Miss Lowe's Book Nook

Oh, Thanksgiving break! A great time to catch up on reading. I just breezed through Denton Little's Death Date  by Lance Rubin. It was not at all what I expected, and I was pleasantly surprised! Imagine a world in which you knew the exact day you were going to die. In Denton's world, that's exactly what it's like. When you're born, they take a bit of your hair and blood and do some scientific mumbo-jumbo and boom, they can figure out the day the Grim Reaper is going to come knocking on your door. Denton is what they an "early"- he's slated to die before he turns 21. Before he graduates high school, in fact, on the day of senior prom. He has been living his life as normally as he can, going to school and being an average joe. Two nights before his "death date", his average streak is shattered. After an alcohol-blurred night, things get weird. Strange people show up. Odd things start happening. Denton's death date is nothing like he imagi

Wow, I am on a roll this week! Another book down. I sped through a newer novel this weekend- The Rest of Us Just Live Here , by Patrick Ness. I was pleasantly surprised by it! Have you ever wondered what the background characters in a book feel? In your dramatic fantasy novels, with zombie apocalypses and vampire love triangles, what is going on in the heads of the innocent bystanders? That's who this story was about. Mike, Mel, Henna, and Jared all live in a nondescript suburb of a nondescript city. They're not "indie kids", those cool-but-also-geeky types who always end up saving the world. They're just average. There are indie kids around, sure, but they don't really talk to the normal kids- too busy stopping soul-eating ghosts to mingle. But Mike and his pals have their own, less supernatural, problems. Anxiety, complicated family lives, teen love, and even more complex issues come up. The four friends just want to make it through graduation- but will th

It's November! Less than two months until CHRISTMAS! I really really really love Christmas. So I started my holiday season off right, with an excellent re-read - Let It Snow , a three-part story by John Green, Maureen Johnson, and Lauren Myracle. I first read it last year around Christmas time, so I was looking forward to reading it again. It was just as good the second time around! Each author wrote their own story, but they all intertwined and overlapped, sometimes in unexpected ways. It was so fun to be reading one story and recognize characters from another. The individual tales centered on love stories, of course; specifically, Jubilee and Stuart, Tobin and Angie, and Jeb and Addie. All of stories took place within 48 hours- from Christmas Eve through the day after Christmas. They also all take place in the same town- the little hamlet of Gracetown, which is hit with an insane snowstorm, and because of it, six teenagers fall in love. The writers all bring their personal sty

Finding time to read in college is hard! But I finally finished another book, Rick Riordan's latest teen-hero extravaganza, Magnus Chase and the Sword of Summer. This is Riordan's first novel in a new series, one that deals with the Norse gods. He gained fame with his work with the Greeks, so I was interested to see how he handled the opposite end of the spectrum- the harsh Norse myths differ greatly from the fun-loving Greeks. With this in mind, I realized I know pretty much nothing about Norse mythology. All the information I had previously gleaned was from the Thor movies, and apparently those are not entirely true to the original myths. So I learned quite a bit on my journey with Magnus. Our adventure begins with Magnus Chase, a young homeless guy in Boston. He's orphaned, ekes out a life on the streets, and loves falafel. When people from his past start looking for him, he attempts to find out more about his family- most specifically, his Uncle Randolph, who his moth