Silver

Before I begin with the craziness of this new review, I would like to thank an author friend for promoting my blog on her Facebook page. Because of my review on Weedflower and now this, I feel more motivated to write reviews and keep it coming all throughout the summer because hopefully people will see my passion for books and that I'm not doing it all for nothing.
This book was my diving back into the realm of science fiction and enjoying what I used to read a whole crazy lot of. It kept reminding me of the small parts that I saw of this show called High School of the Dead where these students get attacked by zombies and they have to fend for themselves against the undead while being restricted to their school. But then again, that was a really weird show with a lot of convenient things going on. In short it was cheesy, but the main idea is the same.

The cover-

At Paul's school, everything is normal. It's a normal academy filled with normal boys and girls. But when a mysterious silver beetle is found and it bites a kid, a dangerous infection spreads through the school and turns students into cyborgs. Their only intent is to kill and turn the refugees into infected humans.
A lockdown is put into place, but the cyborgs keep adapting to every wall they put up and tear through boarded up windows and closed doors. Their only weakness is bright light which paralyzes them and makes them stop moving for a few minutes before they continue their advance.
Paul and some of the other kids at the academy are the only ones left, surviving off of luck and determination that they will make it through the weekend and escape the school once the faculty comes back. There's only one problem. Can the others accept one another and throw away the past to secure that they will be able to live until the next day?

My thoughts-

This book really needed an ending. Like a good, satisfying ending. I was talking with one of my friends who has also read this book and she also agreed with me that the book needed a solid ending. But then again, the idea was such that the kids escaped the school and that was the end. I feel that the power of the infection should have been brought down a little bit so that there was actually a hope of fighting the infection and taking back the human race. The way the book ends, the escaped students are in a helicopter and that's it.
I think this is a hard idea to write a sequel about. I mean, how could this idea end and have a satisfying sequel? The cyborgs take over the world and the last surviving humans are forced to live underground? I wouldn't like that for a book, because where's the fun in that? If the cyborgs keep adapting the way they are, they will eventually find the humans living underground and possibly destroy them all too. And then all of humanity will be gone, so there's no more fun left.
I have to point out the way this book didn't really have a super complex story and stuck to the point the majority of the time. There are some books that I don't like because they tend to stray off into random directions and I can't seem to like that. I liked the simplistic concept and how it was developed throughout the course of the whole story. It was good to change up a little bit from the making my brain hurt because the story is so complex and it has like ten more books in the series to come to something that was like a one time pleasing. I'll read it once, think about it for a few days and then forget all about it until my review.
Even though I said so much about it, this book was pretty good. Not one of the best science fiction books I've ever read, but actually pretty decent.

((Onwards to my next review! It's a historical fiction book about problems we hear about every day. The fighting going on in the Middle East and how everything there is in absolute chaos.))

Weedflower

Summer has begun and I have nothing to do! This is one of the many books from my backlist that I need to review. I will make sure to make time to do all of them and get in at least a good twenty more posts to hopefully reach my goal of 60 posts when school starts.
This is a historical fiction book about the Japanese internment camps in World War II. There was mass hysteria following the attacks on Pearl Harbor, so all of the Japanese immigrants and even second generation Japanese in California were rounded up into large internment camps so that the Americans could make sure there were no spies among them. Many hundreds of thousands were put in those camps, but no one was convicted.
This is the tale of a young, innocent girl caught in a time of hysteria without even knowing what was going on around her.

The cover-

Sumiko loves her life on her family's carnation farm. It's the one place she loves more than anywhere else and wishes she could stay there forever, picking carnations to sell in the market. That is, until her family is sent to an internment camp where it will be made sure that they are not spies gathering information for the Japanese military.

At the internment camp, Sumiko has many new experiences, including horrible weather and conditions, not finding enough food to eat and having to find out what to do in the long hours that they wait as they lay captive in the Arizona camp. The experience of her life is the Native American boy Frank who comes to visit her and constantly complains that the camp was built on his tribe's land.

Throughout the months that she lives through the torture, Sumiko realizes what the real situation is all around her and that in times of hardship, it is always best to forget the bad and cherish the good. You may never know when you'll see it again.

My thoughts-

The way that I would sum it up is that Sumiko is an innocent girl caught in the middle of a crisis she did not want to be a part of. She's just an innocent girl caught in the crosshairs of a panicked country. The way her personality goes, she would have enjoyed living her life with her aunt and uncle on their carnation farm for the rest of her life with Takao, Bull, Ichiro and the rest of her family. 

I found it interesting that she was able to manage herself so well even when she had almost nothing. Sumiko found an envelope of seeds and brought them with her to possibly grow if she could find a place cool enough to ensure that they survive. Within a few weeks of going there, she found a man who liked gardening as much as she did at their camp and helped him start a vegetable garden where she also began to plant her special "Sumiko Strain" of stock from the envelope.

My thoughts on her character is that Sumiko is an extremely optimistic girl who likes to keep herself busy, whether playing with friends or tending to her plants. She is also extremely versatile like the plants she grows in the way that she pushed her homesickness to the back of her head and tried to enjoy as much as she could knowing that she was going to be stuck in the internment camp for who knew how long.

I think that a person like Sumiko is how we should all strive to be. She always knows what is right and wants what is best for herself and the ones she loves. Sumiko is also able to adjust to new places and make the best out of them. I think even in her time of hardship, she was able to make the most out of everything around her, knowing that she wasn't really wanted anywhere because of her heritage. I think that it would do all of us good to be like Sumiko a little bit. She is the kind of strong girl I know I would want to be. Just like the carnations she cultivates.

((I have new books to review! I hope to update soon now that the summer has begun and there is no more school! I will catch up on reviews too! Happy Reading!))

Inferno

I have absolutely fallen in love with Dan Brown's style of writing. He tells so many details about a very short time frame that makes you think the story took much longer. Inferno is a story that spans about a day, but it takes so long to explain all of the details needed to get the full meaning out of the text. The plot is so complicated it's often suffocating at times, but you'll love it all the same. I think this is just because I'm barely delving into the realm of adult historical fiction. As I mentioned before, I am very new to this concept of reading adult books and I avoided them because I know how crazy they can get.
After reading Da Vinci Code, I felt that I needed more of this type of writing. I found that I like this style of questioning popular belief and writing a fictional story around it.

The cover-

Our returning hero Robert Langdon has woken up in a Florence hospital with no memory of how he got there and of what he did within the last few days. All he knows is that he has retrograde amnesia and that he suffered a bullet wound to the head. He even has stitches to prove it.
When a woman with spiked hair comes to the hospital and murders one of the doctors, Langdon is rushed out by a woman named Sienna Brooks who says she wants to help him.
This Sienna is not an average doctor. She is a young medical prodigy with an exceptionally high IQ. She was known to have a sort of tumor in her brain, but not the extensive multiplying of unwanted cells, but a multiplying of helpful cells that allowed her intellectual capability to be more than that of the average human.
Though everything is not what it seems when Brooks and Langdon find themselves in a race to stop the most dangerous pathogen known to man from spreading around the world. They find that their allies are no longer their friends and their enemies are not who they think they are as the duo try to find the meaning behind a Dante-fanatic scientist's clues and modified paintings into a world they wish they could never see.

My thoughts-

Once again it was very beautifully written. Each twist and turn was so beautifully calculated that it didn't seem like a desperate author trying to end their book. The story flowed very well and throughout the whole book, the story never strayed off track and kept moving with the same kind of energy throughout.
Honestly, I'm going to talk about he biggest spoiler in this book, so please shut this tab and read the book if you don't want to know. You all should know by now that I have a tendency to talk about huge spoilers. Zobrist's "plague" wasn't really a plague in the end. It was a genetic mutation that would render one third of the population sterile. It's actually a pretty good idea that won't harm the current population in way that spreading an almighty virus would and will never be able to kill off the whole population. It will just reduce it to a fairly manageable number so that the population can be kept in check.
Once I read that part, I was wondering about the morality of this idea. Genetic mutations, no matter how simple, can be disastrous if not constructed properly. In fact Sienna makes a very good analogy to a house of cards which I like a lot. She says that the human genome is like a house of cards. One card placed wrong or taken out and the whole thing will fall down. She's not wrong. I feel that if there is some kind of proof that this actually works, then the whole morality thing would die down. It was never detailed if he tested it on animals or not. How does Zobrist know that this is going to work?
Come to think about that, he is correct about the fact that the next step in evolution for humans is us to take control of the way we evolve. We are technically a little bit in control of how we are evolving. Our habits are influencing (a little) the selection process of what traits we need and what traits can be replaced with something new. Who knows... I get this feeling that one day humans will have giant thumbs and our smallest fingers will be gone and our feet will become purely flat. That is my guess by looking at the lifestyle of the human today.
Now I'm just going to go off on a completely different tangent about how confusing the last quarter of this book was. Honestly, the whole thing with Sienna actually betraying Langdon because she is Zobrist's lover and watched him jump off a building was like being hit in the head by a curveball. And then there's the whole thing about how Langdon actually does not have amnesia and was given a drug that is normally given to people who witness traumatic events so he could forget what he did in Florence. It was definitely not at all a nice feeling to realize that everything that the book has put out there so far is actually inside out and backwards. Way to throw something weird at the reader. Though I had no problem with that. Once I got all the allies and enemies straight, then I was good to read the rest. In fact I stopped reading Inferno around that point and let it go for a few days just so I could get everything straight. And when I did, I understood enough to enjoy the end. I recommend leaving the book for a few days and just processing it before you rush into the end of the story.
Otherwise, this was a very thought provoking book that I find quite interesting in the way of predicting the end of the human race. And yes, unless we stand up to it, the human race is killing itself. (In fact, recently I watched the new movie Tomorrowland and I recommend watching that after reading this book. I could find a lot of similarities between both the movie and the book, even though they focus on two completely different theories of the end of the human race.)

((So, I wanted to continue reading more Dan Brown books, but currently my mother is hogging up The Lost Symbol, so I won't be able to read it for a while. And please do expect reviews to be coming in like lightning because I went to a book fair about a month ago and bought a bunch of books that I think are worth reviewing. I need to make up for the fact that I did not review anything during the month of May and my goal was to double the amount of reviews on this blog by December. So far it's June and I'm not even there yet. Anyways, this was a long, rambling Author's note, so please excuse me. Happy Reading my friends!))