Holiday reads

I find I like to read my books for book club within a week or so of when we meet so the book is fresh in my mind. As the school holidays were coming up I wanted to have plenty of reading material so I thought I would read some teen favourites. Saying that I chose to read If I Stay and Where She Went by Gayle Forman. If I Stay has recently been made into a movie so I wanted to see what the story was about. It is the story of a girl in a happy, comfortable life whose mother, father and brother are killed in a car accident and she ends up in a coma. She has a type of out of body experience where she can see everything that is going on around her and she recalls a variety of incidents through her life. Ultimately she has to decide if she will stay and live, facing her grief or die and relieve her suffering. Interesting......In the sequel written from Adam's point of view three years later the couple have gone their separate ways, he is a rock star struggling with his life and she is an emerging cello performer. By chance they meet up, explore the city by night, revisit old memories and maybe rekindle an old romance.

I also read The Midnight Zoo by Sonya Hartnett which is a popular book being read by Yr 7 & 8 students in schools. It is a tale of three gypsy children who have escaped from the wreckage of their burnt homes with only their lives who have been travelling across a war ravaged countryside barely surviving. They come across an abandoned village where they find a zoo with live animals in it. As   night falls the children realize the animals can speak and they tell the children how they came to live in the zoo. The children and animals want to escape to a better life but they all fear what lies beyond the zoo. This is a well written story with fable like tales and explores the themes of war, freedom and loss.