The James Logan Courier

By Kayleen Garingan, Courier Staff Writer

Leftovers written by Laura Weiss is a novel about two teenage best friends named Ardith and Blair. Ardith is the more motivated character because her parents are alcoholics. She tries desperately not to fall into their footsteps and works extremely hard in school with a perfect record under her belt. On the other hand, Blair is the rich one with her mother being a workaholic and super strict. She and Ardith are not allowed to be friends because of their family backgrounds, but in the end they always find their way back to one another.

This book is very family orientated. It shows how girls get over hardships, like heartache and sexual abuse, drugs, alcohol, and drama. Leftovers prove how valuable friendship is in a person’s life and how family can influence you in either a good or bad way. It shows how broken families bounce back from the worst and how determination can really change ones life.

By Yari Nieves-Rivera, Courier Staff Writer

Looking for Alaska by John Green is a wonderful debut novel for this promising author’s writing career. The story follows a boy named Miles “Pudge” Halter as he tries to find himself and his independence by leaving home and going to a boarding school.

The novel is split into two parts, before and after. It follows his first year at Culver Creek Preparatory School. There he meets Alaska Young, and Pudge’s life changes drastically as she soon begins to take over his whole world.

Pudge, who was born in Florida, finds himself bored with his little hometown. With almost no friends to socialize with, he spends most of his time memorizing famous people’s last words. When his parents throw him a going away party, he’s not shocked when only two people show up and quickly leave. Looking for a way to leave his boring lifestyle, he asks his dad if he can go to the same Preparatory school as him, and his Dad quickly agrees. His Mother pressed on as to why he wanted to leave, he simply told them François Rabelais’s last words—“I look for the Great Perhaps.”

By Adam Phillips, VOA News

Award-winning American poet Jane Hirshfield has just published a new collection of poems. "Come, Thief" features themes of love, compassion, contemplation and the poignancy of a human life fully lived.

Hirshfield sits in an anteroom at Poets House in New York about an hour before she appears before a large crowd to read from her seventh collection of poem.

“The title is a signal of welcoming what is inevitable into our lives,” says Hirshfied, who adds that the “‘thief” could have many meanings. “But what it primarily means in this book is time; time which brings us everything that we will ever experience and takes from us from us everything that we will ever experience, and one of the main threads of this book is simply saying ‘yes’ to that process. Yes to whatever comes, the difficult, the ecstatic, and yes to whatever goes – everything we will ever love and finally ourselves.”