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Looking for Alaska
Warnings: Drug Use, Drunk Driving, Sexually Explicit Content My Thoughts If our early years are our Spring then adolescence is an invincible summer that feels like it’ll never end. Being a teenager, everything seems so much bigger, more life-changing, everything feels like a big deal. Miles goes to a boarding school seeking his great perhaps, the great unknown that will upend his boring life. At school, Miles meets Alaska, a magnetic young woman with a bad reputation, and quickly falls head over heels. What made this book special to me was that I just found it so relatable, I was reminded so much of how my high school experience had…
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Look Back
Warnings: Violence My Thoughts Why do we create art? For enjoyment? For praise? To compete with our rival, or to live up to our idol? For money, a successful career? Creating art can be filled with joy, but it can also be painstaking too. This is the idea that lies at the heart of Look Back, a thoughtful one-shot manga that pays homage to the manga industry. Look Back follows two young girls, both aspiring manga artists, and how their art brought them together. Fujino is the best manga artist in her class, she lives for the praise of the people around her. Yet she finds herself upstaged by her…
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Smash It!
Warnings: Sex, Discussions of Sex My Thoughts Drama nerds rejoice for the year of fuck it! Smash It! is all about a shy girl that decides to take a page out of Shonda Rimes “year of yes” to start overcoming her shyness. Liv feels that she has always been on the sidelines next to her two rockstar friends, Eli and Dré. She is hopelessly in love with Eli and fears taking the leap, feeling that she’s the uncool girl that nobody notices. But owning oneself is not as easy as it sounds, and everything becomes more complicated when other people and feelings are involved. I loved the main characters and…
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As Simple as Snow
My Thoughts As Simple as Snow is a young adult coming of age story about an average teenage boy and his brief and turbulent relationship with his goth girlfriend, Anna. The book is labeled as a mystery but I honestly don’t see it that way. In fact, I think that this book is hideously mismarketed as a mystery novel. Galloway himself ran a website for a while where he interacted with readers and would give them further clues to the “mystery.” It has been over a decade and there hasn’t been any real answer to what happened to Anna. The reason why was that the mystery was never meant to…
