Ocean City Free Public Library Book Blog

James Eragon   by  Christopher Paolini A great fantasy book for all ages. The story is written well and shares the life of a young farm boy who is cast into a world of magic and dragons without much say in it. Losing his family and loved ones while fighting off evil forces with his blade. The choices the main character has to make also makes the reader question what would be the best option, and how it’ll affect the story. My Hero Academia by  Kohei Horikoshi  A heart warming yet intense story of superheros and a sense of rags to riches is within this Japanese comic. The story of a young boy born without powers in a world where everyone is super, makes him lesser for being different. The story  is based off of him wishing to be a great hero. Eventually gaining the abilities to achieve his dream he embarks on a journey of entering a super school to learn how to become the best hero he can be. Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agen...

      Paper Towns by John Green was first published in October of 2008, and was his third novel. With the announcement that Paper Towns was going to be adapted for the screen, following the success of the film adaptation of Green's latest novel, The Fault in Our Stars, I decided it was a perfect time to reread the book.       Paper Towns follows the story of a highschooler named Quentin "Q" Jacobson and his friendship with an eccentric girl named Margo Roth Spiegelman. The bulk of the novel is Q following clues left behind by Margo after she runs away from home several weeks before they were to graduate. Along the way Q finds himself forced to reevaluate his perspective about his town, his friends, his classmates, and his idealised image of Margo. ***       Rereading this YA novel, I immediately remembered what it was about Paper Towns that set it apart from other YA novels. There are a lot of stories in the Y...

Sam Kingston is an ordinary teenager - self absorbed, heavily concerned about her popularity, disinterested in school...the usual. Everything is hunky dory with Sam until she gets into a horrific car accident on the way home from a party. However, instead of dying, Sam is forced to relive her last day alive over and over again (a la the movie Groundhog Day ) As Sam tries to change the events that caused her death, she undergoes a major transformation as she re-evaluates the important things in life. Gradually, things like a hot boyfriend and looking a certain way lose meaning compared to spending moments with family and true loves. Overall, I enjoyed this book. It was a very quick read and there were lots of tense moments.

I received a recommendation for this book through a friend (now Young Adult librarian) from college. She described it as a mix of the book Hunger Games (see previous review here ) and the film Cube, which is a really trippy sci-fi film from the late 90s. Her description was actually pretty spot on, though I'd probably throw in some references to Golding's Lord of the Flies as well. The Maze Runner is the first in Dashner's trilogy and is centered on Thomas, a young man who wakes up one day to find his memory has been erased. He has been transported to a new strange place, called the Glade, which is basically a huge field/meadow in the center of a large and complicated maze. The area is populated solely by teenage boys. Every night the doors surrounding the Glade are shut and the walls of the maze move into a new pattern. Daytime runners try to tease out the puzzle, but must return to the Glade before the doors close or else awful creatures will hunt them down and kill ...

Sequel to the fabulous Life as We Knew It , Pfeffer explores the same scenario (an asteroid hits the moon and changes its orbit, resulting in catastophic climactic changes on Earth) through the eyes of young Alex Morales, a teen living in New York City with his parents and two younger sisters. When the moon gets hit, both of Alex's parents are away from home, thus leaving the children to act as orphans (you never find out what happens to them) to fend for themselves. Alex is extremely mature and intelligent - making sure they ration their meals long before there is a dire need to, and he is forced to do any and everything he can to make sure his family survives. This unfortunately includes scavenging through dead people's things for items to sell on the black market. As can be expected, the book is very somber and bleak. The Morales family is extremely religious, so there is a lot of talk about God and divine help, a concept which was absent from the first book. You may also ar...

Jay Asher's debut novel has an interesting premise - Clay, a high schooler receives a mysterious package of audiotapes in the mail. They are from Hannah Baker, who committed suicide a few weeks earlier. On the tapes, Hannah narrates the 13 reasons that led her to kill herself (i.e. the people that caused her such anguish). Clay was "lucky" enough to be on Hannah's list and must pass off the tapes when he is finished listening to them. The story is obviously told in flashbacks that detail several indviduals who were just awful to Hannah. Pretty much any kind of bad high school experience is on Hannah's tape-drinking, sex, bullying. Though this is a YA book, the amount of teen angst is a little too much at times. Hannah herself doesn't really come off as a fabulous (or even likeable) character considering that suicide is an inherently very selfish act and she spends 250+ pages blaming everyone else for her death. The only character that you feel kind of bad for...

Here are the reasons why I shouldn't have liked Twilight (or any of the works in the series): 1. I'm not 13. (The series is for Young Adults) 2. I received by BA in English and can recognize "good" writing and character development from "bad" 3. I usually avoid the romance and/or fantasy genres. And still...despite all of these drawbacks, I have to admit I became addicted to this series. Set in Forks, Washington, the series centers on Bella Swan, a plucky and clumsy girl who relocates to the rainy city to live with her dad. Everything is going fine until the day she meets the mysterious and gorgeous Edward Cullen. Edward and his family have a disturbing secret that noone but Bella knows about. The series tracks the epic love between the two along with some action between the Cullen family and their immortal enemies. There's also a nicely created love triangle. I am firmly on Team Jacob. The downsides to the series are that it's poorly written, featu...

Set in the not-so-distant future where the government runs everything, a group of 24 teenagers from 12 different "Districts" (some as young as 12) are picked to participate to the death in the annual "Hunger Games." Told from the perspective of Katniss Everdeen, a teen who volunteers to participate to save her sister, this is a brutal but compelling tale. Who will win and at what cost? I know some people may think this book is a total rip off of the Japanese work Battle Royale , and while the two do share a lot of similarities, I'd say there are enough differences to merit reading Collins' work. What's nice too is that Hunger Games is Book 1 of the series, so it'll be interesting to see where it goes. At any rate, if you liked reading this, you might want to also check out the old Stephen King (Richard Bachman) novel The Running Man , which is set in the future and shares the same kind of "survive while the government tries to kill you...