Miss Lowe's Book Nook

I've been a busy bee lately, but I devoured my most recent read in less than 7 hours. Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon is one of my favorite books of the year so far. PSA: I only picked up this book because I heard it's going to be a movie starring Amandla Stenberg (Rue from The Hunger Games) and Nick Robinson (from The 5th Wave). Now that I've read it, I totally agree with their casting. Madeline Whittier is our main character. Since she was a baby, she has been living with an autoimmune disease that prevents her from going outside, because any little thing could cause an allergic reaction and kill her. So she has lived in her white room and white house for 18 years, with her mother as her constant companion, as well as her nurse, Carla. They're pretty much the only people she knows, aside from the teachers that she talks to on Skype. She reads books and plays games with her mom after dinner, and lives a very calm life. Then, out of the blue, a new family moves...

Fun fact about me: I have an unreasonable amount of knowledge about the Tudors of England. I have devoured dozens of books about Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, and Elizabeth I. But I had never read very much about someone who had a (very) brief rule in between them- Lady Jane Grey. So when I heard about My Lady Jane , a new retelling of her tale by the combined creative minds of Cynthia Hand, Jodi Meadows, and Brodi Ashton, I could not resist diving in. It was so much fun! For those of you who haven't spent ages researching Tudor monarchs, Lady Jane Grey had her nine day reign (yes, only NINE days) after the death of Edward VI. She had been married to the son of one of Edward's chief advisors, Lord Dudley. After Edward's death, Dudley put Jane on the throne (she had a legitimate, if distant, claim to the throne) to stop Edward's sister Mary from becoming queen. However, Mary soon gained the support of the military and common people, deposed Jane, and had her beheaded. (Start...

Sometimes, you read a book and it's just a little too real and freaks you out a bit. Kill The Boy Band  by Goldy Moldavsky was that book for me. In it, four fangirls do some insane things, all in the name of their favorite band. Now, I'm quite a bit of a fangirl myself- I can talk for literally hours discussing whether Snape was a good guy or a bad guy (he's so awful guys come on) or if Aaron Burr was a sociopath or just misguided (the jury's still out on this one). But these girls take being fans to a whole other level. The book begins with four girls, drawn together in fandom- Isabel, Erin, Apple, and our narrator, whose real name I don't think we ever actually found out. Whenever she introduced herself to other characters, she used a name from an 80s movie. Quirky, but it creates an unreliable narrator. These four teenaged girls are enormous fans of a British boy band called "The Ruperts". Yep, all four members are named Rupert. It got a bit confusing ...

Summer reading continues! This one wasn't as good as I had hoped, however. But it was good enough to occupy me on a long car ride! Lock & Mori by Heather W. Petty was yet another Sherlock tale, but with some significant twists (that didn't always work the way I hoped). In this new version of the classic crime solver, instead of teaming up with Watson, Sherlock bonds with a girl named Mori- short for Moriarty. Mori is our narrator. Her mother has died from cancer and her dad, a Detective Sergeant in London, is nearly crazed with grief, even going so far as to start abusing Mori and her brothers. Then Mori meets Sherlock. He's odd and off the beaten path and somehow knows all about her from a glance. He also happens to be the guy that always stands in the same bandstand as her in Regent's Park, though they never realized it until they met in school. When the father of a schoolfellow is murdered in the park, "Lock" and Mori can't help but investigate. L...

Confession: I've been in a bit of a slump. My summer so far has been quite busy, and I managed to re-read about three Harry Potter books before picking up another new read. However, I did just finish a rather enjoyable book- Summer Days and Summer Nights : Twelve Love Stories , a cute little anthology featuring twelve popular YA authors, edited by Stephanie Perkins. It was a fun way to get back in the swing of things. As I said, there were twelve individual stories in this book. I didn't read all of them- two of them I just didn't vibe with, so I skipped them. However, all the other ones were enjoyable. I'll just tell you about my favorite ones: "In Ninety Minutes, Turn North", by the editor, Stephanie Perkins, and "Love is the Last Resort", by Jon Skovron. I've read a but of Perkins before, but I had never read anything by Skovron, so he was a surprise. Perkins little tale was actually a bit of a sequel. She has added to a Christmas anthology...