Off The Shelf

The Nightingale Kristin Hannah 440 pages "Perhaps that's why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present." In Carriveau, France in 1939, Vianne Mauriac must say goodbye to her husband when he is called to the Front. Soon after he leaves, the Nazis march into the village and she must quarter one in her home. As food supplies and hope dwindles, Vianne tries to stay spirited for her daughter, but when she is forced to make one hard choice after another, her true resilience is put to the test. Vianne's sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl who has been kicked out of boarding school more times than she can count. When the Germans occupy Paris, she joins the Resistance, delivering notes by bicycle until she realizes she was meant for something greater.  I again apologize for my long absence. Preparing for AP tests has consumed most of my life for the past few weeks. Yesterday and today were the ...

All the Light We Cannot See Anthony Doerr 530 pages "Could they hide here until the war ends? Until the armies finish marching back and forth above their heads, until all they have to do is push open the door and shift some stones aside and the house has become a ruin beside the sea? Until he can hold her fingers in his palms and lead her out into the sunshine? He would walk anywhere to make it happen, bear anything; in a year or three years or ten, France and Germany would not mean what they meant now."    -page 473 France 1944. A sightless sixteen-year-old girl named Marie-Laure LeBlanc is curled up beneath her bed, listening as the Americans shower bombs over her beloved ocean, her town, her house.  The roar of explosives is deafening in her ears, her body shakes. Down the street, an eighteen-year old German private named Werner Pfennig sits in a hotel cellar, one hand on his rife, the other on the radio transceiver he invented. He thinks of his younger siste...

The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien 233 pages “Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”    (page 36) In Vietnam, Tim O'Brien and the other members of Alpha Company carried dog tags, two or three canteens of water, and love letters. They carried pocket knives and canned peaches. Plastic ponchos and comic books. An M-60 machine gun and an illustrated New Testament. Grenades and M&Ms. They carried fear, they carried each other. They carried what they could bear, and then some - including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried  (page 7).   The Things They Carried is a fictional story based on O'Brien's experiences during the Vietnam War. The novel is broken into short story-like chapters, with titles ...

Life After Life Kate Atkinson 544 pages "Ursula found it very odd to think that up above there were bombers being flown by men...They weren't evil, they were just doing what had been asked of them by their country. It was war itself that was evil, not men.     -page 411 Ursula Todd is born on a cold and snowy night in 1910. She dies before she can take her first breath. No sooner does she die, that she is born again, on the same cold and snowy night, in the same English country home. Ursula continues to die, in various ways and at varies ages throughout her life, but just as soon as darkness falls over her, Ursula is reborn, allowing her to live an infinite number of lives. As the 20th century barrels towards it's second cataclysmic world war, Ursula's seemingly unusual lifestyle may give her the power to save the world from its destructive destiny. Kate Atkinson's Life After Life deals with the delicate idea of choices, and it argues that even the...

The Paris Wife Paula McLain 314 pages "We were all on the verge now, bursting with youth and promise and little trills of jazz...Girls everywhere stepped out of their corsets and shortened their dresses and darkened their lips and eyes...Youth, in 1921, was everything."   -page 40 Hadley Richardson expected her trip to Chicago to be simple - as she was a simple girl with simple wishes. What she did not expect however, was to fall madly in love with Ernest Hemingway. After a speedy courtship and wedding, the newlyweds set sail for Paris, where the Jazz Age has already swept what becomes known as the "Lost Generation" right up into its chaos. Once there, Ernest throws himself into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises  while Hadley struggles to balance the roles of friend, wife, and muse. All too soon, a deception more complicated  than either of them could have imagined, blows the marriage they had built on loyalty and love, to pieces. My rea...

Wave Sonali Deraniyagala 273 pages Wave is the story of Sonali Deraniyagala, who was vacationing with her family in Sri Lanka during Christmas week of 2004. On December 26th, a devastating tsunami and earthquake occurred in the Indian Ocean and her hotel in Yala was consumed by waves. Deraniyagala lost her parents, husband, and sons to the tsunami, and Wave is her incomprehensible story of recovery. For independent reading in English, we had to choose a memoir to read on our own. I came across several titles that took my interest - Half Broken Horses, Eat Pray Love, and A House in the Sky. Honestly, I choose Wave because it was the only one available at my local bookstore. Looking back now, I guess you could say it was some sort of sign, that this was the only book in-stock, as if the store was shouting: "This is the book you MUST choose." Wave is relatively short by normal memoir standards, but a lot is packed into so few pages. Deraniyagala covers the...

Eleanor and Park Rainbow Rowell 328 pages “You can be Han Solo," he said, "And I'll be Boba Fett. I'll cross the sky for you.”    It's 1986 in Omaha, Nebraska and Eleanor meets Park in the most un-romantic place ever. The school bus. They instantly bond over their shared love of rock music, comic books, and disdain for the conventional. And just when they think they know each other inside and out, Eleanor's past comes shooting into the present, with enough force to blow them apart. As the winner of the 2014 Printz Honor and the 2013 Goodreads Choice Award for Young Adult Fiction, Eleanor and Park has quickly become one of the most popular YA novels of the past year. Told in a dual perspective, Eleanor and Park is a sweet and comforting read - one that is different than most other love stories. Rowell creates main characters that are very unlike others found in YA novels. Eleanor is a curly red-haired girl who dresses in oversized sweater...

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald Therese Anne Fowler 375 pages "Lord help me, I miss him. I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we're ruined, who thinks Scott's beyond washed-up and I'm about as sharp these days as a sack of wet mice, Look closer. Look closer and you'll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed." -page 5 When Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is young and beautiful at seventeen years old and he is a dashing army lieutenant. Scott immediately falls in love with her independence and liking for reckless behavior. He promises his writing will bring him fame, and it does, when This Side of Paradise is published in 1920 and earns raving popularity. Zelda, falling in love with his charisma and intelligence, quickly boards a train to New York City where they are married at St. Patrick's Cathedral. The years following are full of lav...

Allegiant  Veronica Roth 526 pages   “There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater."  - page 509 It is very, very hard to write about this book without giving away spoilers from Divergent  and Insurgent, but I will try my best. Please stay away if you have not read the aforementioned titles...   The faction-based society of Chicago that Tris Prior and Tobias Eaton had once called home is now completely shattered. War, unjust power, and betrayal has interrupted their world indefinitely. When they are given the chance to escape the city and go beyond the fence, there is no way they can refuse. What they find there is not at all the quiet, safe, life together they had imagined. Tris and Tobias are sudd...

Divergent Veronica Roth 487 pages “We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.”    In a futuristic, dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions, each valuing a different human characteristic: Dauntless (the brave), Candor (the honest), Erudite (the intelligent), Amity (the peaceful), and Abnegation (the selfless). Upon turning sixteen years old, each teenager must choose the faction to which they belong. For Beatrice Prior, this will mean choosing between her family and the chance to discover who she really is. Tris Prior (as she later renames herself) is a dynamic female character who possess all of the stereotypical characteristics of a weak individual - blonde, petite and pale-skinned - but as readers will come to learn, she is quite the opposite. Her strength not only increases from the physical initiation she must under go in the faction she chooses, but also from the emotional encounters that...

Life: An Exploded Diagram Mal Peet 385 pages At this point I need to take you on a short detour. I'm very much a cause-and-effect sort of a fellow. I'm fascinated by the way things fit together (and come to pieces). And if we were to take what eventually happened to Frankie and me and drew something like a flowchart of how it came about, one of its arrows would lead us into the darkness of a Caribbean night. Clem Ackroyd, the son of a war veteran and a careful bookkeeper, is a working-class boy hoping to one day scrape together the funds to go to art school. Frankie Mortimer is the daughter of a wealthy land owner, living in an inherited estate. Soon, in Norfolk, England, the two will embark on a relationship that must be kept a secret, and if found out, their world could be blown apart. Little do they know, that John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khruschev are about to do just that, as the event later known in history books as the Cuban Missile Crisis begins to unfold. Life: A...

The Future of Us Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler 356 pages Josh and Emma have been best friends and neighbors for as long as they can remember. When Josh's family receives an American Online CD-ROM in the mail, his parents have him bring it over to Emma's so she can install it on her new computer. Upon installing the program, Josh and Emma are automatically logged onto Facebook. But there is only one issue...The year is 1996, and Facebook hasn't even been invented yet. The two friends find themselves looking at their profiles fifteen years in the future - their spouses, careers, homes - it's all there. These unexpected discoveries will force Josh and Emma to re-evaluate what they are doing right, and wrong, in the present. The Future of Us was an incredibly creative story: the plot premise is certainly out-of-the-box and is relevant to today's teens. Emma, Josh and their friends were readable characters, and each of their quirky characteristics brought them to ...

Pivot Point Kasie West 343 pages As a Searcher, Addison Coleman has a unique power. When faced with a choice, she has the ability to look into the future and see both outcomes. The power is supposed to prevent disaster, but when Addie's parents tell her of their planned divorce, she will have to make her toughest decision yet. In alternating chapters, Addie will experience six weeks living with her mother, and six with her father. Both futures promise both love and loss, and for Addie it will come down to which fate she is willing to live through, and who she can't live without. A cross between Paranormal and reality, West has created the most unique novel I have read in a long time. With strong characters, and engaging plot, it was undoubtedly an understandable read. The very beginning was a little confusing, as the reader must adjust to the fictional idea of humans having mind powers must stronger than our own. But, by the end, I found myself re-reading the entire la...

Dear John Nicholas Sparks 335 pages Dear John, There's so much I want to say to you, but I'm not sure where to begin... John Tyree was a lost, rebellious teenager during his high school years, and upon graduation, he enlisted in the army. Soon after basic training, he was stationed overseas in Germany and thought he had finally found the place where he fit in. But in the summer, back home in Wilmington, North Carolina on leave, John meets Savannah. The two fall in love in two short weeks, but are forced to separate when John must return overseas. Over the course of several years, John and Savannah write dozens of letters back and forth, only seeing each other occasionally, and their love is put to the ultimate test. But no one can foresee that 9/11 is about to change the world, along with John and Savannah's relationship forever. Nicholas Sparks ( Safe Haven, A Walk to Remember, The Notebook, The Last Song ) must have something against happy endings. After now r...

Just One Day Gayle Forman 368 pages "We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.”   Allyson Healey has just graduated from high school, and is now embarking on a post-grad tour of Europe with her best friend. At an underground performance of Twelfth  Night in London, she meets Willem De Ruiter, a young and charming Dutch actor. Allyson immediately detects a spark between them, and after spending just one day together, she is surprised to wake up the next morning in Paris, without Willem. Over the next year, Allyson will start college with her mind still lost somewhere in Europe and soon she begins a journey to find Willem. With the help of Shakespeare, friendship, and self-confidence, Allyson discovers more about herself along the way than she ever thought possible. Gayle Forman, the bestselling author of  If I Stay  and  Where She Went  has created yet...

Night Elie Wiesel 115 pages {Thin Yet Thick reads might be short in page length - 200 pages or less - but are thick and deep in meaning.} In his memoir, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, Elie Wiesel describes his terrifying experiences in the concentration camps of World War II. Born in Sighet, Transylvania (present-day Hungary) Wiesel was taken along with his family in 1944 to Auschwitz, and then later on to Buchenwald with his father. As a teenager, Wiesel's faith was put to the ultimate test as he witnessed and suffered from the in-humane experiences which must never be allowed to happen again. Wiesel's writing style throughout the book is very consistent, and purposeful. Maybe it is part of the translation, but his sentences are simple and short, giving the voice of the story a sharp and impactful feeling. This writing style also leaves the reader feeling as if they have been told everything. Night is raw and real, unabashed and unabridged. It shows ...

The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 180 pages I don't feel I have the credibility to really write a review of the novel, therefore I would like to use the opportunity of this 100th post to discuss what is said to be the greatest American novel of all time: The Great Gatsby . The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.   - page 68 New York, 1922. The Jazz Age is in full swing, and with World War I at a close, the American people are restless, alive with post-war excitement and opportunity. Nick Carraway has just moved to Long Island looking to get started in the "bond business", and winds up buying a home next door to the grand and mysterious Jay Gatsby. After being invited to one of his neighbor's lavish parties, Nick soon learns of Gatsby's secrets, and the love he is desperately trying to find again. The following are some of my favorite p...

Between Shades of Gray Ruta Sepetys 338 pages It is 1941 and World War II is tearing through Europe, but the horrific events taking place in the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are unknown to the rest of the world. Fifteen-year-old Lina Vilkas is winding down the school year, and spending her free-time lost in colored pencils and paint, when a knock on her front door changes her life forever. She and her family are taken from their home in Lithuania by the Soviet secret police and are thrown into cattle cars bound for northern Siberia. Along the way, Lina embeds clues into her drawings hoping if they are passed along, they might reach her father, and bring him back to them. In this moving story, Lina will spend the next twelve years fighting for her life as well as others' in the prison camps the world never knew about. The horrific events that occurred between 1941 and 1954 under the rule of Josef Stalin was a part of history I had never heard of before readi...

To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 376 pages I few years ago, I read Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time. Looking back now, I can say that I was too young to fully understand this timeless novel. At that time, I was baffled by words like cynical , amiable , and chiffarobe - words that were key to the story and its meaning. Now, four years later, this book has been given much more meaning for me. And I'd like to share that with you. Introduction To Kill a Mockingbird tells the unforgettable story of a sleepy southern town, in the years post  - Great Depression. It tackles the common issues of growing up, and doing what is right, although that action may not be the easiest. Atticus Finch, and his children see the effects that hatred and bias have on their town first-hand, and through the eyes of young Scout, the reader will experience it too. Characters My favorite character from To Kill a Mockingbird is most certainly Miss Maudie Atkinson, the wido...

Safe Haven  Nicholas Sparks   340 pages “I've come to believe that in everyone's life, there's one undeniable moment of change, a set of circumstances that suddenly alters everything.”   After traveling from place to plate for several months, Katie Feldman has finally settled down in Southport, North Carolina, the classic small town where everyone knows everything about everybody. But Katie has a secret, something she has worked to keep hidden since she left Boston. Just when she thinks Southport is not the place for her, Katie meets Alex - a kind, widowed store owner with two young children. As Katie struggles with her private knowledge, and her feelings for Alex, she comes to discover that love is the only true safe haven. This was my fourth read by Nicholas Sparks ( A Walk to Remember, The Notebook, The Last Song  ), and out of all four, this is the only one threw which I did not cry. Sparks is known for his emotional endings, but in ...