The Bees Knees

KEYWORDS: Murder, Plot Twists    SPOILERS(???): I will spill the murderer, which I don’t think really matters because the book informs the reader who the murderer is in the first chapter anyway. In a nutshell, The Devotion of Suspect X by  Keigo Higashino,  centers around the murder of Togashi. The story mainly featured four characters: two suspects, a detective, and his friend: Yasuko, Ishigami, Kusanagi, and Yukawa. Besides the crime, the story also depicts the intense intellectual battles of two geniuses standing on opposite sides. One is willing to give everything and anything to save his devotion; the other, standing in the same line with justice and truth, will give anything to disclose the crime. Ishigami was definitely one of the coolest and most paradoxical characters I’ve ever encountered. He is a genius mathematician and a mess between sensibility and rationalism. Although Ishigami himself claims to be rational and his college confidant Yukawa states, "...

 by Sophia Chen Wendelin van Draanen is an American young adult author. She's most well known for her book Flipped , centered around two new neighbors who fall in and out of love with each other, and that's how I got to know her work too. I read Flipped  and loved it. I loved the cheesiness of the romance, the humor, the accurate portrayal of idiotic hormonal teenagers -- I wanted more. So I scrolled through van Draanen's author page on a Champaign library computer and found another of her most popular YA novels -- Wild Bird . I borrowed the book. As you may know if you've read both books, Wild Bird  was a  huge change in tone from Flipped . The book's main character, Wren Clemens, is a teenage girl who has gone astray. She deals drugs for her three-years-older pseudo-boyfriend Nico, steals money from her parents to buy weed (which she smokes in the school bathroom with her toxic best friend Meadow), and carves swastikas in her dead grandmother's cherished pian...

Finding great books for me was a bit of a challenge, especially that reading books wasn’t one of my daily habits. But when I remembered the dense book of mystery, Space Case , one of my favorite books I’ve read a few years ago, making the decision was easy. After a day, I already read halfway through the book. Space Case , authored by Stuart Gibbs, was published in September, 2014. In addition to this series, the Moon Base Alpha series , Gibbs wrote the FunJungle series and his New York Times Bestselling series, the Spy School series, which all fall in the genres of adventure, humor, and mystery. In this book, the main character, Dashiell Gibson, undergoes a journey to investigate and solve a murder mystery. As the novel opens, he emphasizes how NASA greatly exaggerated the quality and greatness of life in a base on the moon, which was called Moon Base Alpha (I will refer to it as MBA). Before going to the moon, NASA chose families with parents who excelled in research and scie...

 The book We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson is about a depressed teenager, Henry, struggling with the death of his boyfriend. His home life wasn't as good as it could've been; his brother was a jerk and Henry thought his girlfriend (who his brother had gotten pregnant) was annoying, his mother was single and struggling to provide for them, and his grandmother was quickly developing dementia. He blamed all of his problems on his boyfriend's suicide, saying that none of the misfortunes in his life would have happened if he had stuck around.  However, one day he gets abducted by aliens (something that had been happening for years now) who said that he had 144 days to decide if he wanted to save the world by pressing the red button they had given him. The only thing is, he's not so sure if he wants to save it. With all the stuff happening in Henry's life, he wasn't sure if humanity was worth saving. The only thing stopping Henry from pushing that button is t...