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!))

I Am The Messenger

Looks like I get to write another review before the spring break ends! Honestly, now I feel like I did something over the break.

This is another book by Markus Zusak, the author of Book Thief. (Which if you haven't read by now, you should check out because I strongly recommend it. The review is under the July 2014 section of my blog) It's been increasingly popular among people in my school and a friend of mine who reads a lot recently told me to read it. I guess I took her word for it and this is where I ended up.

The cover-

Ed Kennedy is a mediocre guy with a pretty mediocre life. He works as a taxi cab driver by day and plays cards with his friends Audrey, Ritchie and Marv by night. Only when he is caught up with a bank robbery and threatened with a gun does his life suddenly change.

After restraining a bank robber and getting the police, Ed starts to find Aces from a deck of cards in his mailbox. They each have different things written on them. Addresses at first. The addresses and names of people in unfortunate situations who very desperately need a hero.

With each card, Ed finds that he can love himself a bit more and embrace the life that he's got, knowing that he's been doing only good things for people. Each new card makes Ed rethink the relationships he has with the people around him and wonder how he can deepen them.

First with his mother and how she always hated him for being like his no-good-always-drunk father. Not in the way that he's going to end up like an alcoholic, but in the way that they were both pretty mediocre and tried to get out of it. Ed's father ended up with an alcohol addiction and Ed isn't really going anywhere. It really seems like he's going nowhere only because his younger brother is on his way to becoming a lawyer and is finishing up his degree in university when Ed barely graduated high school. Obviously his mother is more proud of his brother than him.

Throughout the book, Ed learns that he shouldn't be happy with his mediocrity and should try to get past it to make his mark on the people he cares about.

My thoughts-

The book was so interesting that I read it all in two nights. Well, I stayed up pretty late on both nights, but it was completely worth it. When I got to one page, I had to see the next because Ed's character was developed so realistically that he seemed like a real live person and that I could care about him. The experiences he has can also be related to. The relationship he has with his younger brother Tommy is pretty close to the relationship I have with my brother. Basically, whatever Ed does, Tommy can do much better. My brother is also younger than me and whatever I do, he can always do it and impress people. It makes me also very angry sometimes that even though I am the older one, he can do a lot of things better than me and show that he's really smart or strong or whatever.

This also plays into his relationship with his mother who favors Tommy a lot more than Ed. She finds Ed as a really lazy kid when Tommy is actually "making something of himself". No, actually Ed isn't lazy. It's just in his nature that he won't do that. And whenever he does things for his mother, she never acknowledges him even though it is him who did it and she didn't have to drag Tommy from his high university. Only when he finds out that she despises him for being like their father does their relationship show signs of hope.Yeah sure. And she doesn't hate her older daughter who got pregnant at seventeen years of age? I'd surely hate my kid for that.

The one backstory out of all of Ed's friends that I found the most touching was Marv's. He had got himself a girlfriend a long time ago and at one point, he had gotten her pregnant. When her very conservative father found out, he suddenly packed up their bags and moved his daughter far away from the city, vowing that she would never see Marv again. So Ed finds where Marv's girlfriend is now living and he pushes Marv to stand up to her father and say that he is taking full responsibility for the child. The father reacts badly and beats Marv, breaking his nose and bloodying his face. When Ed stands up on Marv's behalf, he gets the same reaction, but without the violence.

Some days later, Marv's girlfriend gets in Ed's taxi and asks him to pick up Marv so they can go somewhere together. They end up going to the city park where the child asks Marv to play with her. For once, Marv says he feels like a father. He feels like he didn't actually make the wrong choice and that he, Sharon and his daughter Melinda will all live together like a happy family one day.

All throughout, this book was filled with intense feeling. It was either happiness or crushing sadness or something in between, but at every moment in the book you could feel for the characters. Because a book like this could never become the "epitome of mediocrity". It standrs out amongst the other books I have read of the realistic fiction genre because it features very believable characters who want to do good for the people they love and care about. And it shows that good always prevails in the end. No matter how much sorrow, how much suffering you have to go through, happiness always prevails.

((Next up is Inferno! Right after reading Da Vinci Code, I had to read a book for a school project that I'd been putting off for quite a while because I didn't want to leave Langdon and Sophie halfway and start another book. I guess I'll review that one too. There's no rule that says you can't review a book for a school project. Usually I don't like the books chosen for our English projects, but this one stands out.))

Da Vinci Code

Spring break is coming to a close and I wanted to review something during that time. Just so I don't feel like I did nothing during the whole week off from school. And I basically did nothing all throughout the week. Kind of. Just a lot of reading and writing and a lot less substantial stuff that will actually be seen.
My mother was bothering me to watch the movie adaption of this book. She said it's really good and I said I'd watch it if I ever came across in on television or in a store.
In October, during an event at my brother's school, I decided to check out a used book sale that they were having. There was nothing I recognized. Mostly there were adult books and I'm not really interested in that kind of stuff. I am, but adult romance is different from young adult romance and adult action is different from young adult action. Then I remembered this title and decided to get it because I was recommended it.
So, let's just say that stuff happened and I got really busy and I wasn't able to read this book until about two weeks ago when I started it. And I still have not seen the movie, so if it's good, please tell me.

The cover-

When Professor Robert Langdon is in Paris for a lecture, he is woken up and taken to the Louvre museum one night. His escort says nothing about what's going on and he's forced to wonder why he's being taken there.

Langdon sees the body of the murdered Louvre curator Jacques Sauniere and realizes that he is being interrogated as a prime suspect for the murder. Surely he was going to meet with Sauniere to discuss his upcoming novel about the history of pagan worship and the sacred feminine, but never kill him. However, in a note drawn in invisible ink, Sauniere has written "P.S. Find Robert Langdon" which the authorities are interpreting as a clue that this is the murderer.

Langdon is innocent, but no one wants to believe it. That is, until the brilliant cryptographer Sophie comes in with a possible explanation for this. She helps Langdon break out of the thick security of the Louvre and get on the run to find the clues that will help them find out who murdered Sauniere.

After a few stops which involve using the note to break into a Swiss bank and eventually ending up at the doorstep of a good friend of Langdon's, Robert and Sophie realize that they are not just looking for the murderer, but for the one thing that the Church has hidden from the whole world for centuries. And they have to beat a deranged monk and his "Teacher" to the punchline or else the whole world will be left in chaos.

My thoughts-

The whole book was extremely interesting. I slowed down a little bit halfway through because I wanted to process what was going on before I got to the next part. This book tells religion the way it's really supposed to be told and makes light of the little details that the Church always told us to overlook.
But first, let me make one thing clear. I am not of the Christian faith, so I had little to no knowledge of the things that Langdon was describing. They were still interesting in themselves. The hidden symbolism inside each of the paintings we know made me see them in an altogether different way. In fact, I think if I go to Paris now, I'll see things a whole lot differently than I did two years ago.
And also there's the whole matter of the Holy Grail. This is probably the driving force of the book. Sophie and Langdon are in a race with Silas (their enemy they meet later on in the book when he tries to kill them, but they end up tying and gagging him up) and his "Teacher" to get to the Grail and unlock its true power.
I just wonder how long it took to write this book. And how much research it must have taken in order to get all the facts right. Because if there's even one mistake, the Church has a valid reason to challenge him. But I'm no expert on this, so it was all new information to me. I took in everything with wide eyes,
It also made me see the ways that people will go so far as to torture themselves to please God. Even the pain that Silas always felt wearing is cilice (discipline) belt was too much for me. He once described that once his wounds from the barbs had healed, the belt always made his skin feel raw. Any shift in movement sent blood dripping down his legs. I personally am very squeamish when it comes to torture, pain or even blood in general, so I was really bothered by this.
Really, this book exposes the truth about Christianity to the world through a very interesting fictional adventure. It opened my eyes to the things around me and how the Church has tried to erase their mistakes, but has never been quite able to get rid of the evidence completely.

((I'm off to read a book I need to finish for a school project, but I may write a review on it sometime soon. And I've got Inferno, another of Langdon's adventures now in Florence, Italy. I absolutely can't wait to read it! Since the next two weeks are exam weeks, there won't be much schoolwork to take care of and I can read when I get home every day! I suddenly feel like I am the only person who gets excited for exam weeks. Surely the exams are long and boring, but still, our classes get shortened to twenty minutes and the day seems to go by much faster than usual.))

The Scorpio Races

No updates in a while and I'm sorry because there was much to do with me getting busy and then going to Japan and having to make up school work. ((That was the worst part)) And then I had a bunch of concerts and extra rehearsals and missed a lot more school than I wanted to.
I've been trying to finish this book since before I went to Japan in the beginning of March, but after we came back, I've been sleeping at midnight or later ((It's all been studies. I'm never going on a week long trip in high school!)), so there's always no time to read. ((Because I get super grumpy when I'm tired and sleep deprived.)) But now that things have cleared up a little bit, I feel better and now I was able to finish it.

The cover-

It's almost November and the horses are coming out of the water again. The pull of the sea is stronger than ever and every man who will enter the race can feel it. Control the beast or be eaten by your vessel.
Puck Connolly is your average girl in a not so average place. Ever since her parents died, she and her brothers have been desperately trying to feed themselves, knowing that one day the little money their eldest brother earns will be used up. When Mr. Malvern, a monopolizing businessman brings her the grave news that she and her brothers haven't been able to pay their tax money, Puck takes it on herself to join the Scorpio Races in hopes that she can pay off the owed money. But the only problem is that she is the first girl to ever join a sport that was "made for men". And her mount is a land pony that was originally her mother's.
Sean Kendrick is the head trainer at the Malvern Yard, where he trains the horses that give Mr. Malvern his power and wealth. Every year he has ridden on his water horse, Corr and succeeded in winning the races and the ultimate prize money. But he has grown sick of Malvern and his son's taunts and wants more than anything to leave the yard and be forever with Corr.
Unforeseen circumstances bring Puck and Sean together where they have to fight for what they love and have to give up everything just to get it back. But they have until November. And that's when the races begin and everything changes.

My thoughts-

It's a very interesting plot. I'd never heard of the water horses in legends before. But then again, Maggie Stiefvater has also written Shiver, which was praised for its very unorthodox portrayal of the werewolf love story that has become a fad in young adult literature. This is definitely one of the lesser popular legends that she brought to light in a very intriguing way.
I honestly pictured the races the way we have the World Cup and those kinds of tournaments. Where a few racers would go against each other at a time and then the best would all be compiled into tournament rounds where only two would remain. But this format was the way traditional horse racing is, just a little less controlled because they're riding wild beasts that will eat their jockeys if they feel threatened.
I have to say something about the horrible things that Mutt Malvern did at the end of the book. I hate animal cruelty and what he did was worse than cruelty. He sliced a water horse's legs so that it could never run again. And then he was going to do the same thing to Corr. Thank god Sean got there just in time to stop him. He would've been heartbroken if Corr could never run again. It sent shivers down my back because I am very much against animal cruelty and hate to see examples of it in literature. If I were in that book, I'd have given him a beating so that he could never walk again. Maybe slice his hamstrings or something really painful and cruel like that (cue maniacal laughter). And I'm not even that big into horses. If you do anything horrible to a cat, you're going to die a very slow and painful death at my hands.
One thing I found awfully weird was that throughout the book, there was no sense of what day it was. The book starts in September and ends when the Scorpio Races do, but it wasn't long before it was the day before the race. Because I had this World Cup format in mind and when I realized that the races were all the way at the end, it took a while for it to register in my brain. I thought that there were going to be preliminary races and then the finals would be the actual Scorpio Races. It would've been helpful to know what day it was, or at least what month. There were brief mentions of it, but I found myself losing track of the time there was until the race.

Recommended for ages 12-14
Some disturbing scenes and some violence, although no too graphic. Mentions of animal abuse.

((I'm now reading Da Vinci Code and it's such a good book! I've barely gotten quarter way through it and I'm hooked. Review of it soon when I get the time to write it.))