review of O'Brien's the Vault of Dreamers

Rosie Sinclair is at a special school for talented teenagers.  They are televised as a reality tv show during the day and at night they are to sleep for twelve hours.  The one night that she decides not to sleep and sneaks out is the night that changes everything.  The next day she must raise her blip ranking (popularity amongst viewers) in order to stay at the school.  She stays, but the question is whether she really wants to be there.  All of the strange things happening might make her change her mind.  She stays and she fights for what she thinks is right.  Rosie wants nothing more than to expose what really happens at the school.  She wants the world to know what Dean Berg is doing with the student’s dreams.

review of Doctor Who:Engines of War

This is the war doctor’s book.  The one where he is set on bringing down the Daleks and makes the decisions that need to be made.  He picks up a human companion who is stuck in the war.  She is a self made soldier with orange hair and a love for women over men.  She is set on the ending the Time War just as he is.  She has had to live through it and have the fear and adrenaline rule her life.

The war doctor appears and she finds hope.  He appeals to the Time Lords and the reader understands why he did not want them to make it out of the war.  They were becoming something else in the war.  They were losing who they were supposed to be.  It comes down to the war doctor and his moral judgment to save the planets that the Time Lords were planning to kill to ensure their own victory.  The Time Lords were seeing themselves as superior and experimenting on their own people.  They were planning genocide with no sense of remorse.  If the war doctor can’t make them find themselves and see the error of their ways, he can fix it himself.

review of Dashner's the Kill Order

To put it simply, this book is a prequel to the Maze Runner series.  It is best read after the series, so as not to give away the best bits of the series.  It would take away the mystery of what is happening within the series itself. 

Reader’s should partake in this glorious book so as to understand how it all came to be.  How the Scorch hit.  The sun and then the military taking out the population.  To actually be there for it and to see how something like WICKED was seen as good.  How it was not only allowed to exist, but how desparate everyone was for it.

review of Dale Peck's Sprout

The voice of this book is iron clad and cannot be broken.  The same can be said for the protagonist Daniel aka Sprout.  He leaves his mark behind of green fingerprints of everything that he touches.  He is incredibly smart and carries around a dictionary like it’s his favorite fiction book.  Sprout is a fascinating character who draws the reader in with his quick wit and unique view of the world. 

The tone and voice of the book remind me of Chris Colfer’s Struck By Lightning.  This boy is far more lost regarding himself.  His life is worse off by far.  They are both the type of voices that people need to hear in order to understand that there are different ways of life and thinking.

review of Adams' Salmon of Doubt

Douglas Adams does it again.  He takes an idea that is ludicrous and makes us realize that it is much more than some ludicrous idea.  It is something to be desired because it inspires adventure and something to be sought after because it inspires thinking.  A personal philosophy is what Adams’ stories sell.  Not just his own personal philosophy.  He sets up a ludicrous idea/world and then has the lead character simply go with it and learn from it.  They live from moment to moment and do not get hung up on the past.  They learn to think which makes the reader learn to think since they are reading through the lead’s perspective.  A personal philosophy can be found within every Adam book.  It is not just his own, but that of the characters and readers that are discovered.

review of Knudson's Evil Librarian

This is a darkly hilarious book.  What if someone who others see as being one thing was actually something else entirely?  An innocuous librarian is sucking the life force from people.  He’s taking your best friend with him.  He’s not even human.  What if you were to find out that demons are real and sucking the souls of your classmates and faculty? 

It’s a different book premise.  A high school story of first crushes becoming first loves.  Life and death meets Earth and Hell. 

Review of harry potter and the order of the phoenix

Prophecy serves as a weapon.  Knowledge is power, but it can also be a bad thing.  It can manipulate others (Voldemort knows that Harry gets flashes of his emotions and that his mind is open to Voldemort).  The desperation for knowledge by Voldemort is the seeking of certainty and control.

Thestrals are misunderstood creatures.  They are associated with death much as the Grim that was a big part of the driving force within the third book, harry potter and the prisoner of Azkaban.  They are seen as omens or harbinger’s of death when they are, in fact, creatures that can only be seen by those that have seen death. 

Umbridge is underestimated because she is small with a high voice.  She wears a lot of pink.  She basically uses the physical, her appearance, as a shield and as an offensive tactic.   If the Minister of Magic, Fudge, cannot see how dangerous she is then she can go far in what she does for his cause.  He was going over the deep end in his paranoia, but he would have drawn the line at cruelty.  She did not have a line.  She sent the dementors to Little Whinging to attack Harry.  She abused children with her punishments.  She was even prepared to use Unforgivable Curses on students.  Her pride, cruelty, and overall prejudices are her downfall.  She would have been an excellent Death Eater.

Snape is starting to be understood a little bit more in this book.  The reveal of his old memory shows why Snape hates James Potter and therefore, Harry who reminds him of James.   James was a bully and Snape simply someone to push around.  James did actually strut about the castle and flaunt himself while bullying others.  He wasn’t malicious, but he sought out attention in the worst ways.  He just wanted to impress one girl and he made a mess of things being driven in his desperation for her attention.

Dumbledore’s Army is introduced as the Ministry of Magic’s fear of what Dumbledore is actually doing with his students.  The weird thing is that the club was only started because of how the Ministry was interfering at Hogwarts.  They made their worst fears come true by pushing for it to happen.  The preemptive strike only led to a self -fulfilling prophecy.

The order of the phoenix is a group that is fighting for what is right.  They are against the ministry who refuses to believe and goes too far to disprove them.  They are against the injustice that Voldemort wants to make common place in the world.  They are the ones who were never accepted and who found their own place without trying to take anyone else down from their own place.  The order members learn from their mistakes and use them to fight, but not promote killing.