Sign up
Search
Advanced search settings

Search only in certain items:

Search results
All (1900)
Content
People
Apps
Books
Orbs
Movies
Music
Podcasts
Shows
Tabletop Games
Tech
TV
Video Games
YouTube Channels
Videos
40x40

Becs (244 KP) rated Words That Kill in Books

Oct 2, 2019  
Words That Kill
Words That Kill
Vivid Vega | 2019 | Fiction & Poetry
7
7.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
I’ve always had a thing for poetry and have loved every single poetry collection that I have gotten my hands on. My husband got me Words That Kill by Vivid Vega for this past Christmas. When I started to read it, I couldn’t put it down, it was just so good and so emotional. But I eventually had to take a break because it was starting to mess with me. There are not many poetry collections that touch on the mental health subject and I’m glad that there is now one available to the public.

Genre: Mental Health, Young Adult

Audience: Young Adult but also mature audiences as well

Reading level: Middle to High School

Interests: Depression, Mental Health, Anxiety, Suicide, Abuse, Hope, and Love.

Style: Light to hard – depending on the person.

Point of view: First person

Difficulty reading: Very easy to read but be warned, it does make you very emotional.

Promise: Words That Kill promises a poetry collection that talks about mental health and it delivers.

Quality: I believe everybody should read this even if they haven’t dealt with mental health.

Insights: Not taking the grammatical and spelling errors, the poems were a lot lighter to read compared to Rupi Kuar or even Shakespeare.

Ah-Ha Moment: There wasn’t really a moment where I went ‘Ah yea, that’s the turning point’. This is only because it wasn’t really a story, more of a poem that brings memories of the past back to life.

Favorite quote: “There is no need to hide in the shade, the light will come and your pain will fade.” – This is a great representation of how depression works. You have your good and your bad moments.

Aesthetics: The thing that drew me to the book in the first place, minus the topic of mental health of course, was the fact that the entire book is white words on an entirely black background. I’ve never seen a book have that aesthetically pleasing style and I love it!

“Like a flower, I will bloom again – depression.”
  
40x40

Rachel King (13 KP) rated Linger (The Wolves of Mercy Falls #2) in Books

Feb 11, 2019  
Linger (The Wolves of Mercy Falls #2)
Linger (The Wolves of Mercy Falls #2)
Maggie Stiefvater | 2011 | Young Adult (YA)
8
8.3 (9 Ratings)
Book Rating
This book picks up where Shiver (Wolves of Mercy Falls) left off, with Sam supposedly healed. One of the new wolves is introduced as a point of view in the book, Cole, who casts an intriguing element into the plot-line as he has a completely different perspective on being a wolf than Sam does. Cole is a contradiction in other ways as well, as he is a druggie rock star wanting to escape life who also happens to possess a genius intellect thanks to a scientist father. He has immediate chemistry with Isabel, too. At first I was baffled by this pairing, but based on personality and intellect, these two mesh well.
Isabel also features heavily in this book. Even though she has attitude to spare, I rather like her, both for her sarcasm and for her brains. Sam and Grace never really seem too curious about the science and mechanics behind the wolf-human changes, but neither Isabel nor Cole can stop obsessing over it, though for different reasons.
As for Grace, now it's her turn to be the focus as she gets sicker and sicker, living in denial of what this illness relates to. Her and Sam both seem to have the mindset that if one ignores the problem, it will just disappear. I never liked that sort of approach - it seems cowardly. Really, their "epic romance" would just be another tragedy if it were not for the practicality of their friends, Isabel and Cole. In the case of this series, the lesser characters seem to carry the plot instead.
As for Sam, I found I enjoyed his random song lyrics and poems most of all. They lent a certain lyrical element to the book and added in the strength of emotion to pull me into the plot. Though poetry is not always the easiest thing to understand, his few simple lines interspersed throughout the text conveyed much more of what the characters were experiencing than a lengthy description could. I look forward to the conclusion of the series, Forever (Wolves of Mercy Falls, Book 3).
  
40x40

Goddess in the Stacks (553 KP) rated It's Not Like It's a Secret in Books

Jun 4, 2019  
It's Not Like It's a Secret
It's Not Like It's a Secret
Misa Sugiura | 2017 | Fiction & Poetry, Young Adult (YA)
8
7.5 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
Sana is a California transplant from Wisconsin; both her parents are immigrants from Japan, so despite feeling like she's a midwesterner, none of her friends think of her as one. There's a cringe-y scene early in the book where she cheers with her friends about being "midwestern farmer's daughters" and they tell her she's cute for thinking that, but she's Japanese, obv. I felt really bad for her. When her family moves to California, suddenly she's not the only Asian girl in a sea of whiteness. It's an interesting mix of having a place with your own people but also fighting the stereotypes of sticking with your own ethnicity. It's assumed she'll be friends with the other Asian kids, which annoys her, but she also finds to be true; having not had the opportunity to have friends like her before, she finds she really likes it. But she also tries to break that mold and be friends with people she's not assumed to like - like Jamie Ramirez and her Hispanic friends, and Caleb and his white goth friends.

The book also explores the way racism hits races differently; the Hispanic kids get hassled by cops while the Asian kids don't - though they also have things expected of them that the Hispanic kids don't. The book gets into cultural expectations as well - PDAs are not really a thing in Sana's world, so she's reluctant to be public about her affections at school, which drives misunderstandings.

It's only in the last few chapters that all the secrets come out, and Sana struggles to put things right.

One thing I really liked about the book is the narrative structure. At the beginning of the school year, Sana's English teacher gives them a project, which is to keep a journal to transcribe poems into and talk about what they mean to you. Chapters from Sana's poetry journal are interspersed with chapters of the narrative, and give some nice insight to how she's feeling. Her love interest, Jamie, also loves poetry, and it plays a large part in their relationship.

I quite enjoyed this book.You can find all my reviews plus more at http://goddessinthestacks.com