The Particular Sadness of Lemon cake

Goodreads summary

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.

*May Contain Spoilers*

The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden—her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s detachment, her brother’s clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.

  Rose is such an incredible and interesting  narrator. It was really interesting   seeing the different emotions   she  tasted and how she reacted  to them.  It was also interesting how  she managed  day after day with her talent and how different people reacted to her   gift. As the story progresses,  Rose  becomes more comfortable with her gift, she  also grows  to love food and tries to eat  food  that has just pure happiness in the food.

The other  characters  in the  story were wonderful too. I really  loved her  Dad and how persistent he was and how  much he used to love Rose's  mom. I also loved   Joseph and how detached   from the world  he was,  in a both literal and  figurative sense. I also really loved    George and how he instantly believed  in Rose, and I think they would have made a  great  couple.

 Rose's mom is such a complex character, she's broken inside, she doesn't know what to do with  her life. She loves Joseph so much and he's  clearly her  favorite  child but he doesn't  really care.  She loves Rose    too but  in a different way.   Her affair  helps  her be less  broken and  helps her cope with Joseph's dissapearence. I honestly feel that she never  really truly  loved her husband and she just thought she did

 I really liked the writing style,  it  was  very raw and emotional and it was really not  what I was  expecting. The only thing that bugged me  was that there  was no  quotation marks but after awhile  I go used to it.

 overall I really  really enjoyed, it was  sad and beautiful  tale and I gave it a 4/5  stars on Goodreads

Me and Earl and the dying girl

  Me and Earl and the Dying  Girl By Jesse Andrews.

Summary from the  back of the book:

Me: My  name is Greg Gaines. I am seventeen. I am the one who wrote tis book. My physical appearace is  unsatisfactory, and there  is probably  a fungus eating my  brain. I’m not  eve sure I’m human

Earl:  Earl Jackson is the only person who is even sort of my  friend.We make mediocre  films together. Werner Herzog is our biggest influence.  Earl is generally filled with violent rage.

Dying girl:Duri my senior  year, my mom forced  me to become friends with a girl who had cancer. This brought about the  destruction of my entire  life.

 Greg Gaines  is  a really great protagonist. He’s  funny  and smart  but sometimes he’s a jerk.  The great thing is that he knows he’s a jerk sometimes and  says  really insentive  things and he calls himself  on it.

Earl is black and  he’s  a    stereotypical  black, which did annoy  me at some points,  like when he used the n word, or it was hard to understand what he was saying. At other times  he talked   normally which I preferred more.

 We really don’t get to know  much about Rachel, the girl with cancer expect for the fact that she likes  pillows and Hugh Jackson. That’s kind of the whole point, that Greg  really only  hung out with her  because she had cancer and    when  Greg was with Rachel, they talked about himself. I loved how honest Greg was and he said  a  bunch of times, that if Rachel  didn’t have cancer, he would have never become friends with her. Greg  really doesn’t like hanging out with her and it feels like more of a duty, and he feels obligated to make Rachel  laugh.  It is kind of   a jerky   thing to say and Greg knows that, he calls  himself a horrible human  being multiple  times. He feels horrible thinking about it but he can’t help it.

 The thing I loved the  most about this story, was  that it wasn’t  a typical cancer book. I find that cancer books,  are usually really deep and  the character learns  something through the experience of having cancer or knowing someone who has cancer, or   the  character with cancer  falls in love. Me and Earl and the Dying girl was nothing like that, Greg didn’t learn  anything from the experience  and he didn’t become a better  person or anything like that. This book was  more of a funny  book  that just happened to have a girl with cancer in it.

 I really  liked the  writing  style, I loved how some of it was in script format and  other parts was just normal writing. I  really liked Greg’s voice and I flew  through this book really quickly..

 I have seen some people compare  this book to The Fault in Our   Stars, and I really don’t see the resseblances.  Asides from the fact that   they’re both  cancer books, there is no other  similliarities.  So if  you have  read The Fault In our Stars and didn’t enjoy it, I  suggest   you read this book, there’s no pretentious  characters or love at first sight.

 So yeah overall really enjoyed it and gave it a 4 out  of 5  stars on Goodreads.

The Unbecoming of Mara dyer Review

 The Unbecoming of Mara dyer is about a girl who was in an accident where she was the only  survivor.  To get away from all the memories of her dead friends,   Mara and her  family move to Floridia, where they  try to start  a new life. Mara is suffering from PTSD and trying to remember   what  happened the night of the accident.   When she meets Noah   Shaw, a boy  who seems  to know  more about her than he should, she wants to learn more about him.

 The characters  in this story are really great,  I really want to be friends with some of them and some of them I want to kill. I really like  Mara because she's really funny and smart, although she  is quite an unreliable  narrator. I also really like her  two brothers, they're just so sweet and you can really tell that they love Mara. I just wish that  Mara could tell them what was going on in her life.  A character I felt kind of iffy about was Noah, at times I really  liked him but other  times he  was your  typical bad boy, who doesn't care about anything. I really like, how as the story progresses we get to know about him and  why  he is the way he is.

   This book was really creepy and when I  mean creepy I mean creepy.  You never knew what was real and what was not and  some of Mara's hallucinations were really   scary. After  I finished this book, I felt  really different and anxious and I've never really  read a book that's made me feel this creeped  out .

I really enjoyed the descriptions  of the hallucinations and the writing style of the story. Although I did  feel that at times,  the dialogue was kind of forced. Michelle  Hodkins  wrote some really pretty  descriptions that I really enjoyed, but I felt sometimes it  felt out of place,  also I felt  like she was using way too many fancy words that weren't really needed because they slowed the story down.

 overall I really  enjoyed this book. Highly reccomend and  I  gave it  4/5 stars on Goodreads

Ask the passengers

Ask the Passengers Review

  Summary from goodreads:

Astrid Jones desperately wants to confide in someone, but her mother's pushiness and her father's lack of interest tell her they're the last people she can trust. Instead, Astrid spends hours lying on the backyard picnic table watching airplanes fly overhead. She doesn't know the passengers inside, but they're the only people who won't judge her when she asks them her most personal questions . . . like what it means that she's falling in love with a girl.

 Astrid is one of those characters that I would really    love to be friends with. She’s just so intelligent and such an interesting person. Her ideas are brilliant and she tries to share them with her family and her friends but they don’t really care. I personally think that her friends don’t really deserve her friendship, and it would have been nice if she had made friends with the guy in her Humanities class, Clay.  I think towards the end of the novel, her friends    take more of an interest in her and listened to what she had to say, which was nice.

The other characters were really interesting   every time   Astrid talked with her mom, I wanted to go into the book and kill the mom because she was such a hypocrite. Even in the end, her mom wasn’t really accepting of her. Another  character I found really interesting was Astrid's  dad, because  you could tell that he was a good person, who liked  to  spend time with  Astrid and build  birdhouses, but to escape everything he smoked  pot and got stoned. So whatever he said to Astrid, she didn’t believe because he was stoned. I think that if we wasn’t stoned, he would be a really great   father.

  I found that some characters such as Christina and Astrid’s  girlfriend, Dee were kind of under-developed. For almost the entire book I really dislike  Dee, but   when Astrid came out, she became more agreeable. I didn’t really get   Astrid’s friendship with Christiana, it just felt kind of odd to me  and there wasn’t really  any explanation to how they became friends, and why  Christiana trusted  Astrid  so much to keep her secret.  It would have been nice, if we could have gotten to know her a little bit better.

  One thing that I really liked was Astrid’s humanities class and how fun it seemed! I   would totally take part in a class like that, if there was one at my school. One thing  I found   really funny was how  Astrid took  Socrates and gave him  a first name so he could be more relatable and how he helped her  get through certain things. The Socrates Project towards the end of the book sounded so fun. I loved into it, Astrid was. You can really tell that philosophy   became the one thing she   was really into, and I could totally picture her teaching it or something like that.

One thing that made this book really special was how A.S King incorporated magical realism into the story. When Astrid sends her love to the airplanes, the people in the airplanes receive it. The author shows us how a couple of the passengers receive it and how it affects   them. I especially love the last person she sends love to because the passenger needs her love to be safe so she sends her love down so someone can keep it safe for her.  If it wasn’t for the magical realism, the book wouldn’t be as special.

 Overall I really   loved this book, and I gave it a 4/5 stars on Goodreads

           

Room Book Review

    5 year old, Jack has lived his entire life in Room and   it's the only place he knows.  Jack loves Room but to his Ma, it's a prison where she has been held captive for   7 years . Ma tries her best to create a loving life for Jack it   this small confining environment but it's not enough for her.  When she comes up with a plan to escape that relies on Jack, she doesn't realize how unprepared her and Jack are for the real world.

 The thing I really loved   about this book was that it was told from a perspective of a 5 year old boy who doesn't know anything about the   real world. He think everything he sees on the T.V is made up and that outside of Room there is just space.  It's really interesting, how    he accepts that there  actually is a world outside of Room and it's not that bad. It's also interesting to see how Jack interacts with people from the outside world after only being his mom for his whole life.

 Another thing I find interesting, is how people react to what happened to Jack and his mom, how some people give them gifts and send them money, while others send them pieces of feces. I really liked when Jack's   mom, told the  talk show host off  for asking    stupid  questions.

 This book was at times funny but for the   most part it was very serious and raw and it really makes you think about what it would be like to live  like that.  I don't  think I've ever  read a  novel that is told  in the perspective of a child  but the book is  an adult novel and the narration really  makes the book special

 Overall, I really enjoyed this book   and I gave it a  4/5 stars on Goodreads

Cardturner book review

 Cardturner Book Review

  Alton Richards,  a 17  year old   junior has been taught his   whole life that Uncle  Lester is his  favorite uncle  despite  only having  met the  man once. His uncle is   blind and nearing his  death and when he asks Alton to be his cardturner for bridge, Alton is forced  to  go and is told   “ not to screw it up.” Despite  not knowing a thing about bridge, he starts to learn the rules of   bridge and he grows fonder of  his uncle.

 Alton’s  job as a cardturner  is to tell his uncle the cards  he has  and to do whatever his uncle says. His uncle treats   him as  an idiot who   doesn’t understand  anything about Bridge. Despite  that,  Uncle Lester starts to have conversations with him about his life, his theories and occasionally bridge. Through these conversations, we learn that   Uncle Lester is not that bad. The thing I liked   about Uncle Lester  was that  he was harsh  but when he gave  someone a compliment, even if it was just a “well played.”,  that compliment was important.

 Alton  Richards  is    a very  witty character and despite what  his uncle thinks, he’s also pretty smart. Before, he went to  bridge, Alton  surrounded  himself with negative people such as his ex-girlfriend, Kate and his best-friend Cliff. That all changes when  he  goes to bridge and   he meets some very  interesting people who are older than him and a very interesting girl who is the same  age as him; Toni. I think all these  people shape  Alton  so that he becomes a better  person.

  I really liked the   different back-stories of the characters and I  found it really   funny, how Alton’s  family was obsessed with Uncle Lester’s  money. I  also really love how Louis Sachar incorporated a little bit of   of a supernatural  element  towards the end of the book.

 I did  find the parts about  bridge   dragged on but I did learn a  little bit about  bridge. I think  it was smart to put  a little warning  everytime Alton tried to explain Bridge and then a little  summary box at the end of the explaination. Cardturner   is one of those books, that I feel  Louis Sachar for himself and he just happened to share it with everyone else in case someone else wanted to read it.

 Overall I really enjoyed  it and have it a 4/5 stars on Goodreads