Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment by James Patterson

Maximum Ride Book One, The Angel Experiment
By James Patterson

Max isn't normal. Not even close.
In fact, she's only 98% human. What's the other percent, you may be asking?
Avian, aka bird.
But, you might also be asking, what difference does 2% birdy DNA make?
A stinking lot, let me tell you.
Max and her friends, her Flock, as they call themselves, all have wings. All six of them.
The rest of Max's Flock (Gazzy, Angel, Iggy, Nudge, and Fang) mean everything to Max, because they're all she's ever had. After all, it's probably pretty hard to make friends when you're a bird-freak.
Anyways, Max's Flock means everything to her, and when one of them gets captured by the evil School, the lab where they were created, she's going to save them. No matter what.
Even if she has to fight the 'Erasers', a wacked-out form of werewolves also created by and run by the School, and risk her own life on the line.

Review | The Iron King by Julie Kagawa

Hey everyone!  Cassia here!  I saw Beautiful Creatures!  It was good, but the book's better.  That's usually how it works anyway.  So if you've read the book...in the movie Ethan is cooking his own breakfast. *shudders*  That's just weird.  So, I was playing around with Blogger, seeing what it can do.  I made us a button!  All you have to do is copy and paste the code below it onto your website!  Thanks to eHow for the article of how to do it!  Here's another review for you all!

The Iron King by Julie Kagawa

Meghan’s life has always been a bit...odd.  It all started when she was six--and her own father disappeared before her eyes.  Now, everything she’s known is slowly spiraling away.  There are things in the shadows, and she can never quite see them clearly when she looks.  Her joker best friend Robbie has also been acting strange.  Suddenly, he’s overprotective.  Is it her?


Okay, sorry the summary is so short.  It’s hard to do it without spoiling anything, so that’s as much as I can give you.  I will give you something else, though: it’s about faeries.  Woo!  My favorite fantasy creature is faeries, so of course I loved this.  I was telling my friend about Wicked Lovely (she never heard of it!), and she handed me this and told me to read it.

I really like the world Kagawa has created in this series.  It has a lot of folk lore, including legends, and of course my favorite part, the Seelie and Unseelie Faery courts.  If you’re new to faeries and are wondering what the heck those are, the fey are organized into two courts: Seelie and Unseelie.  The Seelie Court is also known as the Summer Court, and is the...tamer of the two courts.  In the Nevernever (aka Faeryland), the Seelie court is in a section called Arcadia, if you’ve ever heard of it.  The Unseelie Court is the polar opposite of the Seelie Court: it’s also known as the Winter Court, and backstabbing--literally sometimes--is commonplace.  Now, you might have heard of the section of the Nevernever it’s in: Tir Na Nog.  As for characters, Meghan struck me as not the smartest person on Earth, but she got better over the course of the book.  And then there’s Ash...*swoon*  No, I’m not telling you who he is, either.  I really really liked Robbie!

In the first book of The Iron Fey, Kagawa builds a world that is easy to get lost in with all of the action, folk lore, and of course, romance.
Five stars!
Goodbye for now,
Cassia

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

Hey everybody!  Cassia here!  So, sometimes two out of the three of us will do a review together.  Here's a review of The Hobbit by Max and I.

Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit.  What is a hobbit, you might ask?   A hobbit, according to dictionary.com, is a ‘member of the race of imaginary creatures related to and resembling humans, living in underground holes and characterized by their good nature, shortness, and hairy feet.’  So I guess you could say Bilbo is pretty special.  His perfect life is disrupted, however, when the wizard Gandalf and Thorin and Company ask him to come with them and reclaim their treasure and their kingdom from the evil dragon Smaug.  Here, Bilbo survives trolls, crazy elves, and he discovers the ring.

    He’s even more special now that he has the ring.   And it’s not just any ring, let me tell you.  This ring turns the wearer invisible.    Finally, Bilbo and his companions arrive at the evil mountain , where Smaug, and finally, the treasure awaits him.  With his strange magical ring, what could go wrong?
    The Hobbit is an adventure book.  So, if you like that, you might like it.  I say might because it really was not good.  When I read, I need imagery to get the picture in my head, and this book had none.  Also, I love good foreshadowing.  In my book, the foreshadowing should be very subtle so that you hardly even know it’s there unless you’re looking.  This book had a lot of foreshadowing, and it was bad, obvious, and made the whole thing predictable.  It was also kind of confusing.  It explains what a hobbit is, but it doesn’t really tell you exactly what world you’re in.  Usually, you can identify what world a book is in by what some people--including me--like to call ‘world-building’.  This book did not explain any of it at all.  Basically you had to know what a troll, elf, and dragon is.  You’re just kind of thrown in without any explanation at all.
    One star.

Goodbye for now and fly on,
Cassia and Max

Modelland by Tyra Banks

Picture courtesy of Goodreads

Modelland

Author: Tyra Banks
Series: Modelland #1
Release Date: September 13, 2011 
Pages: 576
Review by: Tessa

       Every year, thousands of girls everywhere in the world strut their stuff for a chance to go to Modelland. Modelland is a model boarding school build on top of a HUGE mountain. Tookie never wanted to go to Modelland--she didn't even enter the contest-- but she miraculously got chosen by the most famous Intoxibella, one of the few who graduated from Modelland. Tookie, with her afro hair, mismatched eyes, and massive forehead, will travel to Modelland with three other girls, who like Tookie don't seem to be cut out for Modelland. Dark rumors are starting about why Tookie and her new friends got into Modelland. None of them are pleasant. Modelland is ready for them...but are they ready for Modelland?

Forever by Maggie Stiefvater

Hey everybody!  Cassia here!  Ahhh, Saturday.  It's nice not having to do anything.  Anyway, here's another review: Forever by Maggie Stiefvater.

WARNING: If you have not read the first two books in the Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy by Maggie Stiefvater, I highly suggest you stop reading NOW.  Thank you!

Forever by Maggie Stiefvater

Now Sam is human...and Grace is the wolf.  They want to be together forever, but how can they when one of them is a wolf?  Now, Sam and Grace must fight harder than ever to be together...and their only hope of salvation may just come in the form of Cole St. Clair.   Now, Culpeper wants to have a legal hunt on the wolves.  Can Sam, Grace, Cole, and Isabel save themselves and the Wolves of Mercy Falls?


I hate irony.  And this book is definitely ironic.  Oh, wait, I did not mean that I hated the book!  I absolutely loved the book, and it's a lot better than the first two books.  (If that's possible ;)). Anyway, remember way back in Shiver when Sam was the wolf and Grace was human?  Yeah, well, now it's backwards.  Which absolutely drove me nuts!  The title is so fitting: Sam and Grace want to be together forever...literally.

Agh this is hard without spoiling anything.  I love it when characters change.  Cole did change a lot since the beginning of Linger.  Then, he was suicidal, and didn't want anything to do with himself; basically, he hated himself, couldn't figure out how to live with himself.  By the end of Linger, he's found his purpose, and he's a lot happier.  (When Tessa was reading this series, I kept telling her how awesome Cole is and she kept giving me this weird look that said, "Why?  He's the exact opposite of you!  How could you like him?" And after she finished it she admitted I was right.) I think all the characters changed throughout the series at some point.  Grace did a little bit, Sam did a lot, and even Isabel did.  Again, there's music.  There's one particular scene with Sam and Cole in this book that I absolutely love, and it's just so tender and they're actually getting along.

In the final Wolves of Mercy Falls book, Stiefvater explores having a purpose in life, sacrifice, and once again, love.  The ending will not disappoint.  (Oh, and I'm going to warn you right now: on her website, Stiefvater said that no matter what, she is never going to write short stories or sequels to go with the trilogy. *sob*)
Five stars!
Goodbye for now,
Cassia