Miss Lowe's Book Nook

Like I said in my post yesterday, I got a lot of reading done on vacation! On the flight home from the beach, I finished Zodiac by Romina Russell. It was a vivid space extravaganza, with dashes of romance and mystery thrown in for good measure. We are presented with a world based on the Zodiac. The twelve constellations are home to people that exhibit and value the traits of their sign, even down to their physically appearance. Rhoma Grace is from Cancer, a culture based on water and nurturing relationships. She's a young trainee in the Cancrian academy and a drummer for a band. When disaster strikes one of her planet's moons and sets off a chain reaction of chaos, Rho is suddenly thrust into the limelight as the new head of her people. However, more danger lurks in the far reaches of space. A mysterious figure haunts Rho's Ephemeris, which is her device that shows her the stars and allows her to read them. Fleeing Cancer to warn the other Zodiac houses about the coming d...

I love summer vacation. So much reading! This week, while laying on the beach, I read Trouble is a Friend of Mine by Stephanie Tromly. It was a delightful romp of mystery, teen angst, and surprises. Our main character is Zoe Webster, a 16-year-old girl in upstate New York. She just moved to River Heights with her mother, both of them recovering from her parents' messy divorce. On Zoe's first day at the local high school, a mysterious boy in a suit shows up on her doorstep, introducing himself as Philip Digby. Over the coming months, Zoe and Philip get themselves and their friend Henry into a boatload of trouble, including truancy, breaking and entering, vandalism, drugs, a kidnapping investigation, and a cult. With an angry school officer on their backs and the average high school drama all around them, Zoe, Digby, and Henry conduct an investigation to find a missing teenage girl, whose disappearance may or may not have something to do with a mystery from Digby's past. Al...

Fact fact: 12 hour drives are really good for getting some reading done. Today I breezed through Virals by Kathy Reichs. I bought and read it quite a few years ago, but it remember almost none of the plot, so it was like reading it anew. I actually enjoyed it more this time around! If you've heard of Kathy Reichs, you'll know she writes the books that inspired the TV show Bones , centering on forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. Virals centers on her great-niece, Tory Brennan. Tory is living with her father on a remote island off of South Carolina. He's a marine biologist working at a research facility on another nearby island. Tory, meanwhile, has befriended the other scientists' children- Hiram, Shelton, and Ben. They're all wicked smart and love science and their island. While investigating one of the other islands, Tory and her friends discover a wolfdog pack. When one of the pups goes missing, they're on a hunt to find it. When they find him hook...

Why not start summer reading with a good old-fashioned sob story? I just read Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, which has recently been made into a film starring Sam Claflin and Emilia Clarke. I could tell from the trailers alone that I would end up crying, but I trudged on, and seriously did cry at the end. Moyes knows how to tear you up. Will Traynor was a world traveler and successful businessman until one fateful day in London. After a near-fatal crash, he's left as a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the upper chest down. Louisa Clark is an almost entirely ordinary girl, from an ordinary tourist town. She dresses eclectically, but lives a quiet life still in the her same childhood home with her parents, sister, nephew, and grandfather. When she loses her café job, Lou (as she's called), her nearly fruitless job hunt leads her to becoming something of a caregiver and companion for the wheelchair-bound Will Traynor. Over the course of her employment, the changes they both work on ea...

Hello all! It's finally summer vacation, so I can get a load of reading done. This weekend I read a book that was actually recommended to me by my sister. Thanks for the Trouble by Tommy Wallach was a surprising and heartfelt read that I thoroughly enjoyed. Our main character is a high school senior named Parker Santé. He's been mute since his father died, and uses a mixture of sign language and writing in a notebook to communicate. Hanging out in a swanky hotel one day, he encounters a girl of indeterminate age with silver hair and an extremely large wad of cash. Parker attempts to steal this rather obscene amount of money, but instead gets roped into a deal with the silver-haired girl, whom he learns goes by the name Zelda. (Like Fitzgerald, not the video game.) Throughout the next three days, from October 31 to November 2, Parker and Zelda get into some insane hijinks. There are parties, fistfights, chess matches, alcohol, beaches, museums, hospitals, and more. They seem ...

Finals week is fast approaching! So what have I been doing? Reading a book that has absolutely nothing to do with any of my classes! Today I finished Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman. It was, shall we say, enlightening. I've always been fascinated by the brain. It's three pounds of mushy pinkness floating around in a bone bowl, but it somehow controls our bodies, understands science, creates worlds out of ink and paint, and stores obscene amounts of information. I always end up in awe of God's handiwork when I learn more about the complexities of our squishy control centers! Eagleman is certainly very knowledgeable. He focuses on the brain as the center for thinking rather than giving us a tour of the specific parts and their functions. His case is this: our consciousness is actually only a tiny, miniscule part of our brains, and the rest is out of our control. Most of what we think we think, is actually thought and processed in deeper parts of ...

Hello all! Hope your days are lovely. This isn't really going to be like my normal blog posts. It's more my thoughts concerning one particular character- Hermione Granger. If you don't know who that is, I have two questions for you. 1. Have you been living under a rock for roughly 15 years? 2. Seriously how do you not know the brightest witch of our age? Well, on with it! I first started reading J. K. Rowling's epic saga in third grade. I was already a fairly advanced reader and devoured books like mad, but those books I read so voraciously that I had books 1-6 read in less than 4 months. (Book 7 didn't come out until after 4th grade.) Not bad for a 9-year-old. These books were like drugs to my young mind. I had never read anything like them before. Somehow, an entire world fit inside the pages and then leapt into my head. And there was one character that has always stuck with me, through half a dozen more readings of the series. Hermione Granger. To underst...