Leave it to the Prose

On the surface, they are identical, straight to the dimples. A nuclear family with parents working high-paying jobs with two identical-twin daughters doing well in high-school. But beyond this mask this family has dark secrets that twist their lives. Identical by Ellen Hopkins is a powerful story about abuse and coping. Before I begin to review this book let me warn you, this book is very mature. Concepts like sexual assault, sex, drugs, self-harm, and incest are all present.  Identical is written from the perspectives of teenage twins Kaeleigh and Raenne. Each page is a free-form poem with one of the two narrators talking about their lives. Hopkins masterfully uses this abstract form of writing to show a deeper meaning that extends to the lines themselves. You can see how Hopkins wants you to read the book by the breaks within the lines and the power of each message is heightened by their unique form of styling. Emotional bits are shaped in the shape of a heart and the more dar...

Hi everyone! So over the summer I started reading screenplays and I recently discovered the screenplay of the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind . The story explores love, heartbreak, and how people react to emotional pain. Overall I really enjoyed it but I did have some issues with the story's structure. First, a summary: Joel is on the brink of breaking up with his long-time girlfriend when he meets a new girl, quirky and outgoing Clementine. They date for a while, fall in love, but eventually break up. Soon after, Joel discovers Clementine has gone through a procedure to have all her memories of Joel erased. Angry and distraught, he elects to have the same procedure done to him. It is difficult to summarize the sequence of events in the story, especially without spoiling it, because it is not chronological. The story itself takes place in a very short amount of time and mostly in one location - Joel's bedroom as he is having the procedure. But the scenes in Joel...

The protagonist of Warcross by Marie Lu is an eighteen year old girl called Emika Chen who lives in a digitally obsessed world. She is only a couple days away from being evicted from her apartment. In her last desperate attempt to pay her rent, Emika hacks into the national tournament of Warcross; a virtual reality game that has spread all over the world. However, while she successfully hacks into the game, Emika is also glitched into the game and everyone in the world can see her, the rainbow-haired girl who is not supposed to be there. Emika is sure that she will be thrown into jail but instead, receives a call from Hideo Tanaka, the extremely wealthy creator of Warcross and offers her something she can't refuse: he'll give her a billion dollars to help him track down an enemy. However, not everything is what Emika thinks it will be.  The characters in this book are quite complex and there is a lot we as readers don’t know about each of the characters. Additionally, they ...

Zev McManus-Mendelowitz “Paul O’Rourke is a man of contradictions… He’s a Luddite addicted to his iPhone, a dentist with a nicotine habit, a rabid Red Sox fan devastated by their victories, and an atheist not quite willing to let go of God.” Joshua Ferris’ book “To Rise Again At A Decent Hour” lives up to this book jacket description as a work of contradictions: there wasn’t much of a plot, yet the book hard to put down; the narrator’s struggles were common, yet his way of describing them was unique. Over the course of this 337-page novel, NYC dentist Paul O’Rourke brings us through his life as an outsider. Despite his successful career, O’Rourke struggles with depression and longs to “be normal.” O’Rourke desperately wants something that can give meaning to his life or, as he puts it, “something that could be my everything.” After failing at music and golf, numerous relationships in which he became obsessive and came on too strong, and basically everything else he tries...