a few people agree because there hasn't been another big movie series inspired by a new fiction story. (Dune is an old story and its movie is being remade, so that doesn’t count).

The first three books of Divergent were AMAZING. Roth created a wonderful disaster of a world filled with human divisions called “factions”. Tris being a bad-ass female character, Four being the tragic love interest, and how they were fighting for equality, but then everything in the fourth book took a turn no one expected. Roth brought in elements that were never mentioned or even hinted at in the series before, such as new technology, a veil, a split reality, humans conducting a human experiment (like in the Maze Runner).

It came out of nowhere.

She might have been going for that shock factor, but it came off like Roth needed to finish the story in 50 pages and she was in a corner that she couldn't get out of without bending the rules of the world that she made.

Now, however, I suspect something totally different happened. Roth simply grew into her true writing style, and she excelled in the next duology that she wrote.

Carve the Mark, and The Fates Divide, revealed that her true talent is not with semi-realistic fiction, but in completely fiction worlds. Roth created a beautiful setting in space. It felt otherworldly and just as big as Star Wars and crafted beautifully. She imagined rich cultures with different traditions as well as everyone grew into “currentgifts” when they reached puberty. The gift matches the person's personality and what the universe senses they need and is said to come from the “current” that flew through the universe that is described as a river of light in the heavens. 

The story follows two very different people, Akos from the coldest planet, and Cyra who was from the coldest culture. These two could not be more different and to help, their cultures despised each other. Akos is kind despite what’s happened to him, while Cyra was born into basically royalty but despises her life. Cyra’s currentgifts was to cause pain with just a touch, but her gift runs over and caused her constant unbearable pain, and she was used as her family’s secret weapon. If anyone questioned their actions, she was forced to torture them. 

Akos’s currentgift was much more special. He could stop other’s currentgifts. Once he was discovered, he was captured and attached to Cyra’s so her could help her manger her pain and she could finally leave their dark home and planet to follow their ancestor’s custom of sailing the universe along the Current. 

After spending months together, they grow close and find out that their paths had crossed way before they had thought.

I loved this duology, it was so carefully thought out and planned, the second novel shocked me with the major twist of this story, and it quickly became one of my favorites. It does have some very dark elements, it deals with war, murder, and loss. But, it is a dystopian, it’s not a feel-good book, and I thought it was really well done and a great use of Roth’s imagination and talent. 

:)

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. He describes himself as “A five year old genius”. 

He can form correct sentences when he focuses, but sometimes what he was thinking about tumbles out of his mouth before he can stop it.

We soon find out that what had happened hadn’t been an accident. Jersey Hatch had shot himself in the head. 

The story shifts to him trying to figure out why he had shot himself in the first place, why he had tried to end his life. 

Jersey had made a lot of ceramic bowls and vases during his hospital stays, and he made a lot of these as gifts intended for Mama Rush, who was a friend of his grandmother. On his way to her house, the ceramic gifts fall and get broken.

These broken gifts are very symbolic of Jersey’s recovery. He made them in different hospitals, like he made progress getting his speech back and learned how to dress and feed himself and function with one bad arm and leg. 

Mama Rush and he started meeting every Saturday, and she gave him a list of possible reasons for why he did what he did, and he was supposed to explore all of the reasons until they found which was the cause. She also mended each gift, such as the ashtray, and piggy bank, showing the mending and progress that Jersey was making. However, a few items were unsalvageable, showing that things would never be the same, no matter how hard either of them tried. 

Mama Rush served as a mentor and a point of reference for Jersey. She leveled with him, treated him like he was a person, not a piece of glass just waiting to shatter. She made him understand that he had shot himself, to own up to it, and figure out why. 

This story shows all of the ugly afters. Jersey lost all of his friends from school, and he saw the damage it had done to his parents. His mother had to leave, and his father tried to hold the family together, like the gross glue-like oatmeal had made for breakfast everyday.

The end of this story brings the whole story together. Jersey finds the weapon that he had used, Mama Rush was in the hospital, his mother had left, and he was home alone. He finally figured out why he had shot himself, and now knew how to do it right.

Only, he doesn’t. He chooses to live, to make things right, and that is said and also symbolized in Mama Rush taking pieces of the ceramic bowls that couldn’t be fixed, and making a suncatcher with them, showing that something beautiful can come from the broken pieces. 

Vaught did not dance around the bush with this story. She said the ugly truth of how it is, and that adds to the feeling of the book. This is a story about hope. Jersey made a bad choice, and now he had to live with the consequences, but he decides he is going to live with them, and make the best of the broken pieces, he will live his life catching the sunshine, even if he has cracks and scars.

:)

The Alchemist

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 members. 

Below is my analysis and fate and free will that are in this book. Enjoy! 

 During childhood, a common phrase kids hear from adults is “life is what you make it”. We are told that we can do anything we set our minds to if we work hard enough. Children usually have very high aspirations, like being the president or being an inventor, and those aspirations are praised by adults. However, as we get older, we start to question if our lives are really in our control; If we have can make our own choices or if every step of our path is already decided? Fate and free will are opposite forces, but both exist in The Alchemist. Paulo Coelho paints them as two coexisting forces that we can choose between. One’s perspective of their own life determines if they believe in either free will or fate.      

 Coelho uses two concepts to describe the tension between free will and fate. Free will is shown through Personal Legends. He describes a Personal Legend as “What you have always wanted to accomplish,” (Coelho 23). It is different than the fleeting interests that occur throughout life; It is a deep desire, or even a feeling of needing to do that task or achieve that goal. They are uninfluenced from others around us, Personal Legends are not hereditary, so everyone has a unique one. An example could be a child wanting to be an astronaut when they grow up and they are determined that their Personal Legend is to be an astronaut. On the flip side, The King of Salem, who served as a mentor to Santiago, talks about a Mysterious Force that represents fate. The king says “But, as time passes, a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible for them to realize their Personal Legend,” (Coelho 24). Meaning, that as one gets older and experiences more of life, they start to feel like their Personal Legend is unattainable from where they are starting, or what was delt to them in the card game of life. 

Continuing with the example, when that child gets older and graduates from high school and choose to go to college, while they still want to be an astronaut, the mysterious force has set in, and they feel that it would be too hard for them. This mysterious force is a result of adults believing, what the King called, the greatest lie, which is “That at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate,” (Coelho 20). Adults believe that their life is out of their control, that they can’t change anything in their life, and they create this mysterious force, which they unknowingly enforce on their children as they get older. This mysterious force is named so because most adults seem to forget their own Personal Legend, as Coelho said “People learn, early in their lives, what is their reason for being. Maybe that's why they give up on it so early too. But that’s the way it is” (Coelho 26). No one can pinpoint exactly when in their life they gave up on their Personal Legend, it is just accepted as what happens. That child begins to think that being an astronaut is not possible for them, they were not born gifted at math or science, their family is not rich, or they do not live in Florida where NASA training facilities are. Their parents suggest becoming an accountant for a reliable job that pays well, and while their inner child is refusing, they go to school for accounting because it is reliable and would fulfill the fate their parents made for them. 

A person’s fate and a Personal Legend could be the same thing, if one creates it for themselves without any outside input. They are both about accomplishing things in life, finding what your reason for existing is, exploring your mission in life. Becoming an astronaut would have been the child’s fate and Personal Legend. As we get older, they differentiate into a realistic possibility and a childhood dream. We start to see a fate that someone else determined for us. Our parents want us to get a good job and live in a two-story house with 2.5 kids, but we might want to live in a van on the coast with a dog. This person does not have the van or the white picket fence house, and since the house is easier and more socially acceptable, it seems like the better option. This mysterious force is just another word for “maturity”, meaning that it is the responsible thing to do to give up on one’s childhood goals and focus on more realistic accomplishments. This force sets in with age because adults are stingy with time, they know they are not a child anymore, so they think they must have a certain house, a certain amount of money, a spouse, and two children to be considered successful. The adults imprint to their children that that is what they should want, because that is what their parents did to them, and the cycle continues until someone breaks the chain. The one who does is often seen as the black sheep of the family, the odd ball, because they reject the lie and followed their Personal Legend. Santiago was that odd ball, and his story has been inspiring thousands to reject the world’s greatest lie and go after their own Personal Legends. 

:)

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, philosopher, writer, and political thinker. Philosophers were obsessed with truth and reality. The title of the book is great because the characters Aristotle and Dante were discovering themselves throughout the book and what they wanted their lives to be, and aren’t our lives just our own little universes? 

I connected with the protagonist Ari right away. He is an introvert and doesn’t connect with other boys his age, or really anyone. He talks about looking up to guys a few years older than him and not understanding their obsessions with girls and how can’t see himself ever going through that girl-craze phase. 

Ari thinks about things deeply. He thinks about his connection with his father, mother, siblings, and other boys around town his age. He wants to control his life, but feels like there's only a few things he can control about it, and that's because he feels trapped, like he’s walking on eggshells. The fact he doesn't have a lot of friends and is good at fighting makes his parents nervous that he’ll follow in his criminal brothers footsteps, but it's his parents fear of him turning out like his brother and Ari’s own fear of letting his parents down that's making him feel trapped. 

Ari’s father is a Vietnam war veteran and is very distant and it bothers Ari, who wants to have a connection with his father. His father is described like he never came back after the war, like it wasn't over for him. 

The accident.

One major part of the story was a car accident that Ari and Dante were in. Dante was in the street saving an injured bird from being hit when a car came barreling towards him. Ari had pushed Dante out of the way and ended up getting both his legs run over. Both boys lived and Ari spent the rest of the summer in the hospital and when school started he was able to walk again. 

During this, Dante of course felt responsible and wanted to thank Ari somehow, which made Ari resent him. Ari didn’t want to feel like a hero for doing something to save his best friend. He feels like he didn’t do it, that it had been an instinct. 

During this time in their friendship, Dante let Ari look at his stretch book, and confessed his feelings for Ari that he loved him. The sketch book is symbolic of Dante opening up to Ari, about his feelings for him. Dante puts his feelings in black and white and Ari responds by choosing not to open the sketch book yet. He’s not ready to admit that he probably feels the same about Dante to himself yet. He is hesitant to not look into the sketchbook and see his own feelings reflected back to him.

I really enjoyed this story, there was some beautiful prose and lines, below I listed my favorite quotes.

“Maybe I would be happy. Maybe my life would be even worse. Not that I had a bad life. I knew that. I had a mom and dad and they cared, and I had a dog and a best friend named Dante. But there was something swimming inside me that always made me feel bad. I wondered if all boys had that darkness inside them,” (Alire Saenz 299).

”Sometimes, when you were older, you become someone younger. And me, I felt old. How can a guy who’s about to turn 17 feel old?”, (Alire Saenz 300). 

“I wasn’t really thinking. Sometimes, you do things and you do them not because you’re thinking but because you’re feeling. Because you're feeling too much. And you can always control the things you do when you're feeling too much. Maybe that's the difference between being a boy and being a man is that boys couldn’t control the awful things they sometimes felt. And men could,” (Alire Saenz 310).

I had a problem with the ending of this book. I am happy for Dante and Ari finally getting together, but I feel like Ari’s problems were bigger than just his sexuality. He talked about a darkness inside him, he always felt like he did or was something wrong, which I understand is accurate for anyone who might be questioning their sexual orientation, especially in 2012 when it was less socially acceptable to be openly part of the LGBTQ community, but it the reveal wasn’t big enough. It felt forced out of him by his parents. I think it would have been more impactful if Ari was honest with himself first, then his parents. 

I needed to see Ari going to talk to his brother in jail, and bringing Dante with him, so we could see how their relationship changed and how Dante is going to support Ari through life. 

I felt like getting with Dante shouldn’t have solved all of Ari’s problems, and that made the ending unrealistic and anti-climatic, it was like a sudden happy ending under a rainbow. But I do acknowledge that this book was written in a different time and probably helped a lot of people feel better about coming out.

I still loved this book and would definitely recommend it, but it is a downer with brilliant writing, so read this when you need something sad.

:)

Ready Player One

by Ernest Cline

We had to write an analysis for class and I am really proud of mine, so Im going to post the best parts here.

My prompt was about reality and how the Osasis was reality for Wade more than the physical world. I had to explain the topic, not necessarily my view one way or the other. 

At the end is also a small argument that there is a biblical reference in this novel, and that all three parts of the Holy Trinity are actually represented. 

What is real?

It’s a question that philosophers, mathematicians, artists, and many others have been contemplating for centuries. Some believe nothing is real, that the whole world is just a trick of the senses, that physical reality is just part of an imagination. Others believe that nothing is real except for themself, because they can think, therefore, they’re an entity that must exist on some plane of reality. Who’s to say that the OASIS isn’t reality and the physical plane is just some figment of imagination? For the people existing in Ernest Cline's Ready Player One novel, it could be so, as they live in the virtual reality of the OASIS more than the physical plane we know today. 

Along with the rest of the world, the protagonist, Wade Own Watts, uses the OASIS as just that, it's the pond in the hot desert, the peace in the middle of the storm, it's an escape of the turmoil around them. The world has fallen to pieces due to humanity's failure to change our way of life and stop depleting the world's natural resources for fleeting comfort.

For most of the story, Wade is in the OASIS, and for him, having a physical body becomes an inconvenience. It became a vessel to hold his consciousness while he existed in the OASIS.  Wade actually denounces the real world at the end of this section with the line “I would abandon the real world altogether until I found the egg,” that ends chapter 16 (Cline, 166). After he’d found the first key and his home and everyone he knew in the physical world was killed in an explosion and he rents a studio apartment in Columbus in chapters 14-16 and he doesn’t leave his apartment for months. 

He can’t seem to escape reality as much as he wants to, because he is a teenage boy in the throes of his first crush. Once he gets virtually dumped by Art3mis, he goes on a downward spiral of trying to satisfy his sexual urges by going to virtaul brothels. Eventually he gives it up with “When I confronted the grim realization that virtual sex, no matter how realistic, was really nothing. At the end of the day, I was still a virgin, all alone in a dark room,” (Cline,193). This line shows him recognising that life in the OASIS isn’t real. 

With this realization, the argument that the OASIS could be reality falls apart. If the OASIS was his perception of reality, he would view the sex as real, and he wouldn’t still consider himself a virgin. If he truly considered the OASIS to be his reality, then it would’ve been real to him and he couldn’t have had this kind of, resurfacing back into physical reality. He starts to take more care of his physical body after this by exercising before logging on to the OASIS every morning, but he really does this in order to perform better in the OASIS and put his best effort into finding the keys and eggs. 

His perspective only truly shifts back to physical reality at the very end of the book with the last scene. He sees Art3mis in person for the first time and says “It occurred to me that for the first time in as long as I could remember, I had no desire to log back into the OASIS,” (Cline, 372). The comment could be made that Art3mis’s role in this book is degrading, but she becomes the only reason Wade can stand being in the physical world. That’s the whole point of their relationship. Without this last part, the whole romance has no purpose, because romance comes from love, and for many religions, love is the whole point of human existence in the first place. 

The OASIS can’t be reality because someone made it. For it to be reality, then the creator, James Halliday, would be put in a God-like position, and with the Christian God, He exists in a trinity. If Halliday is the creator, who is the Son and who is the Spirit? It could be Ogden Morrow serving as the Spirit of the holy trinity, because of what he does at the end in chapter 32. He saves the High Five and gives them fair playing ground, because Halliday burdened him with protecting the integrity, or the spirit, of the game. 

That leaves Wade as the Son, who enters the OASIS and shows the way to the eggs, like the Son entered into humanity and shows the way to eternal life. Wade even has a redemption moment, it's when Aech forgives him for ignoring him for Art3mis and allowing himself to be distracted by her. Aech forgives him  and gives him the clue he needed to get back into the hunt. Wade wins the hunt and ascends into the role of a creator and becomes “immortal and all powerful,” (Cline,363), which are two words used to describe God.

Accepting the OASIS as reality would mean that God is no longer God, but Halliday, Morrow, and Wade are God, and godliness is transferable. Wade came back to the physical world and the OASIS shifts, from being the most important thing to him, into what it was meant to be, a video game.

Cline, Ernest. Ready Player One. Dark All Day, Inc. 2011.

:)

The Prince of Thorns

by Mark Lawrence

    This series by Mark Lawrence changed my reading life. I read it during high school and four years later, I still think about lines from these books. This is what made me declare Mark Lawrence as my favorite author. I started reading more adult fantasy after this and picked up his other trilogy series (The Liars Key) and the only reason I haven't read the rest of he books is because I want to have the time to fully enjoy them and I'm simply not in a place, mentally, where I can appreciate these books and Lawrences story-telling skills. 

These books take place in the future after humanity as we know it destroyed itself. There were the builders, and that represents us/current time in history, and how the world was broken after us and we left fragments behind and now humanity is back to medieval times. That concept is really hitting home now with the state of the world and the fact we have enough nuclear power to end life on earth. Kinda terrifying.  

The main character is Jorg, a 14 year old monster of a human being on a quest to unite the broken empire under one crown. Lawrence gives small hints into Jorgs past when it aligns on his quest, and it's just a masterpiece of trauma and violence. Jorg shows the dark genus parts of humanity, but also what made him that way, and at the end, he wants to be better than whats happened to him in the past. He wants to be a better father, a better king, and get ride of people darker than him, its the classic "it takes a monster to kill a monster" problem.

Its a story about revenge but also just a small piece of the bigger story Lawrence is building with all of his series. I want to reread them because its has been so long since I've read this series but the fact that it remains one of my favorites four years later says a lot about the quality of this story. I want to reread and do an in-depth review of this book and its set-up to learn about Lawrences story-telling and writing styles, to study how the book is put together and not just its content, so stay tuned for that in-depth review. 

Thank you Lawrence for this gift of a series and I cannot wait to read the rest of his works. It stands above Game of Thrones, The Hobbit, and any other classic/well-known series in my opinion.

:)