YA Review: Noggin by John Corey Whaley

Travis Coates died of cancer five years ago.
Or at least, his body did. His head was cryogenically preserved until which time that a donor body could be collected for him to be reanimated with. 
Sounds crazy, right?

Well it sounded that way to his girlfriend, best friend, and parents also, when he told them five years ago that he'd be ending his fight with cancer and flying to Denver for the operation that would hopefully give him a second chance at life. 
For five years, they mourned him, and continued with life, until a crazy thing happened.

It worked.

Writing Club: Ransom Rigg's Style

Writing Club was AWESOME today!!

First of all, I am starting this new season of writing club with a drastic location change.  Rather than using our youth services activity room, I have decided to move us upstairs to the adult conference room.  I'm hoping that this move, from the dark basement where friends and distractions can just wander in, participants will start to feel like they're in a serious classroom and that what they do matters.  

My teen summer reading program this year is all about spies and conspiracy theories, so I thought it would be cool to alter our writing club sessions this summer to fit the theme.  

Laser Tag in the Library

So, I kept hearing all of these wonderful gaming and activity programs that people were trying in their libraries.  Everything from mini-golf to hide-and-seek, so I thought laser tag would be a great and fun end to Teen Tech Week this year.  We had a great time, and it went along even better than I thought.  Want to try it?  Or at least hear about it?  Well here ya go! 

We Take This Man by Candice Dow

We Take This Man by Candice Dow My rating: 1 of 5 stars 

WTH?! This book should have been called, "We drive this dumb dude crazy", or "We stupid women", or "We Blind Mice", or anything else along those lines.

While We Take this Man, does open the door for some riveting conversation about polyamory and marital compromise, it did not do the most simple task entertainment has: Satisfy and take care of its audience. I was angry and frustrated at all of the characters from the beginning to the very end, and as a reader, that disappointed me. Even the victories and semblances of good sense and triumph left me feeling blah.

I was extremely disappointed in what this book said about both women and men!  Both sexes appeared to be morons.  It made women out to be treacherous and misguided, and made men out to be blindly driven by honor and loyalty with no personal conviction.  WOMP. T

he book also made no attempts to find solid footing for any of its blow-ups and it had no clear ending. Stylistically, these two authors did an amazing job of producing a riveting drama that was full of turns and shock values. It was a page-turner if nothing else. However, being intriguing and being satisfying are two different things. View all my reviews

Gaming Review: Tomb Raider

OH.

MY.

WORD.

First of all, let me say that I finished this game with 73% completion in about two days.  Now for most games, that would annoy me because I'd feel like there wasn't much substance.  With this game, however, I felt like there was no real choice.  I HAD to finish it.  The story demanded it.

I have played all but two games in the Tomb Raider franchise, and I have to admit that this may very easily become second only to the original.

Pieces of Programming: Tween/Teen Flashback Day

While many of my library kids may never know much of the technology I did as a child, I've found that there is one definite way to bridge our generational gap: GAMING!  If I put a record and record player in front of my kids, there's a good chance only one or two of them will know how to make them work, but if I put an original Nintendo system in front of an eight year old, they'll beat a game that I never could.  In that frame of mind, I decided to host a flashback day for our tweens and teens to allow them a chance to look at how far games have come, and where they may go.