This tale was set in the 1960s and it portrays the lives of rich white families and the black maids who work for them. There are three main characters: maids Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer), Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) and Miss Skeeter (Emma Stone), the daughter of a cotton plantation owner. Minny Jackson is a tempestuous and outspoken woman who is unafraid to stand up for herself or her beliefs. Her fiery personality often gets her into trouble with her employers and also provides much comic relief. Aibileen is a repressed woman who struggles daily with the grief of her dead son. She looks to fill that hole with the little girl she cares for: Mae Mobley. Miss Skeeter is a recent college graduate who is stuck between the old way of life and her progressive ideals. She sees the Jackson society as an opportunity to analyze that life and advance her writing career.

Miss Skeeter decides to write a book detailing the lives of the black maids in Jackson. Reluctantly, Aibileen and Minny agree to help. Eventually, many more maids join the experiment. Each person involved is concerned about the very real danger they face. None of them want to be subjected to hate crimes or be sent to prison, so they hide their identities.

Writing Miss Skeeter’s book is half the battle. The events that follow its publication are even more challenging.

As a book, The Help was nicely written. It was complex and had a plethora of multidimensional characters. At times, the book tended to ramble and not progress the plot. It also jumped inconsistently from one perspective to the next, which disrupted the flow of the story and caused confusion.

This story was presented much better as a movie than as a book. The plot was streamlined, which solved the inconsistencies and the confusion. The downside to making the plot more understandable was that many lovely scenes and details were cut or arranged in a different order.

In both the book and the movie, an important theme shines through. That theme is that every person is important and that every person has a story to tell. Aibileen sums up that theme perfectly with the saying, “You is kind. You is smart. You is important.”

This story is a wonderful example of how anyone is capable of realizing their true potential in the face of adversity. The strong women of Jackson, Mississippi can be an example for anyone who wishes to stand up for their beliefs and tell the world their story.

It all begins when the Burpo family takes a vacation and Colton (the three-year old boy) complains of having stomach problems that keep getting progressively worse. The doctors give the family a misleading diagnosis and say it was just the flu. After days of the “flu” and multiple trips to the hospital, the family gets a rude awakening that their son has a ruptured appendix.

Colton has to undergo a near death surgery and was seconds from death. Although his heart kept beating, it was a close call to say. The doctors and nurses all thought that this little boy would not make it through alive of his surgery. He did survive the surgery and lived to tell his story.

Over the course of months, even years, Colton tells bits and pieces to his father Todd and mother Sonja about how he visited Heaven and how he even sat on Jesus lap himself.  His parents were amazed by his story and waited to tell the press on what their little boy experience until they got the whole story figured out.

I thought this book was very inspirational. It gave me a good perspective on what Heaven is like and what I should look forward to. It also gave me encouragement that if this little three-year boy could conquer this near death surgery, I can just about conquer anything.

Even if you are not a devoted Christian worshipper, this book is still entertaining. It has a good plot and is a happy story.

It was a very interesting book and has a good twist at the ending. I recommend reading this book if you want a sneak preview on what Heaven just might look like.

John continues to move around, but with a different goal other than hiding. He wants to unite the other five. He continues to grow stronger, but no other powers have started appearing. He travels with Number Six, who found him in Ohio, and his best friend, Sam Goode. They unravel some secrets, but not anything that could tip the scales for the Loriens yet.

For those of you who have not read I am Number Four, or my book review on it, John Smith came from a planet called Lorien with eight other Loric children. They were part of the Garde, a special group who had amazing powers that were used to protect Lorien. Their guardians, the Cepan, helped the Garde run the planet. They went with one Cepan each to Earth, and were trailed by the Mogadorians. The Mogadorians ravaged Lorien, and are headed for Earth and the Loric nine, who are now six, as three have died.

This story was structured a lot better than the last book. It is from the view of John and Marina. This is different because one is a boy, one is a girl. John is always traveling, but Marina stays in one spot. It gives you different insights on what each person goes through, how they handle it, and how they use their powers and surrounding environment. It adds to the suspense by switching constantly, so it is kind of cliché where a Mogadorian is standing above John with a sword or whatnot, and the chapter changes.

The downside to this story is it is fast paced. I enjoy reading, and I am a fast reader, but this was really fast. It took a couple of hours to read and took away from the suspense of what was going to happen. This could be because the text is pretty simple, unlike Harry Potter, where you have to delve into the text, which is more filling, but just as entertaining. It is 406 pages long, as long as a typical Harry Potter, but moved much faster.

Overall, this book was Legacy packed, ash creating, Mogadorian killing awesomeness. It should definitely be turned into a movie, but first read the book. I recommend you stop whatever you are doing, go to the store, and buy the book. You know, after you read I am Number Four.

Sorry, I have to go because these guys with swords are coming down the hall, and they look angry.

The Summoner tells the story of two different people. Prince Matris Drayke of Margolan, a mage and Princess Kiara of Isencroft. Prince Matris Drayke’s life is dramatically changed when his cruel stepbrother Prince Jared pulls a coup, with the help of a blood mage named Foor Arontala. Drayke’s father, mother, and sister are killed. Prince Drayke barely escapes with his life with the help of his friends. Once he is healed he is told by his grandmother’s spirit that he is a summoner. A powerful mage that is able to control spirits, and the dead, and that Foor Arontala is planning on releasing the Obsidian king, the most powerful and evil wizard of his time. If the Obsidian king is released the world would be in chaos. When he is to told that Prince Drayke vows to kill Foor Arontala, and to get Jared off the throne

Meanwhile Princess Kiara, is betrothed to Jared because of a pact that was previously made. But before she goes to Jared she is giving a quest to go to a library which is believed to have been destroyed, and to find her servants, so she leaves Isencroft to look for two servants she sent out to find a cure to heal her father’s disease. Which she later finds out is caused by Foor Arontala.

When Prince Drayke and Princess Kiara meet, she decides to go with Prince Drayke and help him with his quest. Eventually must go to the kingdom of Principality, where they hope to recruit soldiers to fight his brother.  

I liked the book and its constant development of the characters. As you get farther into the book you learn more about them and they develop and grow their power and knowledge. There are some twists, and they changing point of view that kept my attention. I liked how the author had Matris’s power grow more and more throughout the book. This kept it interesting and not dull.

However I thought that it was kind of predictable. Not a lot, but still somewhat predictable. Also there were some cheesy romance parts in the book. I think that the romance in this book is odd. The author doesn’t really have the characters come out and show it. Instead she has them kind of dance around it, and rarely has them do affectionate things like hug or kiss.

 Overall, I liked the book, and I am looking forward to reading its sequel The Blood King.

The book starts out with the main character Thomas, a teen with a lost memory. He awakes in a dark box, soon greeted by many other teens, and welcomed to the Glade. He then must figure out what’s going outside the Glade, but nobody will answer the millions of questions he has. The next day, Thomas finally figures out he is in a maze, and there is no way out.

The Glade is a wide open field with one small house and a yard to keep all of the animals in it. It has a dark forest in the left corner. It also has a small graveyard next to it. The first few boys to show up on the Glade had all of that except the graveyard there for them. They had to get it together quickly for their survival. They made jobs and laws as well. They all voted on a leader to run the Glade to keep peace and order. Also they had to get a handful of boys to go out and explore the maze to try and find a way out.

The book was very interesting and was made very creatively. It gives a lot of description of what the setting looks like and what is going on. Also, the character description was detailed.

The only problem with the book is that it was too repetitive, because there were only two settings- The Glade and The Maze. Besides that is was great. Another good thing about the book is how in depth it gets with Thomas’s emotions and his feelings throughout it.

The book is fairly long and gets kind of boring in the middle section so to read this book you need to take your time with reading it.

Many know the name Percy Jackson from his first series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Now, they can continue his story with new characters in this second book of Riordan’s new series, The Heroes of Olympus.

The Son of Neptune tells the story of Percy as he finds himself led to the Roman demigod camp by the goddess Juno, where he quickly becomes friends with Hazel, the daughter of Pluto, and Frank, who has not been claimed. Shortly after his arrival, people start noticing that death does not have a hold anymore, and that it is getting hard to kill monsters, and even people. That is when the God Mars appears at camp and gives Frank, Percy, and Hazel, a quest to free Death and defeat Gaia’s giant Alcyoneus. Meanwhile the camp prepares for an army of monsters that is coming to destroy their camp while death is captured which stops the monsters from dying. So Percy, Frank, and Hazel rush against time to free Death, before the army reaches the camp, and destroy everything.

The Son of Neptune was a really good book. It takes place somewhere else, and with the new people, it kept me interested, learning about the background of the camp, and learning about the histories of the new people. Also there is some history in the book that made me like the book more.

However I felt that near the end of the book the author was rushing, and that he rushed through the major fight scenes. I think that the fights were too easy and idealistic, with the amount of casualties for both sides being too high or too low to be believable.

In the end, though, I really liked the book, and can’t wait for its sequel to come out.

Lord Loss follows the life of a teenager named Grubbitch (Grubbs) Grady and his ordeals with Lord Loss. It starts off with a kid who plays pranks of his family, and goes to school. Suddenly it goes into his parents being brutally murdered by demons.  The images the book paints aren’t for the faint of heart. Grubbs is put into a mental hospital because no one believes that demons killed his family. He had lost all hope when his uncle Dervish showed up, and this is where the story turned around.

I loved this book; it managed to catch my attention where other books fell short. It managed to hook me in the first three pages and I didn’t want to stop reading. It got my attention and kept it. Although there were a few pages that seemed to stray away from the main plot, it went back to an action packed story. 

When I think of magic and demons, I think of the Lord of the Rings, because a lot of things relate to it. Not this one! It was a total surprise to me, because it relates to teenagers as the story follows a teenager and it can attract many different types of people. If you like magic, werewolf’s, demons, boys, girls, basically anything that you can imagine then you will like this book.

It’s not for the faint of heart, because in the first fifty pages Grubbs’ family is killed. Darren Shan created such an image that I found it hard to read myself.  There are many horror movies that would fall short of this book if it became a movie.

There wasn’t much that I didn’t like; there was an occasional drag on after a point of action in the story. I found it hard to believe how this book captured my attention, and with a good amount of pages, a mere two hundred and twenty four, it’s a book you can read if you don’t have a lot of time to read. 

In the end, Lord Loss can spark imaginations, make you sick, and make you want to read again. I thank Darren Shan for capturing my imagination once again.

Rating: 9.5 out of 10

His only home was on his planet Lorien. That was until the alien race called the Mogadorians came and launched a war on John’s planet that they could never win. The Loriens saw the loss that was going to come and boarded a spaceship with nine special Lorien children, who were part of the Garde. Nine guardians, called Cepan also boarded with them. The Garde had incredible gifts called Legacies, which can be anything from flying to controlling the elements; they were super powers, basically. They were used to protect Lorien. The Cepan would be assigned to training them to fight and how to use their powers. The spaceship made it to Earth and the nine pairs went their separate ways.

A charm was put on the nine children so that they have to be killed in a specific order, unless they are together. A burning scar appears on the calf of every other one of the living children once one of the children is killed. Numbers One through Three have been killed, and John Smith is Number Four.

This was a very entertaining book. I would say it is mainly a science fiction with a lot of explosives, super powers, guns, swords, the things that make life fun. I would even guess to say there is a slight mystery theme, but not genre to it. There are a lot of questions to be answered and people to be found. There is a love story going on between John and a photographer named Sarah. There is an almost perfect balance of all the elements found in good stories in one. It is a little long; it has 440 Pages and 34 chapters, but it was a relatively quick read for me.

Unfortunately, like most books that have movies, the movie with I Am Number Four doesn’t correspond to the book. They took out way too many important details, and added parts that never happened. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great movie by itself, but it can’t compete for the book’s details. In the book all the events happened over months, but in the movie it seemed like it was in a week!

The one thing I didn’t like about the book is how it was structured. I know it has to be in first person form, but if it was written as a diary sometimes, or if there were some scenes about how Henri viewed choices John made, or the stress of John not developing his Legacies would have made the story much more interesting.

In the end, I Am Number Four is for a reader who likes a medium paced teen read about fighting, saving multiple worlds, and a love story that is a little gushy. I recommend the book.

 Sorry, but I have to go meet with some John Smith about alien weapons or something.

My rating for this book is a 9 out of 10.

Name of the Wind tells an innkeeper’s life story. Its starts off when Kvothe is a boy traveling in his family’s troupe, learning how to become a musician and an actor. An Arcanist who joins their troupe, and spurs Kvothe curiosity about magic. As they travel, the Arcanist teaches him the basics of magic until a tragic event happens. It causes him to go to the town of Tarbean, where he lives on the street, stealing and begging for money to survive.  During his time in Tarbean, he learns to be tough and ingenuitive. 

After three years of living in Tarbean, Kvothe realizes that he wants to go to a university that teaches magic and other basic things, like medicine, and crafting. He sets off to the University where he quickly makes a rival with another student which later causes trouble..   The story also switches back to the inn keeper who has to deal with a few things in his life, giving the story a second perspective.

Name of the Wind gives you the story of a life from the view point of a poor man. Who rises up and becomes a person who is told about in stories. This book makes you think about your mind in a whole new way. Some of the mental exercises talked about in the book made my mind tingle. This made me enjoy the book. One of those exercises was to play hide and seek with your mind. Half of your mind would hide a stone in an imaginary room, and the other half looked for it.

 Overall I really enjoyed the book and can’t wait to read its sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear.  Rating: 10 out of 10

Richard was born in New Jersey and lived with his brothers; Florian was the oldest and Joseph the youngest of the three siblings. Richard lived with a loving mother but a horrible father, whom he’d later blame for the outcome of his life. In his house his father was an alcoholic with a bad temper that would mercilessly beat his wife. Then one night his father would kill the oldest of the three sons. This would be the first of many violent acts involved in Richard’s life.

As Richard would grow in his adolescence he would find himself bullied by a local group of ruffians. They would make fun of him because of his nationality (Polish-American). After being heckled by this group of kids he would eventually grow sick of the torture and find his true nature as a killer. One day Richard would find the head of the group of bullies and beat him down with a wooden pole, so badly it would kill the bully. His murder was his first, at the young age of thirteen.

Richard would grow up as cold as ice, and quickly earned a reputation as a ruthless assassin. He would find himself tied in as a contract killer with many of the leading mafias on the east coast. However he would eventually find himself in jail on a life sentence for five counts murder, even though he was involved in numerous unsolved murder cases.

I would recommend the book The Ice Man to anyone who enjoys reading about organized crime in America. This book is focused on just one contract killer’s life and shows a more graphic side of the “mob’s dirty work”.

The book has short chapters and is a quick read. I read this novel because I heard a couple friends talking about this book. This book lives up to the hype and was a very interesting read. The life of Richard was an intense one and was very compelling to read about.