By Neha N., Grade 9

Book Review: I Was Born For This

I Was Born for This

I was Born for This is a novel written by Alice Oseman about teenager Fereshteh (commonly known as Angel) who gets the opportunity to see her favorite band, The Ark, perform in person. She has a momentous week planned out with her long distance best friend, Juliet, who she’s never met in person, filled with fan meetups, exploring, and of course the concert. However, nothing ends up going according to plan. This book threw quite a few curveballs at me. At first, there were little surprises that I thought were going to be major plot points–but then as I got deeper and deeper into the book, more surprising events kept happening. I feel like Alice Oseman’s writing style is generally less about action and more about emotional vulnerability, but this book felt a little different from what I would typically expect. It contains far more action than what I’d originally expected, but not so much that it detracts from the emotional revelations and healing journeys of the characters. Everything that happens in this book happens for a reason, to emphasize what the main characters are going through and how they eventually learn that they need to make major changes in their lives in order to become happy again.

Something I enjoyed about this book was that it had two main characters that didn’t meet until over halfway through the story. I always enjoy when writers do this because the reader’s able to enjoy that dual-perspective charm we love without having the redundancy of reliving the same events twice. It also gives some very subtle foreshadowing. During the beginning of the book, the reader may think there’s no possible way for the two protagonists to ever meet each other, but the fact that they’re the protagonists gives away the fact that their paths intersect at some point. 

Overall, I think this book was very charming and emotional. Alice Oseman definitely did an incredible job of narrating both of the main characters and what they were going through. However, I did feel a little bit of a disconnect between myself and the characters, since I don’t have anything in common with them. Of course, this may not be an issue for other readers, but personally, I’d give this book 4 stars. 

Book Review: Ready Player One 

Ready Player One

Ready Player One is a dystopian novel following the life of Wade Watts as he tries to win a competition for ownership of the largest video game and virtual reality universe in the world, called the OASIS. During the journey, he finds that another organization (nicknamed the sixers) have plans to cheat their way through the competition to take ownership of the OASIS and turn it into a corporate money machine. Wade is then forced to team up with several fellow competitors to stop the sixers from ruining the OASIS. Throughout the book, Wade is forced to shed his identity and fight for his life as he learns that the sixers are willing to pull dirtier tricks than he thought in order to win the competition. 

I really enjoyed the writing style and tone of this book, and I thought Wade was an interesting enough character to be a protagonist. However, I think I would have liked to see perspectives of some of his to-be-friends (not necessarily because I got bored of Wade, just because all the characters were so interesting). Although Wade didn’t bore me, I didn’t feel like he wasn’t really the most interesting character out of his group of friends–especially after they met in-person for the first time after only seeing each other online. I thought the plot was pretty good, although there weren’t any major twists that surprised me-it was a pretty standard hero-versus-villain adventure, in which the hero eventually wins. My main compliment for this book was the world building. I think that the dystopian setting really shined as the perfect world for this book to take place in, and everything about how the Earth had changed made sense to me.

Overall, this book was pretty solid. It didn’t really stir up any emotions within me, but it was certainly entertaining and I was glad that the heroes won. I’d definitely recommend this book for anyone who enjoys dystopias, or is into video games or virtual reality. 4 stars.

Book review: The Martian 

The Martian

The Martian, a Sci-fi book by author Andy Weir, is one I didn’t expect to enjoy. After all, my preferred genres usually don’t range from dystopias, fantasy, or realistic fiction. However, Andy Weir managed to narrate this novel in such a way that I clearly understood the “science” parts while still being able to accept the book as “fiction” instead of something purely educational. 

I really liked this book because of a few key details. One was how the book was structured. Technically, it was in present tense, but most of it was read in the form of journal entries from Mark Watney, an astronaut who was abandoned on Mars during a mission for NASA. When a mission on Mars goes south, Mark’s crewmates are forced to evacuate Mars less than a week after the mission starts. Leaving under the presumption that Mark died, the crewmates spend their time in grief, not knowing that they’d eventually go on to help save Mark by rescuing him from Mars in the end. Reading logs of everything Mark Watney did on Mars, it was easy for the author to explain how everything worked (for example, most people don’t know how space suits function). If he’d written the book from a third person past tense perspective, he wouldn’t have been able to explain those things. However, Watney, being exceptionally lonely with no one to talk to, takes a conversational tone in the logs while explaining what he did during the day. During the few segments from NASA’s perspective, third-person narration worked since there wasn’t much science to digest. The same goes for the segments from Mark’s crewmates’ perspectives, which I feel added a nice touch and gave the story more dimension emotionally. Once I understood how guilty the crew felt, I found myself even more emotionally involved.

I don’t have any major complaints about this book. It has a very strong conflict to offer, as well as a funny and relatable main character that the reader doesn’t get bored of. As I mentioned, scenes from other perspectives were managed well and enriched the story. Overall, the best aspect of this book was the plot—I was on the edge of my seat, hoping and wishing that Watney would somehow make it safely back to Earth from his seemingly impossible-to-survive circumstances. This book was certainly a page turner, although it was too long for me to finish in one sitting. Definitely a must-read, even for sci-fi skeptics. 5 stars.