Huh??

1) Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan / YA / ****1/2
Love this book.  It is hopeful, tender, and sweet.  Thought provoking.  Real.  E1 chose this as the book of choice when her friends did a "teen" book group in fifth grade. I may choose it for my book choice next year for book group.

2)

  No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden by Mark Owen and Kevin Maurer / A / ***

I love military men.  It all comes from my tween years piled on my friend Traci Felt's bed and watching "Top Gun"like 14 times.  It is still one of my favorite movies.  My most favorite movie of all is another military movie and also has Tom Cruise in it, called "A Few Good Men".  You have to have a certain amount of chutzpa to be in the military, and to be a SEAL calls for even more ego.  I really enjoyed this book.... only a few chapters were actually about the mission to apprehend Bin Laden, the rest was backstory about the author, his experiences leading up to that point, and the intense preparation the mission involved. It was interesting. I quite enjoyed it.  And I really am so grateful for the men and women of our armed forces.

 

3) The Rockstar's Daughter: (Treadwell Academy Series #1) by Caitlyn Duffy / YA / **1/2

Don't laugh. It was free on Kindle.  I find I'm much more gentle on bad books that I didn't spend any money on.   It was basically the equivalent of a light beach read. The author actually seemed like a pretty good writer, but the plot was just a little too flat. I expected it to be predictable but this really was cookie cutter fiction. 

 

4)

Ryann by Paul Dorset / YA / *

I've learned a lot having a Kindle.  I avoided purchasing one for several years as quite frankly there is no way I could afford my reading habit.  But with a two week vacation coming up in October, Darren simply refused to haul 20 books through four airports and six countries. 

I haven't purchased that many Kindle books because I usually don't purchase any type of book in paper form unless I LOVE it.   But with Kindle this is harder.

I use pioneer.utah.gov to get a lot of books for free but I do have to wait on hold FOREVER for some of the things I want (on one book I'm 89th on the list of 200 people) and there is a three week maximum check out period. But this is the only place I've found to get "new", "popular" books for no cost, so it is worth it.  The richfieldlibrary.com website has instructions on how to use the pioneer.utah.gov website. You do have to have a Richfield library card number.
Darren found the site http://www.freebooksifter.com and I've used it for several books so far as well.
One thing I've learned is that the ratings on pioneer.utah.gov don't mean ANYTHING. One of the worst books I've read this entire year had a 4 and a 1/2 star rating. This would be true if it was 4 1/2 out of 100 stars but no this was 4 1/2 out of 5.  There are no comment sections on this website so I've learned to check the ratings on Amazon if I find something interesting.
I've also learned that you get what you pay for.  Kindle/Amazon has a lot of wonderful classics for free, but otherwise if the book is free on Amazon, there is probably a reason why it's free.
This is similar to another thing I've learned.  If the book is only published digitally, it is probably because it is so terrible that no one would publish it.   The sad thing is, the are exceptions to all these findings which has made the whole process a little discouraging. It's only February and I've read more bad books this year than last year put together.
Anyway, this book was simply TERRIBLE. Terrible plot, terrible dialogue, terrible characters.  I'm actually a little disappointed in Amazon.