Social Issues Books - Page 12

The Truth About Forever

Sarah Dessen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 173 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

My favorite book during high school. BEST COMING-OF-AGE BOOK! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This was my favorite book during high school, and I still to this day recommend it to everyone I meet. There are not enough words to describe just how great this book really is, and even so, words cannot do this book justice. Definitely the best coming-of-age book I've ever read, and when I have my own family in the future, it will be the first book I recommend to my daughter. (Yes, it is that good!)

Editorial Review:

Sixteen-year-old Macy Queen is looking forward to a long, boring summer. Her boyfriend is going away. She’s stuck with a dull-asdishwater job at the library. And she’ll spend all of her free time studying for the SATs or grieving silently with her mother over her father’s recent unexpected death. But everything changes when Macy is corralled into helping out at one of her mother’s open house events, and she meets the chaotic Wish Catering crew. Before long, Macy joins the Wish team. She loves everything about the work and the people. But the best thing about Wish is Wes—artistic, insightful, and understanding Wes—who gets Macy to look at life in a whole new way, and really start living it….

Clique #9, The: Bratfest at Tiffany's (Clique Series)

Lisi Harrison

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• ADVANT Collegiate Dictionary
• Sold as 1 EA

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Massie Block: The Briarwood boys have invaded OCD and are taking over everything. Worse, the soccer boys have become so popular that the Pretty Committee's alpha status is in serious jeopardy. So Massie lays out a New Year-New Pretty Committee rule: Anyone caught crushing on a boy will be thrown out of the NPC-forever. But will she be able to follow her own decree when she sees that Derrington has ditched his shorts-obsession in favor of ah-dorable jeans?

Alicia Rivera: Is the opposite of onboard with the boyfast. Her crush, the Ralph Lauren-luh-ving Josh Hotz, is more irresistible than crème brûlée fro-yo. But is he worth losing her spot in the NPC? And taking on the wrath of Massie?

Dylan Marvil: Is so ready for the boyfast. She's straightened her unruly red hair and permanently pressed boys out of her life. If only she could do the same with curly fries and caramel popcorn.

Kristen Gregory: Has traded her sporty-chic Pumas for Billabong board shorts and a shark tooth necklace. She claims she's sworn off boy-crushes, so what's with her Blue Crush makeover?

Claire Lyons: Spent all summer thinking about Cam's one blue eye and one green eye. But now he's moved on to a new girl faster than you can say cuh-yutest couple. At least Claire finally has a secure spot in the NPC-unless jealousy-flirting breaks the boyfast. . . .


The Clique: The only thing harder than getting in is staying in.

The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963

Christopher Paul Curtis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 634 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

This book is the best! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

When I read this book it was hard to put it down! From Kenny who is very talented for his age to Byron(By)who tries to act all cool to their little sister Joetta(Joey)who is very different for a young child things are very crazy sometimes. Their dad,Daniel, acts like a clown when he knows people are watching him. He is from Flint the town they now live in. Their mom,Wilona,is a very calm person when she wants to be and sometimes she is kind of a drama queen.She is originally from Birmingham. When they all go to Birmingham they listen to music on their recently bought record player and take adventures!
If you decide to get this book I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Editorial Review:

A wonderful middle-grade novel narrated by Kenny, 9, about his middle-class black family, the Weird  Watsons of Flint, Michigan. When Kenny's  13-year-old brother, Byron, gets to be too much trouble,  they head South to Birmingham to visit Grandma, the  one person who can shape him up. And they happen to  be in Birmingham when Grandma's church is blown  up.

Two-way Street

Lauren Barnholdt

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

i liked it 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

it's something different and unique. i was pretty satisfied with it and would give it 4 and a half stars. i liked the way the author wrote from the point of view of both jordan and courtney and kept switching from past to present; i thought it would be confusing but the author made sure that didn't happen. the suspense is also good and i can tell because when the secret is revealed to the reader, i literally gasped and stared gapelessly at the page for like thirty seconds. the love story is sweet and cute. the only thing i didn't like about the book was the writing style itself. it sounded like a distressed cheerleader talking the whole time; maybe because it sounded so much like a teenager talking i didn't like it, because i prefer more sophisticated writing. overall, a quick read, i finished it in several hours.

Editorial Review:

there are two sides toevery breakup.

This is Jordan and Courtney, totally in love. Sure, they were an unlikely high school couple. But they clicked; it worked. They're even going to the same college, and driving cross-country together for orientation.

Then Jordan dumps Courtney -- for a girl he met on the Internet.

It's too late to change plans, so the road trip is on. Courtney's heartbroken, but figures she can tough it out for a few days. La la la -- this is Courtney pretending not to care.

But in a strange twist, Jordan cares. A lot.

Turns out, he's got a secret or two that he's not telling Courtney. And it has everything to do with why they broke up, why they can't get back together, and how, in spite of it all, this couple is destined for each other.

Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry

Mildred D. Taylor

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 461 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

My Favorite Book 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This was my favorite book in the world as a child. I read it over and over, beginning I think in the 3rd grade. It was deeply moving and probably shaped who I am today.

Excellent source to learn African American history in the 1930s 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is a great book! It is well written and the story line is very easy to follow. This book was one of three books that was required summer reading for my daughter's 6th grade class and she loved it as well. It gave her a different perspective on the different and most often times unfair treatment African American received during the 1930s. I strongly recommend this book to every young person to learn a few of life's lessons.

Black after the civil war 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book portrays the vivid reality of ugly racism after the civil war. A great book and one worth your time and mine. A past of social injustice that we do not want to go back too, nor become the men or women who caused it.
Anna del C.
Author of "The Elf and the Princess"
and "Trouble in the Elf City"
The Elf and The Princess: The Silent Warrior Trilogy - Book One (The Silent Warrior Trilogy)

Editorial Review:

The "vivid story of a black family whose warm ties to each other and their land give them the strength to defy rural Southern racism during the Depression"--Booklist, starred review).

Story of a Girl

Sara Zarr

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A Touching Coming of Age Tale 5 out of 5 stars.
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This book weaves the tale of a girl who cannot shake a bad reputation. However, though the premise may seem simple, the characters, actions, and motivations behind their actions are not. The style of writing and topic make it a quality story about forgiveness and growing up.

Read it! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Very realistic book! Not only did Story of a Girl explore the troubled lives of teenagers, it showed the impact the importance of the support of family and friends. When I first ordered this, I thought it would be just another melodramatic book jam-packed with teen angst, but the plot delved much deeper than I expected.

I'd definitely recommend that you read this book.

Editorial Review:

When she is caught in the backseat of a car with her older brother's best friend - Deanna Lambert's teenage life is changed forever. Struggling to overcome the lasting repercussions and the stifling role of "school slut," she longs to escape a life defined by her past. With subtle grace, complicated wisdom and striking emotion, The Story of a Girl reminds us of our human capacity for resilience, epiphany and redemption.

CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY by Alan Paton

Alan Paton

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 247 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

It's on my Top 10 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 20 people found this review helpful.

How much can a man love his country? How much can he love his son? His God? Can justice prevail when man cannot? What is forgiveness? Redemption? Grace? To consider all these elements in one novel is not possible. Or is it?

"Cry, the Beloved Country" is all these things and more. It is forgiveness writ large. It is agape love in the doing. It is the story of two fathers, each with a son. One son is the victim of apartheid and is lost. The other is also a victim of apartheid but of the other side. He seeks to find a way to make things better, to make things right. The lost one kills the seeking one. One is African, the other is Afrikaaner, and therein lies the difference and the ultimate. This difference, this ultimate, this absolute are what drove Alan Paton in the writing of South Africa's most famous, most searing novel of the separation of races in all ways.

Absalom Kumalo's life is limited in all ways because he is black South African. Arthur Jarvis is an engineer and has all the privileges of white South Africa, yet he is keen on social justice and works to bring it to pass. What irony then that the one without kills the one seeking to bring justice. However, it is this very irony that brings their fathers to friendship, to a bonding of black man and white man.

Umfundisi is the black priest (not Catholic) of a simple, poor church in a village located near the home of the rich landowner and farmer, James Jarvis, who really does not know his son until he is dead. It is the getting to know his son that he connects with the African, and the father becomes the son in the ways of love and forgiveness. The umfundisi is one of my favorite characters in all literature I have read because of his humility and reverence.

This novel, published in 1948, remains as one, even today, apropos to race relations, to their very real potentials and actualities. Mutual respect, sincerity, forgiveness, and grace all come to the fore in this most magnificent, lyrical novel.

It would be on my Top 10 list of books I would take if marooned on the proverbial deserted island.

The Wonder of Boys

Michael Gurian

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 79 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

lots of redundancy, but some useful advice 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

When my son was about to be born, I panicked, because I thought I would not know how to give a good upbringing to a boy. I have only a sister and my husband is an only child. We discussed the issue a lot and we sometimes had different views on how to deal with boys, to do everything to make our son happy and fulfilled. So - we decided to buy a book and chose "The Wonder of Boys".

The book is not bad, but it is not very good. First of all, there is nothing new in the notion that boys are different from girls and that testosterone is physiologically responsible for these obvious differences, boys being more competitive and aggressive etc. Many things described by the author are obvious and instinctive. I would be happy to see more scientific dissection of the differences, something similar to "Brain Sex" by Anne Moir and David Jessel (a really valuable book, by the way), but with the focus on children and the education of boys.
The "old-new" rules of the boys' education and need for the male presence in their lives, the importance of the group, sports and discipline, are nicely presented at the beginning, but later on the book gets very repetitive, full of redundant information and artificially blown out of proportion. Maybe the purpose was to make the reader memorize the rules subconsciously (after all, it is one of the therapy principles, I think). For me, it just made the book boring and I could not help thinking it would be much more useful in a form of an article or essay. It seems to me more like an introduction to Gurian's guidelines, more developed in his later books on various aspects of the boys' character and education.

There is some advice I found good there, though: the rules for disciplining the boys at different stages of life, the details of the father's role, the discussion on spanking, the teaching of morals and spirituality. I could do without superficial examples from the world cultures.

I did not find this book particularly challenging for feminism, on the contrary, I think it presents reasonably the roles of both parents and the methods for building the family life beneficial for the offspring, which happens to be male.

Altogether, I rate "The Wonder of Boys" at three stars, it is neither outstanding, nor hopeless, but the useful advice needs to be extracted from a lot of meaningless words and the book could only benefit from being more concise and to the point.

Editorial Review:

I n this edition of his parenting classic, Michael Gurian considers how the culture has changed in the ten years since The Wonder of Boys was first published, including the impact of the Internet.

Best Friends for Never (The Clique, No. 2)

Lisi Harrison

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 89 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Shallow 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

The characters in this book are spiteful, manipulative, and shallow. But even worse than that, I feel sorry for them, and sorry for any girl who feels like she has to be fake in order to have friends. How terrible that people won't like them for who they really are.. and how awful that must feel to think that one wrong move and your best friend is now your worst enemy. The author of these books has glorified being cruel and encouraged young girls to be scared of who they are. What a heartbreaking message to send girls as they try to discover who they are. Being kind, compassionate, funny, adventurous -these are the sort of things that maintain a friendship. Under all the glam and the glitz, Massie's character seems so lonely. She is afraid to be real with her friends, her family, and herself. Girls thinking of buying this book: you are better than this. Love yourself enough to be proud of who you are and read books that encourage you to be the incredible girl you are! Parents, if you love your daughter, pay her not to read this.

Editorial Review:

The Clique is back ...Massie Block - Still gorgeous. Still trendsetting. Still ruling the social scene at school...she hopes. To keep her spot at the top, Massie decides to throw the school's first boy/girl Halloween party. But her parents are making her invite the entire grade AND share the party with Claire. She's not sure which is scarier...Dylan Marvil - Lost the weight. Kept the attitude. Plans to use her new look to snag a cute guy. Kristen Gregory - Clothes are for sharing. Guys aren't. Likes the same guy Dylan does. Will do whatever it takes to get him. Alicia Rivera - With the Clique unravelling faster than last season's Burberry sweater, is it time for Alicia to stage her takeover? Claire Lyons: Still out. Wants in. Seriously needs to lose those Keds.

Pretties (Uglies Trilogy, Book 2)

Scott Westerfeld

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 104 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

good sequel, but not as good as the first 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Pretties is the second volume of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies Trilogy. It picks up almost exactly where Uglies left off and the story is fairly involved so I strongly recommend reading Uglies first. If, however, you decide to ignore me, here's a brief explanation of what's going on which will necessarily include spoilers (and yes I am quoting my own review):

"Uglies is set in the distant future after a mysterious global catastrophe precipitated changes to the foundations of what readers would call modern society. Fearful of war and violence cities now operate as independent states (think Renaissance Italy as opposed to contemporary Italy). Isolated and self-sufficient, the cities have agreed to certain standards for the greater good.

"New technology ensures that citizens never want for food or luxury items, weapons of any kind are largely illegal, and at the age of sixteen everyone undergoes a series of extreme surgeries to better conform to societal standards of beauty. The logic being that, since humans are preconditioned to respond to certain visual cues in each other already (big eyes are non-threatening, a clear complexion and good teeth indicate that a person is healthy), applying these beauty standards will reduce conflict and create a more harmonious society.

"But in a world where everyone is movie-star-gorgeous (oldies like Rudolph Valentino and Greta Garbo are considered "natural pretties"), normal people are so not pretty. In short, they're ugly."

At the end of the first book, our heroine Tally Youngblood also learns that normal people are smarter than the Pretties. As part of the government's plan to keep the population in line, Pretties' brains are surgically altered with lesions to make Pretties more complacent. The government's logic can be summed up in four dangerous words: for the greater good.

At the end of Uglies, knowing now that the operation has to be stopped, Tally makes the ultimate sacrifice--she allows herself to undergo the Operation in order to become an undercover operative of sorts. The only problem is that, because of the Operation, she forgets everything she learned about the Operation, the government, and perhaps most importantly about Special Circumstances (Westerfeld's interpretation of secret service/black ops types).

In other words, Tally starts Pretties with a basically clean slate. She and best friend Shay know that they lived with the resistance group known as The Smoke, but little else. Looking for something "bubbly" to do as Pretties, the girls decide to join the Crims--a clique known for pulling dramatic stunts in order to stay bubbly and consequently think a little more clearly than Pretties usually do. As Tally becomes more involved with the Crims and their leader, Zane, pieces of Tally's past begin to fall into place. But, the more Tally learns about her past, the more confusing things become as she has to decide between her past and her present.

Of the trilogy, this one is my least favorite. The characters, being Pretties, seemed the most unreal. Although Westerfeld evoked a very realistic world in Uglies it all rings a little less true here. I love how much slang these novels use and how easy it is to follow, but that too got to be a bit much.

The novel ends on a dramatic note, Tally once again rallying against those who would maintain the status quo. But at the same time, like in Uglies, she is once again a victim of circumstances. So, although the ending is great, it's also a bit too familiar. Since Pretties is part of a trilogy, it is a must-read to see what happens to Tally. But, in this reviewer's opinion, the second installment in the trilogy doesn't quite live up to the hype created by the first.

Editorial Review:

Gorgeous. Popular.

Perfect. Perfectly wrong.

Tally has finally become pretty. Now her looks are beyond perfect, her clothes are awesome, her boyfriend is totally hot, and she's completely popular. It's everything she's ever wanted.

But beneath all the fun -- the nonstop parties, the high-tech luxury, the total freedom -- is a nagging sense that something's wrong. Something important. Then a message from Tally's ugly past arrives. Reading it, Tally remembers what's wrong with pretty life, and the fun stops cold.

Now she has to choose between fighting to forget what she knows and fighting for her life -- because the authorities don't intend to let anyone with this information survive.