I picked up this book in preparation for creating a teen writing program, and I was disappointed. While this might be a good general book for students in middle or high school, it is limited only to 5-paragraph essay writing - a single type of writing that is typically overused in school. I have met so many students who are tired of writing, simply from writing too many essays, which turns them away from the realm of possibilities of the written word. Perhaps this book would be good for a student struggling in an English class, but I would not recommend it for writing outside of the school setting.

This book I picked up simply by its intriguing and gorgeous cover and I’m glad I finally got around to reading it.

I really enjoyed the first two thirds of the book! I loved the entire concept of The Hazel Wood and the weaving of fairytales into the plot, I liked Alice’s character as well as her flaws, and I really enjoyed Albert’s writing style. I did guess several of the plot twists while reading, but Albert wrote them in such a way that I was not disappointed as they were revealed.

However, I do feel some of the magical potential of The Hazel Wood was lost in the last third of the book. I wish Albert had slowed down a tad more to explain things better, and several of the plot points towards the end seemed to occur without much set up or explanation, which was disappointing after how much I had enjoyed the beginning of the book. I was also not satisfied with how she chose to wrap up several character arcs - while some were wrapped up quite well, others seemed lacking and felt as if their character growth had occurred separate to/outside of the story I was reading.

Overall, I would recommend this book and I hope Albert decides to continue expanding on this world she’s created.

Highly entertaining, but not my favorite read ever. Like some of the other reviews, my reading experience was broken up with thoughts like “Obama/Biden would never say/do something like that” which would jolt me from the story, and I would have to remind myself that everything was Shaffer’s fan fiction. I would have enjoyed the plot much more if the characters had been a completely fictitious former president/vice president duo, but many of Shaffer’s jokes & barbs at different political figures had me laughing out loud.

This book had so much potential, but unfortunately fell flat for me. The introduction was fantastic and had me really looking forward to the rest of the book, but that excitement quickly waned as I continued reading.

Each selection included in Speeches followed the same format: title, author, a paragraph explaining what the speech was, and then (generally) a heavily abridged version of the speech. I appreciated the explanatory paragraph the publisher had included for each entry, but I wish the publisher had also included 1) the full speech, or at least an explanation of the parts they chose to omit, and 2) a paragraph or two explaining the context of the speech and why they felt it made one of the most influential speeches ever made. Were there any criteria used in the selection of these speeches, or are they just the result of personal preferences? For instance, how did Joe Jacobs’ exclamation of “We was robbed!” beat out any mention of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech?

Several of the speeches I felt needed additional explanation, such as Adolf Hitler’s “Shaking off the Shackles of the Versailles Dictate” speech. Hitler was (at a minimum) the primary force behind the largest genocide ever recorded - how could the publisher justify including this particular speech without some sort of explanation of how or why they felt it was one of the most influential speeches ever?

While I did enjoy several of the speeches (Galileo, Buddha, Darwin, Edward Lorenz, and Voltaire to name a few), many of the selections left me questioning why they were included. For example, why include John Knox’s 1558 speech “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women” (which was a venomous attack against the monarchs of England and Scotland, solely because they were both women), or “Declaring Southern Rhodesia’s Independence” (created exclusively by the white minority group and perpetuated white colonialism), or a single sentence of Oliver Cromwell’s during his slaughter of entire towns of Irish Catholics beginning in 1649? Why were these speeches chosen over, say, Abraham Lincoln's "The Gettysburg Address" or Charles de Gaulle’s “The Appeal of 18 June?