The Radish

                         The Andromeda Evolution  is the second part of the book I did my last blog post on, The Andromeda Strain  by Michael Crichton .  It is set several generations after the original book, and discusses a potential re-emergence of the mysterious hexagonal shaped microorganisms that nearly caused a global crisis in the previous book (Disclaimer: as this book is the second part in one that I've already done a post on, so it will contain spoilers). Like its predecessor, this book hooks the reader on the first page and makes it difficult to put the book down. Before finding this book, I didn't think it would be possible to create one better than its prequel. I haven't finished the book yet, but from what I've read it seems like this book will not disappoint. It is exciting and enjoyable to read for many of the same reasons as The Andromeda Strain. Michael Crichton introduced ma...

  Kathryn Phillips “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.” Seventeen-year-old Alice Prosepine and her mother, Ella, have been living on the road their entire lives in an attempt to escape the terrible luck that seems to follow them around wherever they go. But when Alice receives a letter telling her that Alice’s estranged grandmother Althea Prosepine, the author of a famous cult-classic collection of dark fantasy stories called The Hinterland has died alone on her estate, Alice learns how bad her luck can get. After her mother mysteriously disappears, leaving behind nothing but an excerpt from The Hinterland , Alice must reluctantly team up with an Althea Prosepine superfan, Ellery Finch, and travel to her grandmother’s estate to find Ella. The two soon realize that Althea’s fairy tales might be more fact than fantasy. The main reason I loved The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert was the characters. They’re extremely well-written, with realistic aspirations, personalities, ...

    While Roadside Picnic's story and characters are extremely interesting, with the main character, Red, having significant character development as the book takes place over many years by skipping large groups of time.       Before the events of Roadside Picnic some sort of alien visitors arrive and create a large area filled with extreme dangers like slime that destroys anything it touches and an area completed destroyed by some sort of plague. However along with those dangers there are valuable artifacts like batteries that never run out and disks that can't be separated. These treasures cause scavengers called Stalkers to sneak past the guards and brave the dangers in hopes of getting fabulously rich; Red is one of these Stalkers.      What makes this setting so interesting to me is how limitless the possibilities it is. The book makes it extremely clear how only the well known parts are explored and that the closer to the cent...

Aya Surheyao  “Her power slit their throats, flung them back against the wall, dove inside their screaming mouths, and burned them from the inside out… And then, Rielle looked down at herself and saw that again… her hands, her boots, her skirts were drenched in fresh blood. (Legrand 384)”       Dark, heart-wrenching, and action-packed, Kingsbane makes for a great fantasy read. It is the second book in the Empirium trilogy, written by Claire Legrand. In the world of Avitas, an ancient war between humans and angels ends with the angels tricked into inhabiting The Deep, a realm where their bodies are stripped from their consciousnesses. Now they seek escape … and revenge. This book straddles two timelines, with one set farther in the past where Rielle struggles to believe that she is the Sun Queen and not the Blood Queen, meant to doom humanity. One can infer from the passage above which one she turns out to be. The second queen is Eliana and her story takes place ...

     If you could not tell from the terrible pun in the title this blog is going to be about the Grimm Brothers' Fairy Tale . It is a collection of the fairy tales we all know and love written by the brother Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. These fairy tales were written back when caring about children's mental health and not murdering people in children's books was not something many people cared about. These were stories meant to instill messages in kids' minds, one way or another. As you can probably tell these made the fairy tales I read in this book rather grim, I'm sorry that's the last pun. Another thing to note is the fact that the brothers did not make up most of these stories, someone else did. The brothers made a collection of tales they got from other people, which they then did some edits to. So with that all established, let's get into one of the weirdest stories I've read.     The first story I want to discuss is The Gallant Tailor  which was publ...

          Well I (Shreyas) am actually not sure since I'm only part of the way through the book, so I don't know whether the pathogen actually came from somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy or not. What I do know however is that I will not stop reading until I finish. There are many things that make The Andromeda Strain  by Michael Crichton and published in 1969 very interesting and fun to read for anyone.          The book has a unique plot, one which I have not seen in other science fiction movies. In the story, humans are visited by aliens. The aliens aren't the classic short big headed humanoids, but are microscopic pathogens from a different planet. The book opens with a lieutenant that is investigating the small city of Piedmont, Arizona. He arrives at a grisly scene, nearly all 48 of the town's members dead, shortly before dying himself.  Extremely detailed thermal satellite images show the same scene. Then the au...

  The most interesting thing about Threads by Ami Polonsky to me was the way in which the story was formatted and how it connects to the themes in the book. Each chapter flips between the perspective of Clara, a twelve-year-old girl living in America, and Yuming, a girl around the same age living in China. Yuming has been kidnapped and forced to work in a sweatshop for several months when she writes a note, pleading for help, and sticks it in a purse on the assembly line. Clara finds the note one day at the mall and becomes dead set on saving Yuming. The story unfolds from two different perspectives: Yuming scrambling to escape from the factory and her kidnapper Mr. Zhang, and Clara scrambling to locate this strange factory and save her. As the story progresses and Clara and Yuming’s narratives start to become more and more intertwined, you come to really appreciate the way the book is structured. The back and forth chapters are especially interesting when you add in the element o...