Getting Weirder...

I am still reading the Adoration of Jenna Fox. Jenna has just gone back to school, albeit only three days a week at a charter. A lot of weird things happened before that. First, Jenna found that she was missing a scar on her chin that she had when she was ten. I know that over the course of seven years, it would be much less recognizable, but scars never disappear without a trace, like this one did. Also, when Jenna remembered going camping, she also remembered the taste of hot chocolate. Jenna couldn't eat normal food, just tasteless nutrients. Her parents said that it was because her body couldn't digest normal food after getting its nutrients through a tube for over a year. When she made hot chocolate, she expected it to taste like how she remembered it to taste like. However, when she drank it, it was tasteless. There is one more hint that something much weirder than just a car accident and a coma had happened. When Jenna was up in her room, she heard her mom and grandma (though she always called them by their first names) in a loud discussion about her. Lily (her grandma) said that it wasn't natural. I'm not sure exactly what she means by that, but it definately means something is up. Anyways, when Jenna was in school, she met her four classmates, Ethan, the boy she saw at the mission, Dane, the boy who lives in the Georgia style house, Allys, a girl who lost much of her body to an infection and had very realistic looking artificial limbs, and Gabriel, another boy. I think that Allys' artificial body shows what medical science can do in the future and might act as a way of foreshadowing what really happened after the accident. This book has been filled with suspense and I would suggest reading it.

Eh...

This week, I tried to start reading Truancy, but I couldn't really get into it. It takes place in a city in the distant future, where the government is trying to control through education. As a student, your life is basically controlled by school. The school day isn't any longer than ours, but during that time, you can't talk unless called upon, you have to were hidious and uncomfortable uniforms, you get even more homework than on a busy night here, and you only have one day a week to get away from it. When I started reading it, I figured that the school system was like the japanese school system. They have school on saturday and have to wear uniforms, but it doen't seem nearly as oppressive as this book is. I kind of got bored of it once I found that it's pretty much the same as our world, only school is even more boring and oppressive. I also started reading the adoration of Jenna Fox, which I am more interested in. It is about a seventeen year old girl named Jenna Fox who had been in a coma for a year and forgot who she was, what happened to her, how to walk, talk, and pretty much everything else. After a couple of days, she started regaining the abilities that she would have to use every day (walking, speaking, ect.) but still had no memories. The house in california that she lived in after she woke up wasn't the house she lived in before. She didn't have any friends, or she used to, but they gradually forgot her. Oh, and did I mention that it takes place in the future? So far, the events in the future haven't affected the story much. I don't know if I should recommend this book yet, but it looks promising.

Hungry for more!

This week, I am reading the Hunger Games. Almost everyone I know who read it recommends it, and I can see why. I've only had the book for about three days, and I'm almost done with it. The oppressive laws in Panem remind me of the American Revolution, only this is more of an alternate universe where the colonists didn't win their Independence, and ended up stuck with even more oppressive laws. If you get caught for stealing anything, even if you're a three-year-old who just stole something like a piece of candy, you could end up getting whipped or even killed without having so much as a trial to plead your case. If you can't work or get enough money to feed yourself, you either break the law and harvest food from the meadow or the woods, or starve to death. When I read that District 12, the poorest district, was in Appalachia, I realized that in the hundreds of years in the future that this book takes place in, not much has changed. Jobs are still scarce, hunger still rampent, only here, food stamps and wellfare aren't here as a safety line. Also, the fact that 24 teenagers are forced to kill each other, causing needless casualties and grief, just as a way for the Capitol to assert its superiority is pretty harsh too. Whoever came up with that idea must have no conscience whatsoever. They killed a boy who obviously had a serious mental disorder when he stole a pair of night-glasses. In today's society, someone like that would be given help. Having to either lose your life or your humanity-or both- just to amuse a bunch of rich hypocrites shows how ruthless these leaders are. I know that our world today has plenty of unfairness and cruelty in it. I just hope that the real world doesn't end up like this. This is definately a great book, with just the right balance of action, romance and suspense. However, it is also pretty violent and in some parts very sad, so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone under ten or eleven years old.