Katie Hammontree and
Sarah Cooper have been best friends since the 2nd grade. Katie's
welcoming, tight-knit family is a convenient substitute for Sarah when
her distant parents aren't around, and Sarah's abrasive, goal-oriented
personality gels well with Katie's more laid-back approach to life.
But
when a misunderstanding leads to the two of them being mistaken for a
couple and Sarah uses the situation to her advantage, Katie finds
herself on a roller coaster ride of ambiguous sexuality and confusing
feelings. How far will Sarah go to keep up the charade, and why does
kissing her make Katie feel more alive than kissing her ex-boyfriend
Austin ever did? And how will their new circle of gay friends react when
the truth comes out?
My Review: 5 Stars
I got my copy in the mail around 4 in the afternoon, and probably started it around 7 the same evening, and I was finished it by 11 that night. That should give a bit of an indication of how much I was unable to put this book down. This book was light, fluffy, fun, and adorable. It had characters and relationships that I loved. It was just so great.
I loved how this book was very tropey at parts, but played with the tropes in new ways that I loved. Two of my favorite tropes are best friends to romance and fake dating that ends up becoming real, and this book had both so that was a win. These are tropes that I probably wouldn't get tired of anyway but this book puts an extra refreshing spin on them by using them in a f/f romance. I loved the progression of the romance. It's pretty predictable in guessing that they'll end together but it's the journey to that that is important so I didn't mind that I knew they'd end up together. It was great to watch Katie realize that her feelings were Sarah were becoming real, instead of just acting and to be pretty sure, since we aren't in Sarah's head, that she feels the same way. Yet Katie was afraid to tell Sarah because she thought the whole thing was acting for Sarah. And the entire fake relationship was great. They were so adorable and good at faking being a couple that it didn't seem like much of a stretch for them to become a real one.
I didn't agree with all of Sarah's choices, especially dragging Katie into the whole fake couple thing and lying to everyone about it. Katie didn't want this, and sure, it did end up working out well for the two of them, but that doesn't mean she should have done it in the first place. For a while it still seemed like Sarah was using Katie to get to a boy, which she probably should have stopped doing as soon as she realized her feelings for Katie were real. But I guess she was just afraid of rejection and thought Katie was really straight. It was confusing for both of them, of course.
If you like YA contemporary, read this book.
Katie
10:00 a.m.
The
principal of Opportunity, Alabama's high school finishes her speech,
welcoming the entire student body to a new semester and encouraging them
to excel and achieve.
10:02 a.m.
The students get up to leave the auditorium for their next class.
10:03
The auditorium doors won't open.
10:05
Someone starts shooting.
Told
over the span of 54 harrowing minutes from four different perspectives,
terror reigns as one student's calculated revenge turns into the
ultimate game of survival.
My Review: 5 Stars
I read this book in one day, and am so impressed by it. I couldn't put it down because I had to know if characters would make it out alive. I loved so many of the characters quickly, and I wanted them all to live. And I won't spoil who died, but I will say, not everybody makes it out alive, including characters that I cared about. This book was heartbreaking, but I still loved it.
This was told from the perspective of 4 main characters. It alternated POVs between them. One of the narrators is Autumn, the sister of the shooter. She is passionate about dance and wants to go to school for it. She is dating Sylv, who is another one of the POV characters. Due to living in a probably close-minded small town, their relationship is secret from pretty much everyone. Instead, people think they are best friends. Another POV character is Tomas, Sylv's twin brother. He is not there during the shooting because he had been sent to the principal's office with a friend. He and his friend, Fareed, decide to try to let people out of the auditorium by getting the doors unlocked. The fourth POV character is Claire. She isn't at the assembly due to track practice, but her brother Matt is in the auditorium. She and her friend Chris work on finding the police and helping people out.
Tyler was the shooter, and he was awful. There were hints in the flashbacks of how he wasn't always a bad guy in the past, but there weren't hints of that in the present. He murdered so many scared students with literally no reason. They did nothing to him, other than being there in the auditorium. I wasn't really sure what his plans were, since it seemed like he basically just was doing this because of things with Autumn and Sylv. I'm really not sure at all about his end goal. He had to have realized that this was not a good plan. I never liked him, and I couldn't even feel sorry for him for bad things that had happened to him, since he was just so awful.
If you like dark YA contemporary, read this book.
Katie
Megan doesn't speak. She hasn't spoken in months.
Pushing
away the people she cares about is just a small price to pay. Because
there are things locked inside Megan's head - things that are screaming
to be heard - that she cannot, must not, let out.
Then Jasmine
starts at school: bubbly, beautiful, talkative Jasmine. And for reasons
Megan can't quite understand, life starts to look a bit brighter.
Megan
would love to speak again, and it seems like Jasmine might be the
answer. But if she finds her voice, will she lose everything else?
My Review: 5 Stars
This book was so good and so compelling that once I got into it, I really couldn't put it down until I reached the end and could get all the answers and make sure everyone was okay. I read this within one day, and loved it so much. The characters, the relationships, the mystery - everything was just perfect.
Megan is an interesting character, especially since she doesn't speak. It is cool to get to read the book from her perspective, since I could see when she wanted to speak, but couldn't make the words leave her mouth. And she really censored what she did and didn't say, since to really say something, she had to write it on a piece of paper, which took more time. We don't immediately know why she doesn't speak, though it's clear that she must have faced some kind of trauma. Over the course of the book, the mystery behind when she stopped speaking slowly unraveled.
There is a romance in the book, that started as a great friendship. I would have been happy with it even remaining solely in friendship territory, but I was happy with it becoming a romance too. At the beginning of the book, Jasmine moves to the school during the middle of the school year. Pretty quickly, she befriends Megan. She is a great friend to her, always being there for her, and never trying to push her to speak. She accepts Megan's lack of speaking for what it is. Megan is there for Jasmine too, when people send her threatening notes and bully her. During this amazing friendship, Megan slowly discovers she has feelings for Jasmine, and eventually it becomes clear that they are mutual. The romance between the two is super cute and adorable.
If you like YA contemporary, read this book.
Katie
Cecelia Price killed
her brother. At least, that’s what the police and the district attorney
are saying. And although Cecelia is now locked up and forced into
treatment, she knows the real story is much more complicated.
Cyrus
wasn’t always the drug-addled monster he’d become. He was a successful
athlete, but when an injury forced him off the soccer field and onto
pain medication, his life became a blur of anger, addiction, and
violence. All CeCe could do was stand by and watch, until she realized
one effective way to take away her brother’s drugs while earning the
money she needed for college: selling the pills.
Soon, CeCe
becomes part drug dealer, part honor student. But even when all she
wants is to make things right, she learns that sometimes the best
intentions lead to the worst possible outcome.
Thicker than Water
is an unforgettable dark, harrowing look into the disturbing truth of
drug addiction and the desperate love of a sister watching her brother
deteriorate before her eyes.
My Review: 5 Stars
This was a book that was dark and had morally complex characters. It was a book that made it easy to root for a character even when she did things that were wrong and even illegal. It dealt with tough issues of addiction to and use of prescription drugs. There were complex relationships between family members. Nothing in this book was just easy and simple. I also liked how this book alternated past and present timelines so that the full story unraveled throughout the book.
CeCe is in behavioral therapy at a juvenile center awaiting a hearing to see if she will be convicted or acquitted for being responsible for her brother's death. She blames herself for his death, but is she really fully responsible? If one gave someone the weapon that killed them, is that person responsible for the death that follows? The book deals with these tough questions. Because they really are tough questions. I'm not fully sure what my opinion is on the answers to these questions. But I do feel that CeCe was not fully responsible for her brother's death. She is not blame-free though. She made bad choices. Illegal choices, in fact. She got wrapped up in something that wasn't good for her because she thought it would help her make some money. It was hard to watch her make choices that I knew would come back and hurt her later.
Cyrus, CeCe's brother, was a drug addict. It was hard to see his downward spiral, and to watch CeCe try to tell her dad while he lived in denial. It showed how tough it would be to have a family member succumbing to drug addiction and feel almost helpless to do anything about it. When Cy got clean, it was sad, because as the reader, I already knew he was going to end up dead, so that wasn't going to last.
There is a small romance, but it is not a big part of the story. It is sweet, though, and the boy is good for CeCe, since he really cares about her and wants her to be better. He's in the same juvenile facility, so he has things in his past too, but he really seems to be a genuinely good guy.
If you like dark YA contemporary, read this book.
Katie
Rashad is absent again today.
That’s the sidewalk graffiti that started it all…
Well,
no, actually, a lady tripping over Rashad at the store, making him drop
a bag of chips, was what started it all. Because it didn’t matter what
Rashad said next—that it was an accident, that he wasn’t stealing—the
cop just kept pounding him. Over and over, pummeling him into the
pavement. So then Rashad, an ROTC kid with mad art skills, was absent
again…and again…stuck in a hospital room. Why? Because it looked like he was stealing. And he was a black kid in baggy clothes. So he must have been stealing.
And that’s how it started.
And
that’s what Quinn, a white kid, saw. He saw his best friend’s older
brother beating the daylights out of a classmate. At first Quinn doesn’t
tell a soul…He’s not even sure he understands it. And does it matter?
The whole thing was caught on camera, anyway. But when the school—and
nation—start to divide on what happens, blame spreads like wildfire fed
by ugly words like “racism” and “police brutality.” Quinn realizes he’s got
to understand it, because, bystander or not, he’s a part of history. He
just has to figure out what side of history that will be.
Rashad
and Quinn—one black, one white, both American—face the unspeakable
truth that racism and prejudice didn’t die after the civil rights
movement. There’s a future at stake, a future where no one else will
have to be absent because of police brutality. They just have to risk
everything to change the world.
Cuz that’s how it can end.
My Review:
This is a powerful story that is very timely to issues of police brutality that often appear in the news today. This book does a good job showing the issue from the perspective of both of the victim and a bystander trying to figure out what is right. This book will probably make you angry, when people in it defend someone who seems very clearly in the wrong, and it is a great book for how it was able to affect me so much in that way.
Rashad was one of the main characters, and was the victim of the incident. He was a good guy, who was buying some chips that he was going to pay for, and then he got beaten by a cop who thought he was going to steal. The reason the cop thought this was because some lady tripped over Rashad, so the cop assumed he must be hurting the lady, since he was black and his pants were sagging, so of course he must have just been a thug. Hopefully, you can tell that I think the cop was wrong in making this assumption. Assumptions like this are dangerous, as they can get people wrongfully killed. Luckily for Rashad, he lived, but he did have to spend several days in the hospital, with a broken nose and bruised ribs.
The other main character was a white boy named Quinn who saw the incident from a distance. I really liked the evolution of his thinking and how he really tried to do what was right. Seeing this was tough for him because the cop, Paul, was his best friend's older brother, who had been a role model to him in the past. His friend assumed he would be on Paul's side, but he wasn't so sure that Paul was in the right. But his family and other people close to him told him that Paul had a tough job and was just doing his job. I liked how Quinn didn't just blindly listen to their thoughts on the issue. Instead, he formed his own opinion.
If you like YA contemporary, read this book.
Katie
