last year i got really invested in Greta and her whole motives. i love her a lot and i still look up to her immensely, and i feel like this book is a good way to introduce climate change to kids.

(*my overall rating is a 4.8)

the poet x was an amazingly written and amazingly told story about the struggles of falling out of a religion and having family problems.

i personally thought that, since the book was written in slam poetry, it wouldn’t tell the story correctly, or i wouldn’t want to continue with the story, but this was honestly one of my favorite writing styles of all time. i’ve even taken to writing slam poetry of my own.

i am personally a Catholic so reading about Xiomara’s falling out with the church was hard for me to read. but i understand. religion is not for everyone, some people just don’t believe.

i can relate so much with Xiomara’s struggles of growing up, and crushes, and boys and stuff like that. i felt very heard by Xiomara.

the poetry aspect was the best!!!

the only reason this didn’t get a full on five out of five stars was because, although i loved twin’s relationship with his boyfriend, i felt like it was kind of...queerbaiting? it was kind of just a side piece, which i didn’t think it was supposed to be, but it felt like it.

all in all an extremely good story!

-rebe

(*my overall rating is a 3.4)

love, life, and the list is about Abby who is struggling with her art while still being in love with her best friend, Cooper. she curates a list to give her more heart and depth for the summer.

by FAR the best kasie west book i’ve read. it’s a bit different from the ones i’ve read. first off, the main girl doesn’t hate the love interest (what a shock!). she does still have a some-what broken family. her mother has some kind of sickness, and her dad is in the military, but it felt a bit different from the other books.

i really like Cooper and Abby’s dynamic. i felt like they did click together well, and they had a lot in common. their relationship felt real and true, not forced, like some other books. it was a very well-developed romance.

i also liked how the list played into the story. it was a pretty cool list, and i’m sure that if you actually did it in real life it would be really fun, but i was a bit disappointed when the list disappeared in the middle of the story. it kinda just...faded away.

the side characters were also very fleshed out and very real. Elliot was a genuinely great person and even though he didn’t get with Abby, even though he clearly wanted to, he was still a grey friend to her. Lacey was also an amazing friend, but i feel like she was only there for the sake of the romance. i feel like Lacey could’ve been someone really cool and awesome if she had just been her own person, but that chance was wasted.

the whole art show thing? i feel like Abby may have over exaggerated a TINY bit. yes, i would be angry that my family couldn’t make it and that my dad influenced me getting into an art show, but i feel like she overreacted those two things.

now the one thing i would be EXTREMELY mad about would be my bestie/crush blew me off for a date with some girl he called Ris.

i thought that the ending was cute. i feel like Rachel and Justin could’ve been really cool characters had we known more about them, but getting to see them at the end was still really fun.

all in all a cute story that i would definitely recommend!

-rebe

one of my favorite childhood series so i read the only book i hadn’t read yet :)

i had to read this book for school and i read it so long ago that i can hardly recall what even happened. all i really remember from reading this book was finding it a great length and also i found it super informative and i also learned a lot about the revolution in Sudan! a solid three and a great book to read for school :)

-rebe

(*my overall rating is a 3.5)

cinder is a sci-fi story set in the future that is about a half-human half-cyborg girl who lives in new beijing with her two stepsisters and stepmother. she ends up getting “volunteered” to the research of finding a cure to the current plague.

i had heard so so so so much about cinder before i even considered picking it up. i noticed that it regularly showed up in either hauls pr unhauls, but aside from that i never saw anything else about the story. booktubers constantly said the same thing over and over. “i loved this in middle school but my love for it started to dwindle” blah blah blah. all the exact same critique and stuff like that.

so i wasn’t too interested in picking it up until i was so freaking bored that my crap brain couldn’t think straight and i was suddenly buying it from barnes & noble and reading it.

i loved cider when i began it. cinder was (to me, at the time) a super badass character who accepted things as they were and stood up for herself and stuff like that. but i was wrong. cinder is a very bland, very 1-D character who didn’t really do ANYTHING. cinder just...was. she wasn’t unique, or different from anyone else. to me, a rug would have been more interesting.

and can we talk about how cinder’s only personality trait was that she was a cyborg and she was a mechanic? the only other distinguishing trait i can think of is snarky, and still not much of that.

moving on to the other characters, let’s talk about cinder’s family. first, the sisters. pearl and peony. i was able to appreciate the fact that meyer did go off the original story and didn’t make both of cinder’s sisters total bone-heads. peony was a wonderful character. she was sweet but also sassy. she was your typical teenage girl who had big dreams. the thing is that meyer kills off peony so early on in the story that we can’t really be sad about what happened. she dies before, what, page 100? that, to me, is not enough time to truly care for a character. now pearl was bad. she was just the most average bad stepsister i’d ever read. it was so stupid. the stepmom was also just way too typical.

iko was wonderful. for a robot, she was a heck of a lot more interesting than cinder. i also loved prince kai! he was so adorable and definitely one of my new book boyfriends.

the whole plot thing with queen levana was really interesting! i didn’t think that we were gonna get this space plot in the book but it was a pleasant surprise! i still wish that we had gotten to know levana and the story a little more but i guess not. hopefully we get to know more about it in future stories (which we did, but it still confused me).

the plot was the part where most of my issues lied. while i was reading the book, i found the plot very good! i really loved the plot of the mechanic thing and Prince Kai and the plague and all that stuff, but when i actually finished the book i realized that the story was, even if not directly, super similar to the original cinderella tale.

the ending of the story is what really just put the icing on the cake. what even was that ending? poor prince kai, stupid cinder, annoying queen levana! i was just so angry at the ending (i want to add that i was overexaggerating a lot when i finished it. i still dislike the ending but it’s not as bad as i made it seem.) that it made me not want to even touch the second book.

thank God that scarlet (the second book) was much better. i would high recommend scarlet, even if it meant having to get through cinder.

so yeah. that’s my review that took literal months to get written!

-rebe

no rating just because it’s a behind the scenes of my favorite show haha. i loved this! it was super fun to hear the actors’ inputs on the show and what they thought/felt while playing their characters. i also liked to learn about how Stranger Things came to be and how the CGI, costumes, sets, etc were made and executed. a must have for stranger things fans :)

*2.0

i never elaborated on this so here’s a bad review :)

ever since i had heard about the Disney Twisted Tales series, i was super interested. the concepts sounded very intriguing and quite exciting.

but this book was such a let down.

ugh it was just genuinely confusing from the get go. you have no idea what’s going on until you hit page, like, 80, which is a hassle to get to. Aurora is just the dumbest idiot in this book, she has no idea what the heck is going on around her or on their quest and she still gets to be the hero in the end?

the romance was so one-sided philip might as well had been dating himself.

my biggest issue with this book is just how confused i was throughout the story. i hardly understood half of the stuff i was reading. i know that this isn’t one of my some-what well written reviews and stuff like that but i really didn’t have the energy to write a good review at the moment.

one word to describe this book: confusing.

-rebe

(*my overall rating is a 3.5)

review coming soon!!!