Trapped by Michael Northrop

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Here is a cross between Breakfast Club and Assault on Precinct 13 and it has all the drama and suspense of each film.

A blizzard stalls over New England resulting in the worst storm in living memory. The high school closes early but not everyone leaves.

“There was a little circle of people in the hallway outside the gym when we arrived: four kids and one teacher, all standing near the double doors.  It looked like a field trip just beginning to assemble.  The three of us joined the group, bring the total to eight.  That was the most there would ever be.  From here on out, the number would only go down.” (pg 34.)

What happens at the school as the heat and power fails and the snow keeps piling up?





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The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a cancer book.
But a cancer book with a difference.
The Fault in Our Stars is not about living with cancer, even though that is the book’s plot. It’s about living. It’s about creating genuine relationships and opening ourselves to others and finding love, and laughing hard and often, even in the face of death.
What the characters express is an understanding that it is up to each of us to shape the story of our lives.
I expected gratuitous smaltz, super-heroic teens and troubled parents who disintegrated under the pressure of a sick child. That is not what happened.

I knew how the book was going to end. I was prepared: but I still cried even though I told myself it was fiction, and I should get-a-grip.  These characters are real.

The main characters’ feelings are very teenagery even if their dialog is sometimes more advanced than the normal teens’
You will fall in love with Gus and Hazel and Isaac. You will ache for the teenagers and their unfair lot in life, and you will ache for the parents as they do their best for their children.

Hazel and Gus may have faults in their lives but they get love right.

The Fault in Our Stars has received positive reviews from critics. The New York Times' review of the book "stays the course of tragic realism", while noting that the book's unpleasant plot details "do nothing to diminish the romance". Time called The Fault in Our Stars "damn near genius."Entertainment Weekly wrote, "[Augustus and Hazel's] love story is as real as it is doomed, and the gut-busting laughs that come early in the novel make the luminous final pages all the more heartbreaking".




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