Lucy

Name: 

Lucy

Age: 

6

Personalities:

Sweet, caring, brave when she needs to be, spirited 

Best Moment: 

When she stood up to Mahalia by not singing “Happy Birthday” correctly. 

A Book Review: The Other Side of the Island by Allegra Goodman

Wow! This book was amazing amazing amazing! I’ve read other books like this before—with other worlds and over governments—but this was by far the best one yet! I read it in almost one sitting. It was so captivating and interesting! Honor and her parents live on an island under the watch of Earth Mother and her many rules, but Honor’s family doesn’t follow most of those rules. They have an illegal second child, stay out past curfew, and even Honor’s name, in which the H is silent, doesn’t seem appropriate anymore. Honor and their second child—her brother—Quintilian, worry about their parents. Because in this world, if you don’t follow Earth Mother’s rules, you disappear. And don’t come back.

I love love loved this book. Great writing, great characters, and a real realistic feel! Even though Honor starts as a ten-year-old and finishes as a fourteen-year-old I’d reccommend this to all ages. I take back my five stars—it deserves at least ten!

Mahalia

Name: 

Mahalia 

Birthday: 

Who knows? And who really cares, anyway?

Personalities:

Need I really list? She’s evil, cruel, wicked, mean, bad, naughty, awful, terrible, atrocious, abysmal, horrible, horrid, terrifying, horrifying, crummy, rotten, lousy, lazy, useless, pathetic, careless, selfish, harmful, damaging, destructive, villianous, nefarious, dishonest, dishonorable, ill-behaved, unruly, uncaring, ignorant, thoughtless, greedy, menacing, inconsiderate, vile, outrageous, bitter, sick, dumb, wrong, sinful, foul, corrupt, malicious, sinister, monstrous, atrocious, mischevious, malignant, nasty, unpleasant, filthy…you get the point. 

Greatest Wish: 

For the world to all become her slaves for eternity and for Amethyst & Friends to be destroyed for EVER!!!! 

Best Moment: 

None. 

Worst Moment: 

Now we’re talking! It could be when she captured Amethyst, tried to destroy Lucy, hired Quiana to take over and fly a jet plane (that’s illegal you know) and then throw them out the window (even more illegal) it could be sending innocent orphans on trains, or…never mind.

Appearance:

She’s really…oh, never mind, you don’t wanna know.

A Book Review: Love, Aubrey by Suzanne Lafleur

Love, Aubrey is the best, most amazing, saddest book ever written. And I mean it. You will never regret reading it! The writing is so capitivating; you feel both Aubrey’s happiness and sadness. You feel so bad for her, and you can’t stop reading until the last page, when you find out the outcome. It will keep you thinking long after the last page and I’d say the only thing wrong is you’ll go crazy wanting a sequel so you can hear more of Aubrey’s future life! 

The story is about eleven-year-old Aubrey. Her dad and little sister, Savannah, have just died in a car accident, and her mom, crazed with grief, abandoned her. Left alone in her house, Aubrey lives alone for a week—until Gram comes to take her home to Vermont. 
At home, Aubrey’s friends had abandoned her, she was living by herself with nobody to watch her, and she hated school. Here in Vermont, she goes to a nice school, lives with her caring grandmother, and has a new best friend, Bridget. But the emptiness from the loss of her family is still there. They’ve been searching for her mom for a long time with no clues. Why would her mom just….leave?

Wow—it is just a beautiful book. It takes true talent to write a book so good it makes you want to cry. Read it! You will never regret it, and you will never forget Aubrey’s story. Reading her memories, you start to miss Savannah, too, even though you never knew her. 

Love, Aubrey definitely deserves five stars. It’s the most amazing book you’ll ever read. 

Writing Tip #3: The Editing Process

The editing process. It can be hard. It can be difficult. But it can also be very exciting. When you’re editing, you have power to change everything and anything.  You can change the starting point and ending point. You can change characters, add characters, delete characters. You can add and delete chapters. The point of the editing process? It’s to make the book the very best it can be.
So here’s my top secret (not really) tips on making your story the best.

1: Your first attempt will never work as a book.
That’s the hard fact. The first try, the first attempt, most likely is going to stink. (Mine always do.) What’s the point of the first draft, then? To get the story finished. Don’t worry about grammar. Don’t worry about editing-along-the-way. Don’t worry about names, chapters, or if it makes sense. When you’re writing your first draft, you have 1 goal and one goal only, and that is to get it done.
Once your first draft is finished, I highly advise starting a new draft and rewriting the story—this time, worrying about all those things I told you not to worry about. Can you still use your great sentences from the first one? Sure. But make sure they really are great sentences first.

2: Feel free to change the story around!
Once you have a second draft finished, you may have a great idea for a new plot twist. If that happens in the middle, feel absolutely free to start again on a third draft. You may think your story is working fine and you don’t need a third draft. If so, consider yourself amazingly talented, skilled, and lucky, because I can’t get a really good story until draft 4 or 5. Mostly because I keep coming up with better ideas. (LOL.)

3: Once you’re finished with it, set it aside!
This is EXTREMELY important. When you have a draft that you think works, put it aside and DO NOT LOOK at it for at least a week. Why? Because after a week, when you look at it, you will find more mistakes or things you can improve. I can pretty much guarantee it. You should just see my third draft of The Hidden Amethyst, which I thought was the final one. It’s hilarious. I had a chapter where Amethyst (called Eliza then) and her friends are almost run over with an airplane! Not only was it totally unrealistic, it was ridiculous. I also had the Mochas be good people, because I added them in afterwords to get the names in—which leads me to number 4.

4: Do Not Get Lazy!
I got lazy in my third draft of The Hidden Amethyst. How it went was: I wrote all about “Eliza” and her friends walking along having an adventure and I’m sure I had multiple descriptions of their raggedy clothes in there. So later on, I add in the Mocha family because I need to get my friend Avery’s name in there, and my story leads to the Mochas giving them all these clothes. The problem is, later on, they have ragged clothes and I knew it. I got lazy. Instead of finding all those descriptions of their clothes and changing them, which would have been the better idea, I just wrote a chapter where they get robbed. Pathetic, right? DO NOT DO THIS. Obviously, when I went back to re-edit (that’s where Eliza became Amethyst) I deleted that part out, in the process making the Mochas evil. My whole third draft, come to think of it, is just me getting lazy. So take that as a lesson: if you find an issue like the one above with an easy way to get rid of it and a hard way, generally, the hard way will get you a better story.

These are the tips I’m following myself as I work through my next book, which should release next August. Hope they were helpful to you!

Avery Mocha

                                                        Name:

                                                      Avery Mocha

Birthday: 

 July 12

Personalities: 

Cautious, reluctant, kind; a follower

Greatest wish:

For her mom (Jenny Mocha) to become good

Best Moment:

  When she came to Dr. 

Sawyer’s office to

                                                     apologize to Amethyst

Book Review: Eight Keys by Suzanne Lafleur

Eight Keys by Suzanne Lafleur is a beautiful book with a great writing style⎯but what book by Suzanne Lafleur isn’t? I just finished re-reading it for like the hundredth time and it currently is my favorite book! **SPOILERS AHEAD**

The story is about a girl named Elise. Elise’s parents died when she was young, so she lives with her Aunt Bessie and Uncle Hugh. In the beginning of the book, Elise starts middle school, and suddenly everything is different. After an unfortunate incident in the woods, she has become the target for bullying and teasing at her new school, particularly by her locker partner, who finds immense fun in ruining her lunch every day. Elise always had her best friend Franklin to turn to, but now, to Elise, he seems babyish and is unintentionally embarrassing her. At the same time, her aunt’s sister Annie and her baby daughter Ava move into Elise’s house, seeming to interrupt and sometimes ruin her wonderful life with her aunt and uncle. Things just keep getting worse⎯until Elise finds a key. A key with her name on it. A key that starts an adventure of discoveries. A key that unlocks one of the upstairs rooms in the barn, rooms that have been locked up for as long as Elise can remember....

I was reading reviews on this book and it seemed to me like one thing people didn’t like was that it seemed to them like the message going over was “Telling an adult about a bully doesn’t help.” They didn’t like that message. However, I don’t see that message at all. When Elise tells her teacher, I can agree that her teacher doesn’t seem to care the first and second times; but when she tells her aunt and uncle, they do do something about it— they give her advice on how to handle it. Maybe some readers wanted Aunt Bessie and Uncle Hugh to go storm to the school and demand Elise be treated fairly. But in reality, maybe they wanted Elise to try to manage it herself, for her to have courage to stand up for herself. And that is a definite message that is sent.

Personally, I can not find anything I do not like about this book! Everything Elise endures—whether it’s good or bad—winds together and twists together to create one unforgettable story of mystery, friendships, and a few keys that happen to unlock secrets from the past. I can guarantee this is a book you will never regret reading.