Rainy Day Reads

This book follows Lily who is not doing so well in chemistry class. In stead of taking notes she scribbles song lyrics on the desk. Next day she discovers that someone has continued the lyrics, and the two start a correspondence hiding notes under their shared desk. Alongside this exchanging of notes we follow Lily’s slightly chaotic home life and her trials at school struggling with the popular kids, and trying to overcome her awkwardness to ask her crush out.   This was a cute and fun contemporary, but nothing more really. It is pretty obvious from the start who the secret letter writer is going to be but I didn’t mind it too much. I really liked the person and when we got their backstory through the letters it made me really invested in them. It was fun to see Lily balance her opposing views of the letter writer in the letters with the person in real life once she found out who they were. As I said it was fun and cute, but not much more. I gave it 3 stars out of 5, maybe 3...

I loved this book so prepare for a gushing review! I feel like 2016 is going to be a good reading year, since I have already read a few good books, and I finally feel like I am coming out of the last of my reading slump of 2015.  Anyway this book is about a boy and a girl who meet in the school bell tower, each standing on the ledge looking down. The boy, Theodore Finch, is contemplating what this type of suicide would be like, when he sees the girl, Violet Markey, posed on the ledge. He talks her down, but because of their high school status, and because Finch is a nice guy, the story ends up being she talked him down. She is branded a hero, he a weirdo. He doesn’t seem to mind too much, as he is already an outcast in school and he lets people think what they want. He takes an interest in Violet, however, determined that she should know that life is worth living. The story goes on from there and I really loved the structure of it. It sort of ends up taking the form of a...