BookOwl

4/5 stars *Spoiler alert!* For the First Time, Again is the third and final entry in Sylvain Neuvel’s “Take Them to the Stars” series. I’m sad to see the series end, but I felt like the third book wrapped everything nicely. Aster is a normal teenager growing up in the 90’s, or so she thinks. Her mother gave her up when she was a baby, but Aster had a great childhood under the parentage of a hardworking single dad. Readers will know that she is Lola’s daughter, the same Lola that sacrificed herself by confronting the Tracker, in order to give her daughter a normal life. Aster doesn’t know this yet. Everything is going great, until she finds herself in the middle of a mass shooting. This shooting takes her father’s life. Of course, nothing is the same. No 12-year-old should have to go through this, to lose the only parent they know in this way. It’s overwhelming enough to lose your father, but Aster is taken into custody by the US military in the wake of this event, where she learn...

4/5 stars *Spoiler alert!* Change the Game is a middle-grade graphic novel by NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Even if you aren’t an avid sports follower, you may remember the huge political controversy raised when Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem as a protest against systemic racism and oppression. I was intrigued to see that Kaepernick had started a publishing outfit to go along with his off the field activism and had to check out Change the Game . For the audience this graphic novel is purporting to target, I found the material satisfyingly challenging when it comes to confronting everyday racism and the general travails of growing up and trying to pick a path in life. (Gosh, I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up, and I’m close to thirty years old!) The graphic novel follows Kaepernick’s upbringing in a small town with a mostly white population. He describes how he was set on the path of future college then MLB baseball player, but incre...

  5/5 stars *Spoiler alert!* I had no idea where this book was going to take me, but either way, I learned quite a bit. Rachel E. Gross writes with compassion, humor, wit, and wonder about the taboo topics surrounding women’s reproductive and sexual lives in Vagina Obscura . Especially about the vagina and the overall complexities of the female reproductive system as a whole, which science seems to finally be coming around to discovering its complexities.   “Your vagina is another planet. If you could shrink down to the size of a grain of sand and go between your own legs, you'd find a wondrous realm of humid jungles, cool caves, and viscous pits of mucus created by your teeming ecosystem of microscopic life. Like your gut or your mouth, your reproductive tract is home to billions of microbes, which work together to repel disease and create the ideal conditions for you. Its landscapes are populated by clusters of long, thin rods and hordes of tiny round balls that cling to its...

  4/5 stars *Spoiler alert!* I’ll be honest, this book was a difficult read, taking me about a month to get through. The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick is a dense, dark survey of the underbelly of American politics. Companion to a history docuseries of similar content, this book takes readers for quite the ride, from the past to the recent present. (The updated version, which I am reviewing here, covers former President Obama’s second term and halfway into former President Trump’s term.) So, we’ve got historical coverage for events through 2018. One cannot help but feel despair when surveying a history of economic, political, racial, sexual, and gender violence entwined with American foreign and domestic policy, a repeating pattern of oppression that runs counter to our idealism about America being a role-model democracy. No presidential administration is spared in Untold History . Admittedly, this is refreshing. No administration is per...