CLP Teens Blog

Through the Ever Night by Veronica Rossi

Aria and Perry are back in the sequel to “Under the Never Sky” by Veronica Rossi, and they are officially a couple…sort of.

Aria and Roar have set out after a disastrous attempt at life in the Perry’s home village. He is now Blood Lord of the Tides but the tribe is not happy about him bringing an outsider into their midst. So much so that at the marking ceremony Aria is poisoned by her tattoo to the point where she almost dies.

Perry’s nephew, Talon, is still a prisoner in the world of Realms where Aria has been banished. The Aether storms are becoming more and more frequent occurrences rather than anomalies and are upsetting the pods or the world of the realms. Director of Security Hess, who initially banished Aria, is in need of her help. There is said to be a world that is Aether free and the only hope for the existing pods. If Aria can locate it, he will let Talon go free. Aria’s mother was lost in one of the pods and time is running out for her friends and the realms. Perry wanted to go with her but he would have lost the respect of the tribe if he would have abandoned them to be with that ‘dweller ‘. However, he still wants to rescue his nephew. If that wasn’t enough motivation for her, her attacker is back with a new twist. He was banished but only to a different realm. He seems like an unlikely ally for Aria, but in this complex novel, you never know who you can trust.

“Through the Ever Night” by Veronica Rossi is the 2nd book in the trilogy. It is part Hunger Games, part Matched and part Uglies all rolled into one. A great read that will keep you wanting and waiting for the final installment.

Review by Andrea, CLP-Hill District

In Darkness by Nick Lake

In Haiti, the Site Soley is one of the poorest and most dangerous slums in existence today. Residents in the area often are starving and have little or no access to formal education, hospitals or even proper running water. Formal government does not exist within the Site Soley, and the area is ruled by violent gangs that distribute weapons and guns. It is truly a terrifying existence and one that only has gotten worse since the devastating earthquake of 2010.

In Darkness follows the parallel stories of “Shorty,” a Haitian teenager who is trapped in a hospital following an earthquake, and Toussaint l’Ouverture, the leader of the rebellion that freed the slaves and forced the French out of Haiti. Shorty grew up in the Site Soley and has been exposed to violence at young age. Finding few options, he becomes wrapped up in gang life which is how he ends up in the hospital. Toussaint was born into slavery but educated himself and became a great leader.

Nick Lake has done an extraordinary job providing his readers with access into the lives of people who live in one of the most impoverished areas of the world. Lake also does a great job of highlighting Haiti’s difficult and often tragic history by providing the perspectives of both Shorty and Toussaint who, while existing centuries apart, face similar adversities—violence, corruption and devastation.  While it certainly is a difficult and emotional read, it is certainly worth reading.

Review by Maddie, CLP-Squirrel Hill

The Future Of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler

When I was a teenager, long ago during the 1990s, the internet was a much different place than it is today. To connect to the World Wide Web you had to use dial up modems: small plastic boxes which made weird eeeeeeeebingdingbingdingchshhhhhh sounds when connecting, were incredibly slow and tied up the phone line. Instead of search engines like Google, to find a website you had to scroll through pages of directories: long lists of websites sorted by topic. And social media was non-existent: no YouTube, no Facebook, not even MySpace…just email. Online was truly a dark and lonely place.

“The Future of Us” is based in this bleak past, 1996 to be exact, where the internet was just beginning to take form. But Emma is about to get a glimpse into the future. When she receives an American Online free trial CD-ROM (these disks were everywhere) all she intends to do is create her first email account, instead she notices something called “Facebook” and opening it she discovers her own Facebook page…from 15 years in the future.

Immediately she has to share this discovery with her longtime neighbor and once-best friend (it’s complicated) Josh, and they proceed to look up their future selves. Only problem is, while Josh seems to have a great future, married to uber-popular and attractive Sydney Mills and living in a mansion, Emma does not seem very happy. She’s married to some guy named Jordan Jones whose apparently never home (Emma suspects he is cheating on her). To fix this Emma does the unthinkable: tries to make sure she never meets Jordan Jones thus altering her and everyone elses future forever.

I loved the concept of this book. Being able to see your future Facebook account is an appealing and frightening idea. I liked how Emma would jump to conclusions based on intentionally vague Facebook statuses, something I think often happens in our own everyday use of Facebook. Also, writing about time-travel can be very tricky, but I think that the authors did a great job here. Even the slightest change to the present significantly alters the future, such as how many kids Emma and Josh have, so every time they check their Facebook their lives are significantly different. This was a fun read that you should definitely check out!

Review by Simon, CLP-East Liberty

Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi

If you can picture a perfect world in the future where you only need to envision a place and you can go to it in the bat of an eye or actually through your “smarteye” which is wearable computer, you would see life the way Aria does in the book, Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi. She lives in a place called Reverie.

Aria has never known life any other way. Her food, shelter, education and health care have all been taken care of for her entire seventeen years. However, all of that is about to change. She has not been able to communicate with her mother, Lumina, for a long period of time. So, Aria enlists the help of other Reverie dwellers to leave the safety of their POD and try to get in contact with her mother who is a geneticist in one of the Realms called Bliss.

Soren was the driving force behind them leaving the Realms in the first place. It was his desire to break the rules of the Realms by disengaging their Smarteyes and going on an adventure for a few hours. Aria went along with it so she could sneak away to find her mom. Her best friend, Paisley and Soren’s lackeys, Bane and Echo accompanied them. As she and her friends disengage their contact from the world of Realms by shutting off their Smarteyes, an Aether storm was simultaneously building in the forest surrounding their Pod. The storm is no ordinary storm. It has the ability to not only destroy the landscape, but bring out the primal barbaric nature of human beings. Aria is attacked by her “friend” and fellow Reverie citizen, Soren. Soren’s father is in charge of security in Reverie. After they illegally ditched the POD it basically came down to Soren’s word against Aria’s. Bane, Echo and Paisley are all dead. Aria was exiled from her home, Reverie, and the other PODS or realms as well. For the first time in her life, she has nothing. She had a message from her mom stored on her Smarteye, but she had no way to retrieve it. She also had no food, no shelter, no protection as Soren ripped her Smarteye from her and she is abandoned in the forest.

Not everyone lives in the ideal world of the realms. Peregrine, or Perry as he is known, is an outsider. There are whole tribes of people whom the dwellers call savages who make their home on the outskirts of the Realms. They fight against the dwellers and against neighboring tribes. Perry’s beloved nephew, Talon, was captured by dwellers and taken to the Realms world.

Aria and Perry, the most unlikely couple in the world, are brought together through circumstances that neither one understand or have control over. Aria is not alone and neither is Perry but can they work out their differences and outright distrust and disgust of each other to help rescue the people they love most in the world? Read Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi.

Review by Andrea, CLP-Hill District

One Piece by Eiichiro Oda

One Piece is about a boy named Monkey D. Luffy. He wants to become king of pirates, so he gathers some crew and goes for an adventure. I liked Sanji, he’s the cook and I found him interesting because he says the most important part of a cooks body is his hands, so he always fights with the lower part of his body with his hands in his pockets.

The only thing I didn’t enjoy was the art, it’s a little weird. I love the characters though, I think they’re oh so very awesome. I would recommend this to everyone. It’s awesome!

Review by Dakoda

Pictures of Hollis Woods by Patricia Reilly Giff

Hollis Woods, the main character, is a problem-child orphan who basically spends most of her life shipped around from foster home to foster home. The only family she’s ever really pictured herself staying in is Steven’s, in a perfect house by a river, under a mountain. During her brief stay at Steven’s house, she and Steven get into an accident, and as problems worsen she runs away from them. Later, she gets sent to a foster home with a woman named Josie Cahill, an artist. Josie is beautiful and wonderful and has a great cat, but she’s slowly forgetting things, to the point where it might be dangerous for her to live alone, and nobody notices this problem but Hollis, who begins to love her. When the agency comes to take Hollis away and to possibly put Josie in a home, Hollis runs them both away to Steven’s summer home in the mountains, the only place she knows to be safe, where she eventually finds that being a part of a family is not impossible.

Hollis is one of the funniest and most relatable characters I’ve ever read because she’s really stubborn and doesn’t say much. I know every teen book ever is about some quiet kid who has a huge attitude in their head, and it gets really cliché after a while, but what I really like about Hollis is that she doesn’t overthink things or constantly spew her feelings about everything all over the place. She just does it. And that was perfect for me.

What I loved most about this book was the way the story was told. First of all, Patricia Reilly Giff is a wonderful writer, and the details she includes are perfect. But also the story is told with every other chapter in the past timeline, alternating with the present. So you get to see both stories unfold, and they were really well-timed so that as one falls into tragedy the other heals the wounds.

I would actually just recommend this in general to anyone as a really great book, but especially to teens, just because Hollis is a teenager herself.

Review by Jasper

Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

I just read the first two volumes of Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba and I am EXCITED! It’s been awhile since a book has caught me so fully and I’m ready to blaze through the whole series of 13 volumes! Here’s what we know so far:

Light Yagami is a smart, handsome, & clever academic king who is boooored.

Enter Shinigami death god Ryuk who is so bored (note: the first volume is fittingly called Boredom) with his job of killing people with his Death Note, that he’s ready to drop it in the human world to see what they might do with it. What’s a Death Note? It’s a book where any person whose name is written in it DIES according to the wish of the writer. Ryuk’s Death Note gets picked up by our hero (or anti-hero?) Light, who figures out the purpose of the book in no time flat. Who does he decide to kill? A mean teacher? A bully at school? A rival? Nope. He decides to kill criminals. Light wants to rid the world of evil by killing off everyone who is evil. Sounds great! No harm, no foul—sounds like a kind of superhero to me.

Enter L. “L” is the un-named, un-faced, world-famous detective renowned for being able to solve any crime and catch any criminal. But wait, who’s the criminal here? Isn’t Light the good guy catching criminals himself? Not in L’s opinion. L is ready to take down Light and his vigilante justice, and figure out what force is making Light the unstoppable judge, jury, and prosecutor he is without having to touch a single victim.

The cat and mouse mystery begins! Who is L? Where is Light? Who will catch whom, and what will be the price? This story gets so good so fast. I was totally captivated by the ever ingenious ways Light and L moved to outwit each other. This story has one-up after one-up and each time it just gets more suspenseful and tense. Who IS the greater brain between the two, and more importantly, who will win? I loved it.

Death Note is a slightly older series (2006), but if you haven’t read it yet (like me), it’s gonna be like opening a brand new caffeine-filled surprise of a book that will keep you on your toes, watching a battle of wits to the death between seriously smart characters. (Heads up: anime and video games involving these characters exist as well—look out for ‘em and enjoy!)

Review by Gigi, CLP-Brookline

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

The daughter of smoke and bone, Karou, lives in a world hidden within our own. While her world is full of magic, wishes, angels, demons and war, it’s plain secrecy and cautiousness that keeps her world a secret from us. Karou was raised as a human by Brimstone, a feared wishmonger, in his magic shop. The wishmonger’s shop is accessible from our world through a series of doors scattered throughout the world. When one of us opens the door, it may lead to an abandoned basement in Prague, an apartment in Paris, or a shop in Marrakesh. But when the door is opened from the inside, it leads straight to Brimstone in his magic shop.

Karou, whose hair grows out of her head blue, by the way, is an art student in Prague. Her job, if you can call it that, is collecting teeth for Brimstone. While Brimstone has never told Karou what he does with the teeth, he pays her in wishes – small wishes, and a lot of them. When Karou is travelling between cities and Brimstone’s shop collecting and delivering teeth she notices that some of the doors to the shop are being marked with a black handprint seared into the doors. This mark is the warning of the angels that the ongoing war is coming to Brimstone and the demon world. Karou is ready to protect her family when a complication arises – she falls in love with an angel.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a rich and lyrically written book that confuses what is “good” and “evil,” taking and remolding the best of Romeo and Juliet, fantasy, and beautiful prose. This book blew me away and I can’t wait to read the sequel!

Review by Annica, CLP-West End

Work What You Got by Stephanie Moore

Sororities have always had a major role in the collegiate experience. The Deltas just celebrated 100 years of existence from the time they first appeared on the campus of Howard University. The AKA’s and Zetas will soon celebrate their centennials as well.

Beta Gamma Pi is a fictitious sorority that College Sophomore Hayden Grant wants to join. Her three roommates have differing opinions on sorority life. Myra will only pledge the sorority with the reputation for throwing the best parties. Bridget is thinking about pledging, but the Beta Pi’s are too bourgeois for her to ever want to be a part of. Her last roommate, Chandra, is only interested in her school work. She simply does not see the benefits of sisterhood; Me Phi Me all the way.

Hayden’s mother is a member of the coveted sorority. Her uncle is the president of the college she attends. Even with all these things in her favor, she still has to be invited to become a part of the sorority. “Work What You Got”, the debut novel in the Beta Gamma Pi Series by Stephanie Perry Moore, is must reading for ladies even curious about sorority life, friendship, betrayal and love. Moore’s story will test the bonds of true sisterhood.

Review by Andrea, CLP-Hill District

The Silence of Our Friends by Mark Long and Jim Demonakos

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies…but the silence of our friends.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Those words give me the chills every time. Mark Long, Jim Demonakos and Nate Powell team up to create a moving and realistic graphic novel based on those very words, titled The Silence of Our Friends. In the setting of a small Texas town during the civil rights era, readers will be introduced to two families, one white and one black. When covering a protest at the local college campus, Jack Long, a white television reporter, meets Larry Thompson, a black professor and activist. A friendship begins out of like-mindedness and understanding of how a person should be treated, regardless of their culture or race. Though Thompson is wary of Mr. Long’s intentions, he lets him into his confidence and they agree to have their families meet for dinner in the spirit of solidarity and friendship. That friendship almost comes to an end when the two men find themselves on opposite sides in a court case where five students are unfairly accused of manslaughter. Jack witnessed that the death of the police officer in the case was actually a result of ricocheting shots from other officers, and he looks for an opportunity to tell what he knows, though Thompson doubts his intentions and his boss pressures him (at the cost of his job) to leave it alone.

Based on the authors own father and experience growing up, this graphic novel paints an intimate and telling portrait of the human experience in the ‘60s by focusing on relationships and family dynamics. The story show regular conversations that were had at home, depicting what it must have felt like for the people involved, highlighting the risks they took on a daily basis just to live according to what they believed and knew was right. Reading this graphic novel was like watching history in action. The characters seem like people you know, and their responses seem as relatable as if it could have been you. The Silence of Our Friends de-abstracts the history of civil rights and makes it as present as the friendships you have now. The unfair inequality sustained in the United States was not just an issue for black people, but for every citizen. This book highlights this notion, showing that in situations of injustice, it is by friendship we must stand to overcome insidious actions.

Review by Gigi, CLP-Brookline