emilyusuallyreading's reviews
746 reviews

As always, Marie Rutkoski weaves an intricate, stunning tale. I love the cultures created in these books, as well as the twists and turns to be found on each page.

The Winner's Crime is significantly slower paced than its predecessor. I found myself struggling to get through certain chapters in the middle.

The most frustrating moments for me was when the point of view would shift between Arin and Kestrel and show their blatant miscommunications. (For example, in one scene, Kestrel lifts up a hand and wishes to touch his face, and Arin interprets the gesture as her warding him away, so he recoils, and Kestrel interprets that as him being repulsed at the notion of being touched by her.) Silly miscommunications drive me mad.

However, the high society glamor and Kestrel talent of discernment are all there. I enjoyed this book almost as much as the first and will certainly be reading the next in line.

This book is beautiful. It is one of the most remarkable YA fiction books of all time, and the voice of Ponyboy is a clear image into the mind of a young teen. I will forever be inspired by The Outsiders when I am writing YA fiction, and I recommend this book for anyone who has ever been young.

This is one of the first times I've read a sequel before the first book. It was certainly entertaining. I would have enjoyed this book more if I had read it when I was in middle grade. My biggest critiques are its simplicity and predictability. The storyline made me laugh, but each subplot and each adventure with the grandmother became repetitive.

I love most texts by the Brontes, but I never became immersed into this book. I couldn't stand the characters, the writing style is dense, and not a lot happens. I'm disappointed to admit how much I didn't care for Wuthering Heights.

What I Liked
This is definitely a unique story. I read a tweet somewhere that said John Green writes like he rolls a die to decide something like, "My protagonist will be a child prodigy who only dates girls named Katherine and whose best friend is an overweight Muslim kid who is obsessed with Judge Judy. Really. That's what the book is about.

What I Didn't Like
The plot of An Abundance of Katherines isn't super catchy. I found myself getting bored, and even though it was a short book, I read it in four, five, six sittings instead of my usual one. Maybe I'm just not a big math fan.

But I didn't get the theorem. I didn't get the point of Colin dating all of those Katherines. I didn't get the characters and their weird jokes (fugger, switching randomly to different languages, etc). And I did not get the sheer quirkiness of the characters as being realistic. Yes, everyone has their own quirks, but those quirks don't define who we are. Colin's entire identity lied in his insane intelligence and his heartbroken self and everything about Hassan was his humor and fatness. It just didn't flow for me.

I read this book a long time ago, but I forgot how terrifying it is! Spiritual warfare is insane. I love how Ted Dekker writes with chilling realism, but he also approaches demonic possession in contrast with the power of Christ. I love Dekker and always will.

This was one of my very favorite books as a young girl. Re-reading now, I see Elsie's near-perfection as unrealistic and even two-dimensional. Elsie is a model Christian girl of the 1800s. She is beautiful, wealthy, patient, submissive, kind, generous, and gentle. Something interesting is that Elsie keeps slaves happily in later books, believing them to be like foolish children that need Christian guidance.

Elsie's life is used as an example of choosing Christian values in the face of other loyalties, particularly that of her secular family. While I will always have a special place in my heart for Elsie Dinsmore, I relate to her less these days. Perhaps I have lived too long to have the same childish innocence, but I can relate much better to flawed, broken characters who have experienced both the shame of sin and the overwhelming gift of God's grace.

I love the concept of this book. It contains some powerful stories about the harrowing effects of children whose lives have been ravaged by war. However, of the child soldier narratives that I've read, this doesn't make the top of my list of what I would recommend to people. There is an outsider feel to this, being written by someone who visited with these children but couldn't truly know their thoughts, experiences, or trauma.

I read this book for the first time when I was in middle school. It's been several years since I picked up A Child Called It and I've certainly been able to look at it with new eyes. Since middle school, I have worked for both an inner city mission and for a nonprofit humanitarian organization that focuses on neglected children around the world.

Dave Pelzer's story is devastating. It will never be my place to question whether or not the events he described occurred, as some people have. Instead, I can only focus on the goal that what happened to Dave will never happen to another child again, as best as I can help.

The language in this book is very simplistic, almost as if a child wrote it. I'm not sure if this was Pelzer's intention, but this made it a quick read. I read cover-to-cover over my hour-long lunch break at work.

This book is insanely disturbing. When I was a kid, I had pet rats, but I don't know if I will ever look at them quite the same way after reading 1984. George Orwell had some kind of keen insight into the idea of dictatorship and dystopia. So many facets of this made-up culture reminded me of North Korea.

The ending was so vague I'm still wondering exactly what happened. My mind was blown by this book... in a good way.