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If you aren't reading young adult fiction, then you are missing out. I have discovered that young adult authors are some of the most imaginative writers I've encountered. They have to be. Have you ever tried keeping the attention of a teenager? It’s a challenge!

If you want a great YA author to start with, I can’t recommend anyone more wholeheartedly than Neal Shusterman. He has a long list of great books and book series. I'd count a few of his YA series among my favorites of all time. He is going to hook you early, and he's going to make you think. That’s just the way it is with Shusterman.

My sister (a reader whose opinion I trust dearly) recommended his Arc of a Scythe trilogy to me. I'll tell you upfront- this one did not disappoint. Like some of his other works, this series is set in a futuristic society where technology has taken over for the benefit of the people. Health care is advanced. Death is no longer a natural occurrence. To make up for this, a chosen group called the “Scythes” controls the population numbers by "gleaning" people. Gleaning is the equivalent of death, and the Scythes are a revered and powerful sect of society.

Shusterman always does a wonderful job of developing the main characters that you want to follow. Whether you love them or hate them, they will capture your interest and won't let it go. This series is no different. In the first book, Scythe, you’re introduced to this futuristic world. You also meet the Scythedom and many of your main characters of interest. It also doesn't take long to see some issues with this "too good to be true" way of life offered by the "Thunderhead," the all-knowing cloud of technology running the show. Thunderhead is the title of the second book, which is action-packed. You'll learn more about some Scythes' corruption and the Scythedom's breakdown. You'll also begin to see the weaknesses of the Thunderhead. And, of course, your main characters are all over the place! So much drama unfolds. Book three, The Toll, is a rollercoaster from beginning to end. I can’t describe this one without spoiling anything. But just know that I couldn’t put it down.

Oddly enough, as enjoyable as this series was, it still isn’t my favorite work by Shusterman. My heart still belongs to the Unwind Dystology. I still need to finish the Skinjacker trilogy, which I plan to do *soon*. Shusterman has also mastered the standalone novel. If you feel like diving into your emotions, you must check out Challenger Deep. Keep your tissues close by.

Let me know if you're ready to get caught up on ALL of Neal Shusterman's greatest works. I went on a Shusterman shopping spree last year, so the Palatka Campus Library has you covered!

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How I Embrace Autumn in Sunny Florida

As someone who grew up in Kentucky, autumn has always been my favorite season. There's nothing quite like the crisp air, the golden leaves crunching beneath your feet, and that undeniable shift in the atmosphere that signals sweater weather is on its way. When I moved to Florida, I knew that my beloved autumn wouldn’t follow me. Instead of flannels and bonfires, it's endless sunshine (or like we have seen in the recent weeks, endless rain). But that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on chasing those cozy or spooky autumn vibes.When September hits, I load up my digital and physical shelves with books that have that autumn feeling I'm craving. I know it sounds silly, but I love bringing as much autumn energy into my home as possible. So, you'll usually find me reading with an autumn-scented candle burning and sipping endless cups of apple cider. I might not get to pull out my boots or wear my favorite sweater, but the right stories take me to cozy cottages, ancient forests, magical towns, or haunted mansions where autumn is in full swing.Below are some of my favs!The Very Secret Society of Irregular WitchesA warm and uplifting novel about an isolated witch whose opportunity to embrace a quirky new family--and a new love--changes the course of her life. The Unfortunate Side Effects of Heartbreak and MagicSadie Revelare has always believed that the curse of four heartbreaks that accompanies her magic would be worth the price. But when her grandmother is diagnosed with cancer with only weeks to live, and her first heartbreak, Jake McNealy, returns to town after a decade, her carefully structured life begins to unravel. Legends & LattesThe battle-weary orc aims to start fresh, opening the first ever coffee shop in the city of Thune. But old and new rivals stand in the way of success — not to mention the fact that no one has the faintest idea what coffee actually is.The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying VampiresFried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula in this Southern-flavored supernatural thriller set in the '90s about a women's book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious and handsome stranger who turns out to be a blood-sucking fiend.A House with Good BonesSam Montgomery is worried about her mother. She seems anxious, jumpy, and she's begun making mystifying changes to the family home on Lammergeier Lane. Sam figures it has something to do with her mother's relationship to Sam's late, unlamented grandmother.She's not wrong.The Midnight LibraryBetween life and death there is a library. Wuthering HeightsSet in the west Yorkshire moors, Wuthering Heights is the story of two gentry families -- the Earnshaws and the Lintons -- and their turbulent relationships with Earnshaw's adopted son, Heathclifff. Practical MagicWhen the beautiful and precocious sisters Sally and Gillian Owens are orphaned at a young age, they are taken to a small Massachusetts town to be raised by their eccentric aunts, who happen to dwell in the darkest, eeriest house in town. As they become more aware of their aunts' mysterious and sometimes frightening powers -- and as their own powers begin to surface -- the sisters grow determined to escape their strange upbringing by blending into "normal" society.TwilightAbout three things I was absolutely positive.First, Edward was a vampire.Second, there was a part of him - and I didn't know how dominant that part might be - that thirsted for my blood.And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's StoneHarry Potter thinks he is an ordinary boy - until he is rescued by an owl, taken to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, learns to play Quidditch and does battle in a deadly duel. The Reason ... HARRY POTTER IS A WIZARD! ...

By the pricking of my thumbs... A review of this year's three 'Macbeth' retellings

I’ve been on something of a Macbeth kick this year. For some reason, several authors have written “feminist” retellings of Shakespeare's Scottish play this year, all from the perspective of Lady Macbeth, and I can't be blamed for falling down this particular rabbit hole.This started a few months back when I was scrolling through NetGalley—an online service which allows library professionals, educators, and online influencers to read books before they’re published in exchange for reviews—and I came across a book by Val McDermid called Queen Macbeth. I had never read anything by McDermid before, and I didn’t really know anything about her other than that she is one of the most well-known modern authors in Scotland, but I knew I liked Macbeth, so I decided to give this book a chance. Dear reader, I wish I hadn’t because it was genuinely the worst book I’ve read this year so far.Queen Macbeth is told across two alternating timelines, the first, during Gruoch’s (that’s Lady Macbeth’s historical name for those unaware, as I was) marriage to her first husband when she met her soon-to-be second husband Macbeth, and the second, about twenty years later. I’m not sure why this story is told in alternating timelines, though, because the two are not connected in the slightest, and so far as I could tell, there was no plot to this book. Perhaps the alternating timelines existed as a means of hiding that there was no plot. I couldn’t figure it out, and I still can’t.The second Lady Macbeth book I read was significantly better, if only because it did have an actual plot, and it was generally fun to read, even if it made very little sense at first. In Lady Macbeth, author Ava Reid presents readers with a completely new, never-before-seen Lady Macbeth, replacing the middle aged Scottish leading lady of Shakespeare’s Scottish play with a French teenager named Roscille, also called Roscilla, Rosele, and Rosalie at different points in the story… apparently for the sake of linguistics. As someone with a degree in European history, I understood what Reid was going for, but I thought that it exposed a deep misunderstanding of how medieval and early modern spellings actually worked rather than adding depth and nuance to her retelling as she thought it did.Roscille is seventeen and the illegitimate daughter of a French nobleman who has married her off to some distant, isolated lower member of the Scottish noble class in order to get rid of her because she is a nuisance. Sometime before her marriage, Roscille was accused of charming a stable boy with witchcraft, and as punishment, she had to watch as her father had the boy executed, and was forced to wear a veil at all times following this incident in order to protect men from her treacherous gaze, something which she wholeheartedly believes in.When she marries Macbeth, she refuses to remove her veil in his presence even when they are alone, and she also refuses to consummate their marriage until he brings her three very specific gifts that she thinks will be difficult to procure. She is terrified of her husband and views him as brutish and harsh and unpredictable, and thus does everything in her power to avoid displeasing him, including allowing him to pressure her into committing several murders for him (a stark contrast to the OG Lady M, who pressured her husband into committing murder).This all appears to be a result of her trauma from seeing her father kill the first boy she loved and being forced to wear a veil so she doesn’t accidentally bewitch/seduce anyone else. I thought her belief that she was a witch who needed to be veiled was also a result of this trauma, but no. She actually is a witch.The first half of Reid's book read like a piece of historical fiction, while the second half was an increasingly bizarre fantasy novel interspersed with random, weirdly-timed sex scenes featuring a fellow Scottish noble's son, who is English in this story for some reason, and who can turn into a massive, powerful dragon (he didn’t do that during the sex scenes, but she did make it very clear she would have been into it if he did).At no point, though, did any of this book feel like it had anything to do with Macbeth beyond the fact that some of the characters had the same names as characters from Macbeth, and there were three witches who made a few cameo appearances. I generally enjoyed this one, but I didn't like it as a retelling of Macbeth.The third and final Lady Macbeth book of the year (unless someone else drops another one in the final months of 2024…) for me is All Our Yesterdays by Joel H. Morris. This book is by far my favorite of these three, and one of my favorite books I’ve read this year in general. It is the only one of the three that interprets the characters in a way which, in my opinion, honors the play it was based on.Where Val McDermid’s Lady hates her first husband for being weak and cowardly and unmanly and therefore, in her eyes, less-than, Morris gives her a backstory which makes her hatred of him make sense, and which equally shows the reader how this Lady has fought for her life as well as her station and how she could become the Lady Macbeth of Shakespeare’s play. Where Ava Reid’s Macbeth was large and brutish and cruel, Morris’s Macbeth is a gentle, softspoken, and somewhat awkward man who tries—not always successfully—to leave his battles on the battlefield, and who loves his wife and puts her comfort and her interests first, which lines up much more believably with the Macbeth Shakespeare created.Interestingly, Macbeth was referenced in another book I read this year as well: Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, which is actually a retelling of another Shakespeare play, King Lear. From the perspective of Agnes, Private Rites’ Cordelia (Lear’s youngest and most beloved daughter who he cast aside late in life), Armfield writes of the three sisters:It occurs to her [Agnes] that there has always been one shitty witch in Macbeth, the one that never says anything useful and always just seems to be filling in space between the other two. Most of the time she feels like this witch is Irene, although sometimes it’s Agnes and sometimes it’s all of them, which doesn’t really make sense but still feels fundamentally accurate. (p. 175, UK edition).The inverse, I think, is fundamentally accurate where these three Lady Macbeth books are concerned: two are just filling space with nothing useful to say, and one is a proper one....

What did I just read?!

Well… I’m not really sure where to start this post. I decided at the beginning of this year that my reading goal was to stick with the genre that I love most – romance – but broaden my horizons within the genre. My least favorite and least read genre is fantasy/science fiction. Ever since I read Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorn and Roses (ACOTAR) series last year, I decided that maybe I was too harsh on the genre of fantasy and should give it another go. So far, it hasn’t been too bad! But I’ve come to the conclusion that within the genre of ‘fantasy,’ I’m still not a huge fan of the “fae/fairy” stuff. Now, there have been some exceptions to this rule, such as ACOTAR, so I wanted to keep an open mind. That brings us up to our Book Club meeting on July 16th…Having discussed with the group about my goal of trying to read more fantasy/sci-fi but disliking “fae/fairy” stories, our very own Brittnee Fisher then recommended I should read, How Does It Feel? by Jeneane O’Riley. To be fair, she did warn me that it was a “fae/fairy” book and that she did not like it and that it was wild (and not in a good way). With a raving review like that, who could stay away? So, I quickly found and downloaded the book, then waited a few days (because I had no idea what I was about to dive into), then I got started…So, all I knew starting this book was that it was a well discussed book on BookTok and the synopsis on Amazon – A forbidden obsessionUnyielding family allegianceThree deadly challengesTHE HUMAN.When a trip into the forest to collect a rare mushroom goes horribly wrong, I find myself falling through a fairy portal and straight into the arms of the Unseelie Fae prince. The dangerously unhinged and handsome Unseelie Fae prince.What could be more horrible than that? He thinks I'm an assassin sent by the humans to kill him, not a biologist.Determined to kill me first, and rid himself of the human he has unwillingly grown obsessed with, yet also needing to entertain his people, the villain challenges me to three deadly trials.If I survive, I gain my freedom. But if not...The Fae.I've never felt anything but hate and loathing until my eyes found hers--the vile human assassin's. She is a parasite that has mercilessly latched onto my mind and won't let me free.My hand itches to be ungloved and feel her smooth skin, even though I would never. The Unseelie Fae royals would rather burn than touch a repulsive human.I fear that if I do not destroy the girl soon, she may be the only thing that's capable of truly destroying me. Let’s just say, this book was… a collection of interesting choices. First, the main heroine, who is a human, Callie, is just not very smart. She makes one horrible mistake after another that really left me confused. The main love interest, Prince Mendax, who is the prince of the unseelie court, is supposed to be an anti-hero/villain-who-gets-the-girl, however, he was BEYOND unlikable. Because he is the “villain” of the story, he was abusive and horrible with Callie, and it makes absolutely ZERO sense why she would end up falling in love with him. Speaking of falling in love, I’m still baffled as to how Mendax becomes interested in Callie. He is convinced for the ENTIRE book, that Callie has been sent to kill him. We also never get his perspective so his “love” for her really feels out of the blue. The “relationship” that forms over the course of this book is best described as toxic. Basically, Mendax starts off hating and abusing Callie and then ends up being an obsessed stalker. There is also a twist at the end that I have to say, I didn’t see coming, and I guess, cleared up some confusion about the plot. However, the book ends on a cliffhanger and left me feeling uncomfortable with the toxic relationship and confused with the overall choices the author made.But obviously I had to read the second book! What Did You Do? is the title and it is even more wild and confusing than the first! I won’t go into too much detail into this book since the main plot is about the twist at the end of the first book. However, another love interest enters the picture to create a sad and messed up love triangle between the three characters. Things got even more wild and crazy with the plot, and it ended on another cliffhanger.I believe that there are supposed to be two more books in this series and honestly, I’m probably going to read them. So far, these books are like car wrecks, you can’t help but look! I can also honestly say that I said to myself, out loud, “what the heck am I reading?” multiple times while reading these books.So, with all that being said, if you want to read something crazy (and not in a good way), check these out! And if you too are uncomfortable and confused by these books, we can all thank Brittnee for that!...

Bright Young Women defeat a law school drop-out

Top left: Bright, young women Lisa Levy, Margaret Bowman, both murdered by Bundy.Bottom left: Bright, young women Cheryl Thomas, Karen Chandler, Kathy Kleiner, all injured by BundyNita Neary, a member of the Chi Omega sorority, came home to find Ted Bundy (Left-artist’s rendition with Neary’s description; Right-photo of Ted Bundy) running from the house.Chi Omega Sorority House description of Bundy’s attack On January 1, 1978, at 4:00 am, serial killer Ted Bundy brutally murdered two women and injured three others (see first photo above) at the Chi Omega Sorority House on the Florida State University campus in Tallahassee, Florida. Nita Neary, sorority sister to the women, saw Bundy run past her and out the front door. Later, she would become a witness for the prosecution at the trial that convicted what the judge would call at his sentencing a “bright young man.” Seeking to correct the judge’s ridiculous and erroneous description of the sadistic murderer who kidnapped, raped, and killed at least 30 women, Luckiest Girl Alive author Jessica Knoll wrote Bright Young Women. When I re-watched the judge at Bundy’s trial attributing those compliments to Bundy, I am in disbelief, and I have always felt sickened by the positive adjectives heaped on this killer. After finishing graduate school and moving to South Florida in 1989, I worked in a high school where Bundy’s crimes were still on the faculty and staff’s minds. Buried deep in my subconscious, I was reminded of his murders when a fellow teacher recalled dropping her daughter off at FSU. “You remember what happened [at FSU] when Bundy killed those sorority girls.” No, I hadn’t remembered, and she reminded me admitting that parents were still haunted by the killings and dropping their bright young daughters off at FSU scared them to death.I was in eighth grade when Bundy killed these bright young women, but I wasn’t aware of the stranglehold that his crimes had on a nation mired in Vietnam fatigue and Watergate. Today, viewers can’t get enough of true crime, and I counted 30 shows currently on Netflix alone that will quench viewers’ thirsts, including “Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes.” Googling “shows about Bundy” displays the following hit: Present-day interviews, archival footage and audio recordings made on death row form a searing portrait of notorious serial killer Ted Bundy. Watch all you want. Knoll destroys his “bright young man [ness]” when she refuses to call him by name; instead, she refers to him as the defendant. When the judge referred to him as “bright,” she reminds the reader that he was in the bottom fifth of law school, and he wasn’t accepted to ANY of his top choices. He also attended the University of Utah School of Law, but only because of falsified documents. Few people know that although Bundy did represent himself at his murder trial, he had a “team” of lawyers at his side to act as advisers. Knoll surmises that he acted as his own attorney so that he could “relive his crimes.” And finally, he NEVER earned his law degree. Spending his time as a serial killer may have hindered his studying for exams.Knoll reminds the reader how the New York Times played a part in wrongly characterizing the defendant referring to the serial killer as a “terrific looking young man with beautiful eyes, light brown hair…Kennedy-esque.”When the defendant stuffed his prison cell keyhole with toilet paper to cause his tardiness to the courtroom during his trial, reporters called him “clever.” Knoll’s response: “I have a dog who rips up toilet paper when he doesn’t get his way, too.” I’ll allow the reader to connect the dots here.All too often, the victims of crimes are shoved to the background, while the perpetrators occupy the foreground. Reading Bright Young Women reminds the reader that honoring the lives of Lisa Levy, Margaret Bowman, Cheryl Thomas, Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner eclipses the scores of TV shows and movies devoted to a not-so-bright sadistic murderer. ...

Another YA Win by Shusterman

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