Brown Girl Dreaming

I was completely underwhelmed by this book and I think perhaps it had everything to do with the lyric style. I felt this was a very character driven piece in which the characters are not discussed as much as I would like. There was a lot more I wanted to know about her father, her younger brother's father, her mom, her grandparents, and her siblings. It moved so quickly that everything felt almost inconsequential. It was a memoir of her life, and as important as it might be to her, it was not important to me at all. My other issue with it is that I just wasn't convinced that the narrator was really a child. She wrote like an adult and didn't even try to give the impression that she was the age that she was trying to write as. It was hard to take it seriously. Overall, it was an easy read, but an incredibly forgettable one and I don't think that had to be the case. I certainly don't feel that this deserves a national book award, but that's just my opinion.

The House of the Scorpian

This was the second book that we've read that I really enjoyed reading and kept me interested the whole way through. The other one was, of course, The Book Thief. I think the reason I enjoyed those two the most is because they really got at a lot of deeper questions and I was able to empathize with the characters more. When I connect with a book on a deeper level, I tend to enjoy it more because I can get more out of it. The fact that it was science fiction really gave it more of an entertainment value for me as well. I had read this book in the past, but I only remembered it up to a certain point so the ending was just as much a surprise to me as it was for the rest of the class, though it wasn't exactly a surprising ending. I really enjoyed the subtle way that it touched on big issues because it gave the reader the ability to either leave it or dig deeper. I think personally it's hard not to dig deeper when given subjects like cloning and slavery, but I can see how other people would rather sit back and be taken on the ride that the book is offering them. All in all, I really appreciated this book not just for its plot, but for the amount of thought that went into it. It didn't feel like a simple story told simply for entertainment. It was not forgettable either despite having read other books about the same thing.