Biblio Reviews

Written a decade ago,  Geography Club  (2004) spawned a book series and a recent TV movie. An engaging read, I can understand why this debut novel by Brent Hartinger is so successful. After all, it was written at a time when stories featuring gay characters were rare.  Geography Club  is the story of a Russell Middlebrook, a high schooler convinced he is the only gay teen at his high school--until he learns he is not. With his newfound knowledge and company, Russell and his other gay friends are desperate to have a safe space for them to gather and talk to each other. What other way than to create a boring club no other high schooler would be interested in joining than the Geography Club? In the end,  Geography Club  is a story of identity, of people coming together to define and accept who they are. It is also the story of what seems to be the universal high school experience in which reputation creates division lines and the goal is to figure out on whi...

What must living be like for Steve Bartman? On October 14, 2003, Bartman became the most infamous Chicago Cubs fan when he deflected a foul ball in game 6 of the National Championship Series between the Cubs and the Florida Marlins. In the immediate aftermath, security escorted him inside the stadium to watch the rest of the game and later hustled him (in disguise) to a safe place. The next day, Bartman released a statement begging fans for forgiveness and pleading that threats against his loved ones be stopped. In the following weeks, Bartman headlined the news of nearly every sports-related program and planted himself firmly in Cubs lore. After all, the Cubs went on to lose the game and the series. More than a decade later--and still no World Series championship for the Cubs--Bartman has yet to be seen or heard from publicly. Bartman is simply one example of one, along with his friends and family, whose life was altered in ways unimaginable. Yes, in general, life is unpredictable...

If not for the humor in the exposition of her epistolary novel, I'd have never read, much less bought Maria Semple's bestseller,  Where'd You Go, Bernadette  (2012). A satire of the Seattle-based super rich and privileged, I found myself not liking many of the characters because they typified so many of my stereotypes of the super rich: delusional, entitled, competitive, paranoid, and money/power/status obsessed. Bernadette, a twenty-year transplant to Seattle and supposed genius architect, suffered a mental breakdown that has crippled her for the past twenty years. Seemingly disenchanted with people and life, Bernadette is reclusive. This, of course, creates conflict with the parents of her daughter's (Bree) Montessori school who find Bernadette to be off-putting due to her lack of active involvement and participation in the school community and the other parents.  Audrey Griffin, Bernadette's next-door neighbor and nemesis, is the catalyst of much of the conflict...

Rabid fandom is one reason I've yet to watch  Titanic  and never got into  Friends,   Lost,  among many other highly successful films and TV shows. Instead, I tend to dedicate my viewing time to the underdogs, which is to say that a lot of the shows that I do like tend to get cancelled, i.e.  Arrested Development, Life, Chicago Code, Human Target, Men of a Certain Age.  To date,  The Good Wife  is the only one of my faves to have escaped that fate.  With that said, you can imagine how resistant I was to reading Rainbow Rowell, the darling of CBReaders. However, because my passion for reading is stronger than my passion for film/TV viewing, I broke down a couple of months ago and read her debut novel,  Attachments  (2011). In the end, the novel was a satisfying, nostalgic quick read. Much of my enjoyment came from the atypical male protagonist, Lincoln O'Neill, a diffident, non-alpha romantic lead. Set in 1999,...

Junot Diaz's  This Is How You Lose Her  (2012) is an eight story collection of machismo and misogyny centered around Yunior, a serial womanizer who is forced to face the consequences of his actions. Never having read Diaz before, I had no idea what to expect, and after reading the epigraph by Sandra Cisneros, I used my knowledge her structure and style from  The House on Mango Street  (1984) to guide me. What ensued was a rather confusing read. Unlike some who found Diaz's use of Spanglish to be the cause of their confusion, the shifting perspective and time in each chapter are what did me in.  This Is How You Lose Her  is similar to  The House on Mango Street  in that Diaz also mixes the Spanish and English, doesn't include quotation marks to clarify speakers in dialogues, has short chapters, and gives insight into the machismo that is familiar in Latino culture. But it is different in that the collection is not fully a cohesive unit and...

One of my all-time favorite TED Talks is 2008 McArthur Fellow and writer Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie's " The Danger of a Single Story ." In her Talk, she makes a case for the importance of publishing varied and numerous stories, particularly about those who historically have been marginalized.  As she brilliantly articulates, the lack of variety and availability of some groups' stories has resulted in "single stories"--stereotypes--about them: "[ S]how a people as one thing,   as only one thing,   over and over again,   and that is what they become." Her concept of "single stories" explains why I have sometimes been...reserved in reading "ethnic" or "urban" literature. A girl gets tired of reading the same type of victimization-type of stories, you know? I find many "ethnic" or "urban" stories to be very limiting and repetitive in setting, plot, and genre. They seem to always be based on reality or...

I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so to date, I have written two complete short stories which I first wrote many years ago. Since then, they've been in a constant state of revision because they lack a certain  je ne sais quoi  for publishing. I wish other writers were as self aware: Amazon is currently filled with published novels that are truly the works of amateur writers. One such amateur work is Molly Ringwald's  When It Happens to You: A Novel in Stories  (2012). At $1.99 at the time of purchase, it was a good deal. This "novel in stories" is made up of eight interconnected short stories, unified by Greta or Phillip, the central characters introduced in the opening story. It is they who launch the novel's theme: When life throws you a curve ball, how do you cope "when it happens to you"? In this case, life throws Greta a curve ball when she learns that her husband, whom she has been struggling to have a second child with, has been having an affai...

My latest attempt at falling in love with a romance came with reading Sophia Nash's  The Once and Future Duchess  (2014). I'm sorry to say I did not fall in love and will need to court more authors.  The Once and Future Duchess  tells the story of Isabelle Tremont, the Duchess of March, and James Fitzroy, the Duke of Candover, who are among a special group in the realm who have received missives from the Prince Regent to get married. While James (30) intends to disregard Princy's demands, Isabelle (18) uses it as an opportunity to propose marriage to James, whom she has been in love with since her preteen years.  Problem is, James isn't keen on marrying Isabelle because of their age difference and a promise he had made to her dying father. The story of how these two end up together is filled with other characters and back stories that make this story, for me, a hot mess. To make sense of  The Once and Future Duchess , it seems like the reader needs to h...

Found in nearly every corner occupied by a sitting or lounging furniture in my apartment are small stacks of paperback historical romance novels. Though they are still prominent in my living space, they represent a seemingly long lost period for me, one in which romance novels offered escape into an idealized, long-gone era and presented a world inhabited by sophisticated and gallant heroes and unconventional heroines. So what if the heroes and heroines were bound by strict societal norms and habiliments? Their chemistry and love for each other would help them overcome! There was a time when I would and could binge-read historical romances at the expense of developing conversational skills. In every purse was a novel that served as a buffer against idle chit chat. I would spend no more than a couple of days reading them, so voracious was I in reading these historical romances. It comes as a surprise, then, that I cannot remember when my consumption of these books stopped. Maybe it was...

If you've ever wondered why the guidance department seems to be less than helpful in counseling during the college access process, there's a reason. According to Mandy Savitz-Romer and Suzanne Bouffard in Ready, Willing, and Able: A Developmental Approach to College Access and Success  (2014), that reason is the following: "...[S]chool counselors, who typically hold master's degrees in counseling and licenses provided by state departments of education, rarely obtain training in college counseling...In fact, according to the National Association of College Admissions and Counseling, out of the more than four hundred counselor education programs in graduate schools, only about forty include a credit bearing course specific to college counseling, and even those courses are not necessarily required" (p. 35). While not the main argument of the book, I found this bit of information very interesting because it certainly helped me understand why, from personal experien...

One of my handful of memories from middle school and early years in the U.S. comes from seventh or eighth grade. It's hard to remember which year because we shared the same classrooms and teachers during those two years. In any case, we had a guest speaker, a relatively young (and white) one, and that's about all I remember about why he was there to speak to us. My strongest memory about this speaker, though, was a question he had asked: "Raise your hand if you plan on going to college?" I remember thinking, "Well, d'uh, we're all going to college. That's the goal of going to school. What a dumb question." Reflection upon this particular moment reveals a few things: Until that moment, I didn't consider that I would have a choice in the matter. In my household, that was the expectation. A relatively new immigrant to the U.S., I was an innocent. I wasn't aware of the hostile racial history of the United States and the bitter legacy ...

Despite sweeping reforms in U.S. education in the 20th and 21st centuries, much in U.S. education has remained essentially the same. In  Transforming School Culture: How to Overcome Staff Division  (2009),   Dr. Anthony Muhammad explains that the fixed state of education in the U.S. is the result of reforms that focus on technical changes (structure, policies, teaching tools) rather than on cultural changes (mindsets and behaviors). Unless a school begins to focus on making cultural changes, no amount of technical changes will ever result in a healthy, productive, and successful school culture. This, he asserts, is because schools comprise of four key groups who each have their own agendas. A school leader who doesn't learn how to manage and fulfill the needs of these four distinct groups is susceptible to developing or maintaining a toxic and dysfunctional school culture, "the set of norms, values and beliefs, rituals and ceremonies, symbols and stories that make up the ...

In September, I will enter my third year of teaching 8th grade English after having taught the previous seven years at a high school in another district. Many factors contributed to the change in my work zip code, one of which was my desire to restart by working with an age group that still believed in possibilities and who would benefit the most from instruction to build their literacy. The biggest factor, however, was a need to leave what had become a hopeless situation. In my last few years at the high school level, I taught seniors who began to suffer from  senioritis  as early as October. While their lack of motivation was dispiriting, their lack of literacy and critical thinking skills as they neared the beginning of their independent adult lives was devastating. Being 17-19 year-olds, many had already solidified their beliefs about school, believed they had learned all they could be taught, and saw themselves as being too grown to be told what to do and how to do it. ...

Who knew that Matthew McConaughey's foray into romantic comedy--a most dreadful film genre to most critics--would be so sociologically and culturallly relevant? In Dr. Leonard Sax's Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (2009), he argues that McConaughey's Failure to Launch (2006) is a gem of a movie in that it reflects an American epidemic of men who are underachieving and who seem to be perfectly accepting of that fact. Before presenting his explanation, I offer a personal anecdote. This past school year, I experienced my most challenging teaching experience EVER. This is because I came across the most disengaged, apathetic, and academically unmotivated group of students EVER (the word bears repeating). Made up of a majority of boys, this group was so immature and indifferent to academic learning that school was simply a social experience. Of all the things that they were engaged in, academics ranke...

In the last year, I have carpooled with a male co-worker whose candid conversations have given me interesting insights into some males' perspectives regarding relationships, among other things. This is because my co-worker fancies himself skilled in sociology--without formal training. So you can only imagine that whenever I express doubt in what he terms "schooling me," about life and people, his usual response is, "I  know  people." I must admit from observation and conversation, his conclusions are often on point. His theories and opinions about the world and people scan a variety of topics. Three that seem to have always lead to lectures during our commute include the societal emasculation of men, the loss of community, and the failures of education in the U.S.. Here is a list of some of his thoughts: Gender roles (masculine and feminine) matter. Societal problems that exist today are the result of the blurring of the lines of what men and women can and ...

I'm amazed that so many education-focused texts ever get published since I've rarely had my pedagogical knowledge expanded by the many theoretical pedagogical texts I've been asked to read or that I have read voluntarily. The more of these books that I read, the more that I realize that the landscape of education-focused texts is made up of the same recycled ideas...and that much of education reform is really a money-making endeavor that a select few profit from in a major way at the expense of many parents and educators. The new wave of texts being published in response to the Common Core will soon saturate the market with many pimping out old ideas under new labels.

What's in a name? I had not been familiar with the Stephen King quotation when I first named this blog "Portable Magic Reviews." At first, I thought I was being unique. Boy, was I wrong! While I agree with King's sentiment about the power within books, I wasn't keen on having a blog name that was so common. I wanted a name that clearly communicated the purpose of this blog, so after a couple more changes, I settled on "Biblio Reflections and Reviews." I not only include a review, but I also share a reflection inspired by the particular book. While not the most exciting of names, it felt less kitchy and more palatable than the original blog title.

Technically, the Common Core is already here, but in case one did not know, the saturation of "Common Core aligned" notices on various workbooks, vocabulary texts, and the deluge of Common Core-themed texts on the market would make that announcement clear enough. Anxious parents, and even more anxious and novice teachers, will soon scan these shelves to buy these Common Core-themed texts in the desperate hope that they will be enlightened. Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher's  Rigorous Reading: 5 Access Points for Comprehending Complex Texts  (2014) is one such text they might come across. In the end, Frey and Fisher's  Rigorous Reading  is an overview of the reading demands of the Common Core. In it, Frey and Fisher identify five strategies ("access points") for engaging students with complex texts, a requirement of the new Common Core. These five access points include the following: Purpose and Modeling Close and Scaffolded Reading Instruction Collaborati...

It seems as if every wanna be romance writer makes Amazon their dumping ground. Desperate to find some new authors to diversify my limited favorite authors' selections, I stumbled upon Terri Osburn's  Home to Stay  (2014) ,  a bland, forgettable romance that emphasizes why I hate small town romance series. Home to Stay  is the story of Willow Parsons and Randy Navarro, residents of Anchor Island. Willow, living on the island for only a year, works as a bartender and harbors a secret that keeps her emotionally distant and secretive about her past. Randy, muscle-bound owner of the local fitness club and brother to Willow's "best friend," is determined to break through Willow's protective shell despite her visible, negative physical reaction to him / his size. In the course of planning their friends' wedding, Willow and Randy fall in love, but will she let her past get in the way of true love? Of course not! At 291 print pages,  Home to Stay  is an abs...

Catherine Coulter's Night Storm  (1990) was my first. I was a freshman in high school, and it happened in Civics class. "Girl, you gotta read this!" a classmate exclaimed. She  grinned as she beckoned  me to read a sizzling passage from the novel. Fourteen and innocent, I could not believe that such eroticism existed in the pages of books that were readily available at my local library.  After such temptation, I could not wait until she  finished the book to lend to me, so after school, I walked down to my local library to get my copy. I consumed it within a couple of days, read the other two books in the Night  series, and began my love affair with reading romance novels, in particular, and reading, in general. Membership into the Harlequin book club quickly followed. (How I found the money to retain my membership remains a wonder to me because I did not work throughout high school.) I spent every waking hour reading the  Harlequin  Pre...

Malcolm Gladwell is a storyteller. What I find particularly admirable about his work is that he is able to convey what has been traditionally a spoken language skill into a written one--while reducing seemingly complex ideas into digestible bite-size chunks. It is not surprising, then, that  The Tipping Point  (2000) was a best seller and achieved "one of the best books of the decade" status on many lists. Pulling from a broad set of examples from different aspects of life and history, such as from Paul Revere's midnight ride, to successful advertising campaigns, to  Sesame Street  and  Blue's Clues,  to the decline of the crime rate in New York City, Gladwell explains "how little things can make a big difference." More specifically, Gladwell describes how three special groups of people--connectors, mavens, and salesmen--are responsible for creating word-of-mouth epidemics. In the process, he also adds interesting bits of trivia, such as that the number...

"My heart hurts," said one of my students, crouching near her desk, after we finished the book recently. She then asked if she could go in the hallway because her pain in response to the story was so acute. Some others had tears in their eyes--the girls visibly so while the boys tried to hide or deny theirs. I had a lump in my throat and waited until I had control over my emotions so I could formulate the words to speak. In all, I reveled in this particular moment. There is something thrilling, satisfying, and affirming about seeing someone else fall in love with a book that you, yourself, love. When that someone else is a group of not and non-readers, the experience becomes magical. Such is the case for me every year when I introduce my students to John Steinbeck's  Of Mice and Men  (1937), a heartbreaking historical novella about the friendship between migrant workers George Milton and Lennie Small. In as few as 103 pages,  Of Mice and Men  packs a strong emot...

I first read  Of Mice and Men  (1937)   as an adult, a few days before I was to teach it to my sophomores years ago. I had wanted a quick read; at 103 pages, it fit the bill. What I remember from that first reading is that I was hooked within the first five pages, that I didn't like George much at first, and that I gutted by the ending. Other than  Flowers for Algernon  (1966) ,  which I had read my freshman year of high school, I hadn't wept as much reading a book as when I finished  Of Mice and Men . ( My Sister's Keeper  [2004] by Jodi Picoult and  The Fault in Our Stars  [2012] by John Green are two others that have since provoked such a similar response). Looking back, I guess I wasn't much of a good reader because Steinbeck had foreshadowed the ending from the very first chapter. In any case, I followed up my reading with seeing the 1992 film adaptation. Despite my newfound familiarity with the story, the movie, too, left me...

Brian Stelter's  Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV  (2013) is a bit of a misnomer. Less of an insider expose into the "cutthroat" world of morning TV, Stelter's book is more of a chronicle of the rivalry between  Good Morning America  (GMA) and  Today  and the events that led to  Today 's eventual downfall to number two in 2012 after sixteen years at number one. Opening up with "Operation Bambi," the name given to the plan to oust Ann Curry from  Today , Stelter then details the key warring executives whose desires for power and dominance fueled the rivalry between the two shows--and some of the "talents," like Ann Curry, Deborah Norville, Lisa McRee, and Kevin Newman, among others, who were victims of their "cutthroat" plans. Top of the Morning  was a rather disappointing read in that it felt more like tabloid fodder than riveting journalism. Much of what was included was not deserving of a whole book. A...

When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I told my much older sister that she could look forward to holding in her hands  my own published    book . I spoke with such confidence that she said she believed that I would achieve that goal. Nearly twenty years later, I am no closer to attaining that goal than when I first boldly made my claim. It isn't because I lost the desire to. No, my lack of progress is more of a result of self-realization. To write--realistic fiction, in my case--would require me to do something that I have struggled to do seemingly all my life so far: be emotionally open and accessible. In other words, be willing to share my fears and insecurities, be vulnerable. Despite claims that fiction is created from a writer's imagination, I understand that there is always some personal truth in all writing. As such, there are certain levels of risk involved for the writer in every story s/he writes. Writing is, after all, personal. Like any other creative fo...

So much to read and so little time! In the last few weeks I've added quite a few books on my list to read but finding the time to do so has been difficult. Knowing that I have to post my reviews for the Cannonball Read has been my main motivation to not postpone reading until summer break.

Leave me in a bookstore and I will get lost in the romance novel section. Romance novels--to be more precise, historical romances a la old school Amanda Quick--are my default book reads, especially when I want to escape into an adult fairy tale. I say all this to make clear my bias in tackling Nancy Naigle's  Mint Juleps and Justice  (2014), a contemporary romance and my January Kindle First selection. Mint Juleps and Justice  is part of Naigle's Adams Grove series set in Virginia. I have not read any of the previous books in the series, nor do I intend to. That has nothing to do with Naigle's skills as a writer but rather my lack of interest in the particular brand of romance that she offers: small town characters who engage in realistic ways and who have realistic problems with a little bit of realistic suspense thrown in. The story is of Brooke Justice and Mike Hartman who find themselves relocating to Adams Grove for a fresh start. They meet, fall in love, and liv...

I didn't know I was an Amazon Prime member (and had been for two years!) when I read an email from Amazon that I had a new (?!) perk with my membership, Kindle First: I would get to download one free book per month from their list of four editors' picks--for free and one month before the official publication! Always happy to get freebies (Who isn't?), excited to have new options for my Cannonball Read challenge, and rededicated to actively using my Kindle after a couple of years of non use, I clicked on the link to see my options:  The Barkeep  by William Lashner (Thriller),  The Line  (Withing Savannah, Book One) by J.D. Horn (Fantasy),  Mint Juleps and Justice  by Nancy Naigle (Romance), and  Descending Son  by Scott Shepherd (Horror) were the picks. They all had a pre-order price of $4.99 and all were authors I had never read or heard of before. I can't say that any of the titles appealed to me. I'm not big on fantasy or horror but could be...

A lot can be learned from Jane Austen's  Pride and Prejudice  (1813), one of which is why it is important to smile: Mr. Bingley, who puts on a more agreeable face, is received well by the people of Netherfield Park whereas Mr. Darcy, who  doesn't, is spurned. The science behind why Mr. Bingley experiences more social success than Mr. Darcy is explained in Marianne LaFrance's  Why Smile? The Science Behind Facial Expressions  (2011). LaFrance draws on the work of latest research in biology, psychology, sociology anthropology, computer science--and even quotes various works of literature--to shed light on the effects of putting on a happy face.  Why Smile?  is organized into three sections (Life, Lies, Loyalty), in which, through extensive research and engaging writing style, LaFrance explains the complexity of smiles. [Smiles] are consequential--they affect what others feel and do...they are indispensable to physical health, psychological well-being...