Killed off for Character Development

My potentially happy readers, the school year is nigh and this is the last blog cycle! I'm doing something different for my last blog post and ranking my favorite 10 blog posts that I've read this year, and there will be spoiling, I suppose. Although it will probably be harmless? I'm not sure what kind of warning to include, but here be dragons... just because.               For my last blog post, I wanted to write something different from all my other book reviews. Thankfully, Miranda suggested this topic, and I was pretty much instantly on board. Just a disclaimer, all of these opinions are very VERY subjective and honestly it feels like my standards change every time I look at the list I have compiled. I'm so proud of us as a class for getting through with these blogs and keeping it up this entire school year, and I enjoyed all the blog posts mentioned here for unique and different reasons. With that out of the way, l...

There’s this account on Instagram called @raeganspoetry that I follow. She’s pretty well-known on TikTok too and maybe you know who I’m talking about or have stumbled across one of her videos before, or maybe not. But I like watching her short reels, they always fill me with comfort and at least a temporary sense of joy. She films almost everything on what seems like her bedroom’s floor. It’s often dark and the camera quality isn’t great. Not terrible though, just enough to create a casual and lofi ambiance. The audio quality of her recordings isn’t extremely crisp or professional sounding either. It’s just a teenage girl, sitting in the corner of her closet, using her phone to record the poems she wrote, wanting to share them with the world. ^raegan's book ^raegan Raegan recently published a collection of about 200 poems, neatly packaged in a petite book, full of simple doodles and aesthetic designs to match each story. My mom bought it for me a few weeks ago after I had expressed...

       To end the school year with a bang, I will look into the story of another person who is tired from school. Back when I was a kid there was always this book that everyone usually read constantly during elementary school. That book was called Diary of a Wimpy Kid, I never actually read it during elementary school, but a few weeks ago, I decided to try to read it for the first time. This review will only be on the original books and not the other ones that I have read later on. This book stars a 12-year-old boy named Greg Heffley who is a person who aspires to be the most popular in the world (basically a perfectionist). He records all of his many adventures and experiences in his quote-unquote "diary". He has only one friend named Rowley who is practically the most gullible person in the book. Throughout this book, I saw myself being immersed in the many crazy and funny adventures that Greg would do with Rowley to get his way. These efforts would unfortunately b...

As we are currently studying poetry in our ELA unit, I decided to read and review a poetry book called "Yellow Star" by Jennifer Roy. This book is written in free verse and tells the true story of a woman named Sylvia, who is a survivor of the Holocaust. Sylvia was a young Jewish girl living in Poland when the Germans invaded in 1939. She and her family were forced into the Lodz Ghetto, and this book describes their experience there and how Sylvia managed to survive the ordeal.       Personally, I loved this book and found it to be an eye-opening account of what Jews went through during the Holocaust. Although it was written in poetry, it was still easy to read and understand. I think the poetry format made the narration of the book even better and allowed me to feel like I wasn't reading too much while still understanding the story. I also appreciated that the book was written from Sylvia's perspective, which gave me insight into what it was like for a young girl gr...

 Hello!     While this has been a crazy month for getting to sit down and read a book I've found a lot of comfort in the time I made the effort to enjoy a new book! The book I choose to read about this cycle is called One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus.      As I've previously mentioned in past blogs, my favorite genre of books is any sort of mystery book so when I was looking for a new book to read, it looked perfect. This book shows the perspective of five students each bringing new things to the table, the brains, the beauty, the athlete, the outcast, and the criminal with them all being trapped. With suddenly the outcast died, but they knew it was no accidentally. With everyone else becoming suspects the book leads us on a trail, figuring out this mysterious death.     This book reveals secrets that the characters are going to far to try and protect. From trying to dodge the media to a homophobic father, this book ...

Hello Potentially Happy Readers. I foresee *small* spoilers ahead. You have been forewarned. Here, be dragons.   I love this book so much. It truly touched my soul, and I love this author so much.  Solutions and Other Problems is a sequel to Hyperbole and a Half , which had been published 7 years earlier. They're a collection of anecdotes that ultimately form a sort of autobiography, and the entirety of the way the book flows through incredibly lighthearted moments to extremely serious topics just scratches the itch in my brain perfectly.  A large portion of why I liked the first book was because of its chapter on depression. I first read that book last year, and while I would consider my mental health back then, much better, I have had bouts of it before, and I HEAVILY related to it. The lackadaisical drawings are so effortlessly expressive, and there’s something about the way that Brosh describes her thoughts that is so… conveyable. Ever since I initially read that boo...