The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim

The Story of Owen follows a teenage boy following his family tradition of slaying dragons. Set in a modern world, where dragons feed on carbon emissions, E. K. Johnston weaves the history of dragons into the history we read in our textbooks today.

Surrounded by normal high school kids, Owen finds himself somewhere between being an outcast and a celebrity. The narrator of the story, Sibohan, is Owen’s best friend and a musical prodigy. Together the duo, along with Owen’s famous family, wants to change the way the world views dragon slaying.

Things That Worked For Me:

• History – Johnston incorporates a lot of history (real and fictional) into the story. This is a great choice by the publisher, who focuses on educational-based children’s books. The history, although long-winded at times, was interesting and appropriate for the story. Johnston does a great job of weaving the story’s fictional history into the history we believe in our world. Its a great way to sneak a little history lesson into your child’s fun reading! 
• Another creative twist of real life and fiction is the fact that these dragons feed on carbon emissions. We know its a danger in our world, but image if every time you drove a car or worked at a factory, you had a serious chance of being attacked by a fire-breathing dragon.
• Rural Canadian setting – The setting worked well for the story, keeping the reader grounded to reality in an unrealistic world. Growing up in rural Minnesota, the setting was familiar to me but also differed in interesting ways.
• Music, Dragons, History – What a mix!? The narrator is a musical prodigy and her best friend is a dragon slayer…where else will you find a duo quite like that!?
• Characters – Johnston incorporated a good mix of characters. Some are quiet and reserved, others are loud and outgoing. Some are athletic, others musical. Some past their prime, others growing into it.
• Dragons in a Modern World – Just plain cool.

Things That Didn’t Work For Me:

• History – Ironically the thing I liked most about the book (the interesting mix of real and imagined history) is also my least favorite. The history lessons, with a great mix of real and fictional, made my head feel like a bong getting hit over and over and over again. Especially in a book aimed for children and young adults, the story needs to move quick; the author can’t afford to waste a single page with useless backstory and, unfortunately, Johnston wasted much more than that.
• Over Simplified – Emotions were often over simplified and saw drastic, unexplained changes.
• Too Slow – Even at the height of action, the story moved too slow. This could have been helped by staying in the present and avoiding long “what might happen now” explanations.

Overall, I give The Story of Owen 3 stars.

Check out the New York Times book review on The Story of Owen here! 

The Story of Owen is a series. If interested check out the second book in the series, Prairie Fire.

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

A great story with unique writing, We Were Liars keeps the eyes of the reader zipping along with short paragraphs, mid-sentence line breaks, and a compelling mystery rivaled by few.

Characterization “Taglines”

My favorite tidbit of Lockhart’s writing in this book were the “taglines” she gave each of her main character’s best friends. They are as follows:

Johnny, he is bounce, effort, and snark.

Mirren, she is sugar, curiosity, and rain.

Gat, he was contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee.

Don’t miss that Lockhart decided to use nouns, not adjectives, to describe her characters. Gat is ambition, not ambitious. Although this play on words could be looked at in many different ways, I see it as a way to emphasize the importance of the statements. Gat does not only possess ambition, he encompasses the thing itself.

What do you think of Lockhart choosing these nouns where adjectives would normally be used?

These taglines provided a unique, fun way to introduce the characters but also helped me understand the basic truth of the characters later on. These taglines were stated more than once throughout the book, and the truth of them really struck home once I’d gotten to know the characters more. They gave me something solid and definitive to understand the characters’ personalities while being unique and memorable. 

Strong Language

Although the book is clearly a young adult story in realistic fiction, Lockhart did not let the genre limit her writing. Some metaphors were stated with so much authority that the images (often violent) sharply portrayed what the character was feeling. Examples:

My father ran off with some woman he loved more than us…He had hired moving vans already. He’d rented a house, too. My father put a last suitcase into the backseat of the Mercedes and started the engine.
Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,
then from my eyes,
my ears,
my mouth.

That first night, I cried and bit my gingers and drank wine I snuck from the Clairmont pantry. I spun violently into the sky, raging and banging stars from their moorings, swirling and vomiting.

The Big Mystery **Spoilers ahead**

The entire plot revolves around a big mystery that everyone seems to be keeping from the first-person narrator, Cadence. She spends the entire novel trying to figure out what happened and the mystery kept me very intrigued as a reader. It was fun to guess what the mystery was and Lockhart did a good job at laying down clues along the way. (Possibly too good of clues because I realized what the big mystery was about 50 pages before I was told.)

Overall

FOUR STARS! I enjoyed the story as well as the fresh writing style. Although I’m not eager to read more of Lockhart’s work, I wouldn’t shy away from it either! I have to thank my friend Tom for the recommendation and let him know I struggled to keep myself from scribbling notes in the margins of his book.

The Hunger Games Book Review

This was my second time reading The Hunger Games. I normally don’t reread books because I enjoy having the fresh anticipation of new stories and new writing but The Hunger Games drew me in for a second time. I was surprised by how much I had forgotten about the book and the writing itself.

 

 

Things I Rediscovered about The Hunger Games book:

1. Its written in present tense, a unique style in today’s literature. Before this, I don’t remember the last time I read a novel in present tense yet after only a few pages I failed to even notice it. It lends well to the quick, suspenseful plot. Like Katniss, the reader is living from moment to moment, without even a hint of what lies ahead.
2. The flood of Young Adult themes in the book. Katniss is exploring love and sexuality for the first time. She is trying to figure out who she is compared to her family and dealing with the loss of a parent. She is having new experiences (though most are not the typical…) and she is starting to question authority. Bullying and “clicks” are even portrayed through the careers. These are all typical YA themes. I think the popularity of the series as well as the darkness of the movies made me forget that the story originally targeted youth. Katniss’s internal dialogue really exemplifies the confusion of a teenage girl, no matter what kind of world she’s living in.
3. How oblivious Katniss is to Peeta’s and Gale’s love for her. The movie certainly doesn’t portray this as well as the book. The movie makes her seem more unconcerned with the boys’ love for her where the books really capture her confusion. 
4. How fast-paced the novel is. The reader never has time to take a breath. From the first page to the last, we are hooked. New secrets are always being revealed, new dangers crop up as soon as old ones pass, and new mysteries always keep us wanting more. 
5. Excellent cliff hangers at the end of every single chapter. I don’t think its possible for anyone to get bored while reading The Hunger Games. Its unbelievable writing and unbelievable editing. There is not a wasted line in the entire story. And the popularity of the book can attest to that. Tell me you haven’t heard someone say something along the lines of, “Oh yeah, I read The Hunger Games in a weekend/day.” That’s because there is never a good stopping point, especially at the chapter breaks! This is a lesson all writers, young and old, can learn from.

I think its pretty common to rediscover new things when re-reading books and because of that, I don’t think it’s a waste of time at all. There is a certain comfort about re-reading your favorite books or re-watching your favorite movies but that doesn’t mean that we can’t take something new away from an old story.

Have you re-read any of your old favorites lately? What did you rediscover? 

Charlie from The Perks of Being a Wallflower; Book Review

Book Review: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. Published in 1999 by MTV Books/Pocket Books.

One of my favorite book covers ever!

I’m varying from my typical structure for this book review because every time I think about or begin to write about The Perks of Being a Wallflower, there is one central point that I cannot get away from, Charlie. Charlie is the 15-year-old narrator of the story. The book is written in the form of letters, from Charlie to an unnamed “friend.” They are very casual and journal-like. The letters balance between accounting Charlie’s day-to-day life and mining the diamond-like thoughts he unearths before us.

Charlie writes his first letter the day before his first day of high school. He is a loner, a listener, an observer, a wallflower. His only friend committed suicide the year before and his brother, whom he was very close with, left home to attend college. He reads an obsessive amount of books, enjoys walking around his neighborhood alone, and cannot seem to stop the tornado of thoughts from swirling 24/7 inside his head.

There are parts of Charlie that we all wish we could be
and parts that we all fear we are.

But through all that, I think the most important part about Charlie is this: there are parts of Charlie that we all wish we could be and parts that we all fear we are. He’s a thinker. He thinks about why he thinks things. He does not tunnel his thoughts; he lets them lead him. Because he thinks so much but rarely speaks, he uses writing to get the thoughts out of his head. That is where we, the readers, come in. 

The quote on the back of the book says Charlie is “caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it” and I surrender to the fact that I could not have said it better myself. The books he obsessively read is a way for his to escape, especially from his own thoughts. Its not a mistake that Charlie doesn’t think deeply about the books because if he did, it wouldn’t be much of a mistake.

We don’t worry about Charlie being a reliable narrator
because his thoughts, his interpretations
are all we grow to care about.

This next quote from the book struck me so true, it still puts a smile on my face months after I’ve read the book. “I almost didn’t get an A in math, but then Mr. Calo told me to stop asking “why?” all the time and just follow the formulas. So, I did. I get perfect scores on all my tests. I just wish I knew what the formulas did. I honestly have no idea.” Being able to plug Charlie’s personality into something as boring and irrelative as math class proves how well Chbosky was in-tuned with his character. It’s brilliant. 

I connected with Charlie (as so many people have). I felt bad for him and I felt sad with him. Written in any other point of view, this book would not be so successful. We don’t worry about Charlie being a reliable narrator because his thoughts, his interpretations are all we grow to care about.