By:
On:
In: Realistic Fiction (YA), Young Adult Book Reviews
With: 0 Comments

Although Your Final Moments by Jay Coles is a difficult book to read—given its focus on suicide and addictive behaviors—it is also beautiful in that its message affirms life and hope. Many of these messages derive from allusions to poetry, music, and literature. As Coles explores the lives of teens attending Center Grove High School, he reveals some complex truths about life, grief, death, depression, and those who succumb when they give up hope. Set in Indiana, the novel opens with one of these difficult truths: “Everyone you love the most will die. Your friends will die. Your family will die. One day you willRead More →

By:
On:
In: General Book Reviews, Middle Grade Reviews
With: 0 Comments

With his writing of Breaking into Sunlight, John Cochran pens a story that gives hope and inspiration to anyone who has watched another human being struggle with drug and other addictions. Dealing with an addict is Reese Buck’s reality, and when his dad, Sam, overdoses on pain medication, Reese loses himself in drawing or basketball. These distractions enable him to push to the back of his brain the painful truth that his life is a huge mess. Instead of having to think about his dad, Reese dreams of making a name for himself in the Guinness World Records as the first thirteen-year-old to sink theRead More →

By:
On:
In: Middle Grade Reviews, Realistic Fiction
With: 0 Comments

Set in North Carolina, The Mending Summer by Ali Standish tells the story of twelve-year-old Georgia Collins whose heart is breaking as she struggles to put her Humpty Dumpty family back together. Pursuing their own dreams, her mother is studying long hours for a degree in biology so that she can work in a lab, and her accountant father moonlights as a piano player who comes home transformed by alcohol into the Shadow Man, no longer the Daddy she knows and loves. To protect Georgia from the fighting and the shame and to give herself more study time, Mama arranges for her daughter to summer inRead More →