"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain

First, I would like to say that all the written-out dialect does get easier to read eventually. A little easier. But you still do have to translate things like "I 'uz mos' to de foot er de islan' b'fo' I foun' a good place" into "I was almost to the foot of the island before I found a good place" in your head, which can get rather tedious.

Second, I would like to make another note about the racial slurs. Yes, they're in there. Yes, there are more of them than there were in Tom Sawyer. In modern times, we shouldn't say them; they shouldn't have said them back then either. However, the book was written in a time when they were commonly used, and set in a time when they were even more commonly used, so it wouldn't make sense for people not to use them.

And also! It should be obvious to anyone who's read it that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a deeply anti-slavery book. As my mom said in her review of the Manga Classics version, the racial slurs are in there for a purpose: "to show the cruel thoughtlessness of racism." That said, they are offensive to black people today (and almost certainly were back then as well), so let the reader be aware.

This concludes my note about the racial slurs. Now we can get to the rest of the review.

I wish we hadn't spend quite so long with the king and the duke. Really I wish we hadn't spend any time with them, but if we had to, I'd rather it have just been a couple chapters. They annoyed me. I'm pretty sure they annoy everyone.

I do like Huckleberry Finn as a narrator. I just... like how he narrates, and I like him as a character. He's an oddly endearing combination of cynical and innocent.

The ending, which can be described as "Tom Sawyer tries to turn this into an adventure novel while everyone else stands there looking bewildered," was one of my favorite parts. Tom Sawyer clearly knows that Jim |has already been freed|, but he can't resist the temptation to make rescuing him as dramatic as possible. Meanwhile, Huckleberry is taking this seriously, and being increasingly confused as to why Tom wants to do things like saw through the table leg holding Jim's ankle chain when it would be much easier to just lift the table and take the chain off. That, I think, is what really sold me on Huckleberry Finn as a character.

However, I suspect that if I hadn't known beforehand how the ending went, I'd have liked it a lot less.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T, probably, for some violence and all the racial slurs. It would be a good thing for a child to read with parental guidance, so the parent can explain things to them.

3 stars. I liked the ending, but the ending being good does not, in my mind, outweigh the chore that is reading the rest of the book.

Favorite lines:

    ...and I'll think of you a many and a many a time, and I'll pray for you, too!' -- and she was gone.

    Pray for me! I reckoned if she knowed me she'd take a job that was more nearer her size.

    Page 200.

(Endnote: Despite Tom's insistence to the contrary, Sid does not appear in this.)

"Hollow Knight: Silksong" by Team Cherry

Me: "I'm going to buy Hollow Knight: Silksong!"

*sixty hours of playtime later*

Me: "That was fun!"

Seriously, this game is huge. I've played about seventy hours of the original Hollow Knight, and I've gone through that one three times.

It was about seven years in the making, most of which was "Team Cherry works on the game and doesn't share any news about it because they're having too much fun working on the game, while the fandom slowly goes stark raving mad." (And yes, that's the actual explanation; there was an interview where they were basically asked "why didn't you say anything for 7 years" and they basically answered "we were having too much fun working on the game.")

But as befits a game that took seven years, and as I've said, it's huge. It's also, as with Hollow Knight, not for the faint of heart, because it, too, is difficult as nouns.

(The final boss of Silksong took me slightly fewer tries than the final boss of Hollow Knight, but I attribute that to my being more skilled now.)

Anyway. Silksong's art is at least as beautiful as Hollow Knight's, and everything in the game is similarly some combination of elegant, adorable, and horrifying. It has the same hand-drawn aesthetic, and it's also full of unique areas with distinct looks.

Some of my favorites:

-Moss Grotto (similar to Greenpath from Hollow Knight, it's a verdant forest of moss. And I love moss.)

-Mount Fay (a really annoying parkour challenge, but I have to give it kudos for all the snow)

-High Halls (also kind of annoying, but also really pretty)

And dishonorable mentions to Bilewater, Putrified Ducts, and Sinner's Road (all of which are annoying and swampy/sewery), as well as the Sands of Karak (a coral desert place with a boss whose runback is entirely too long).

And now it's time to explain the story!

(Caveat lector: This game is best experienced as unspoiled as possible. If you ever intend to play it and don't already know the plot, I suggest not reading inside any of the spoiler tags.)

Basically, in the past, the |malevolent goddess at the top of the kingdom| decided to make |spider people|. Said |spider people rebelled against her and put her to sleep, then noped out of the kingdom when she woke up| and started possessing people and making them go insane.

Flash forward an indeterminate amount of time. The |Citadel at the top of the kingdom| has taken over everything, and is subtly tugging everyone to |make pilgrimages to it|. Most of them |die along the way|, because Pharloom (Silksong's game world) is even more dangerous than Hallownest from the original. |The Citadel's bugs| also sent out envoys to capture any descendents of |the malevolent goddess's spider people|, including the player character, Hornet. Hornet is brought to Pharloom and promptly decides that the bugs capturing her can get yeeted, yeets them, and makes her way up to the top of Pharloom to figure out what's making people go insane. And, hopefully, talk it out of it or slap it until it decides not to.

There are multiple ways of doing that. In the normal ending, "Weaver Queen," Hornet |kills Grand Mother Silk (the malevolent goddess, henceforth "GMS"), sort of eats her power, and apotheoses|. Unlike with Hollow Knight's "The Hollow Knight" ending, wherein it's implied |the player character will eventually fail in its containing-the-Infection task just like its predecessor did|, I'm not entirely sure that "Weaver Queen" |isn't the good ending. Hornet apotheoses (replacing the evil overlord with a good overlord), most of the characters are still alive, and aside from the Citadel getting covered in silk, everything is fine|. This is in contrast to the second and third endings, |"Snared Silk"| and |"Sister of the Void"|. In |"Snared Silk"|, Hornet |teams up with an NPC named the Caretaker to trap GMS and kill her without Hornet apotheosing. I'm not sure why she doesn't want to; maybe she doesn't want the responsibility of having to run a kingdom now|. Except |it goes wrong, because Lace (Hornet's foil character) screws everything up, meaning that instead of getting eaten by the void, GMS is now violently resisting to try to protect her daughter|.

So |the kingdom starts falling apart and void is taking over everything|. That's where "Sister of the Void" comes in, as Hornet has to |fix everything by going down into the void and taking Lace back out of it so GMS will stop trying to pull herself out of the void and unintentionally wrecking things|. Hornet doesn't |apotheose, but a bunch of people get killed, and Pharloom is in tatters. Aside from Hornet not having to run a kingdom, I can't see how this is really a better ending than "Weaver Queen"|.

This has been the story of Hollow Knight: Silksong. (I find it interesting that Pharloom is currently going through what Hallownest went through in the past; Pharloom is |actively dying|, while Hallownest |has already died and is now just sort of decaying|.

Unlike the Knight from Hollow Knight, Hornet has a foil: Lace. Like Hornet, Lace is the daughter of |one of the Hollow Knight universe's gods (Hornet's dad is the Pale King, Lace's mom is Grand Mother Silk|. Like Hornet, Lace has wandered around the game world stabbing people before the player character showed up, and like Hornet, Lace is a boss you fight twice who survives both battles. They even have similar fighting styles. Also, in Hollow Knight, Hornet |jumps in and stabs the first final boss at the climax of the bossfight, giving you access to the true final boss|; Lace does the same thing in the |"Snared Silk" bossfight with GMS|.

Except that what Hornet did in |the fight against the Hollow Knight| was entirely helpful, and didn't cause the huge amounts of problems that Lace's actions did. And there's other differences, too; Hornet was stabbing people to protect the kingdom, Lace seems to just be stabbing people for the sake of stabbing people. Lace is also, despite being ageless-ish like Hornet, still rather immature, spoiled, and bitter. The difference between them is exemplified by the differences between Lace's opening monologue in Silksong and Hornet's opening monologue in Hollow Knight; Hornet's is like "look, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have stop you here," and Lace is like "I'mma stab you because I caaaaaan" before Hornet tells her to shut up and get on with it.

This game also contains probably the third-saddest bossfight I've ever encountered: the Cogwork Dancers. (First- and second-saddest bossfights are here.)

Honestly, I could write an individual review of every boss and area in the game. But instead I'll just mention a few more NPCs before I go:

-Shakra, the mapmaker, who's much more capable of handling herself than Cornifer from Hollow Knight is (Shakra can fight and, in fact, |helps you out in one of the arena battles|; Cornifer really can't).

-Sherma, a smol adorable guy wearing a cymbal as a hat who shows up in random places throughout the game.

-Caretaker, an exceedingly curmudgeonly shrine-tender-person who's |actually one of the Snail Shamans (first seen in the original Hollow Knight)|. For a while, I had a theory that he was the reincarnation of |the Pale King, who's dead in Hollow Knight but who is known to reincarnate when he dies|; that theory did not turn out to be true.

And a dishonorable mention to the boss Disgraced Chef Lugoli, who was kicked out of being a chef for thinking the Pickled Muckmaggot was a good idea.

I intentionally avoided wikis while I was playing this, in order to avoid spoilers. That was really annoying to do.

This is a videogame, and it's rated E10+, presumably for fantasy violence. (For whatever reason, I can't find the official rating documentation anywhere.)

5 stars. My only real quibble is that I don't like the various wave defense sections scattered throughout the game, but that's really just me.

(Endnote: This game is magnificent.)

"A Wind in the Door" by Madeleine L'Engle

I suspect that A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels are at least partially ways for Madeleine L'Engle to be as weird as she wants. Why else would the plot involve Meg and Calvin |teaming up with a cherubim (the eyes-and-wings kind), a microscopic being, and Charles Wallace's principal (who's been duplicated by some evil demony-spirit things) to fix Charles Wallace's mitochondria so they can continue being the powerhouse of the cell and he'll stop dying|?

I'm just going to spoil it a little bit so I can talk about things without having to redact absolutely everything, so if you don't want a very mild spoiler, don't read farther in this paragraph: the plot involves mitochondria. There. That wasn't too hard, was it?

Anyway, the author made up some internal structures of mitochondria in order to have the plot work. There's no such thing as farandolae. Then again, there's no such thing as tessering, either, so it's not like she didn't make up stuff for A Wrinkle in Time.

Unlike the previous book, it's not clear to me what the title is actually referring to. The "Wrinkle in Time" is basically the time travel used by the book's mentor characters to make it to where the whole several-days-long adventure doesn't result in Meg and Calvin being missing for several days, but I'm not sure what the wind or the door are referring to here.

A Wind in the Door kind of defies genres. A Wrinkle in Time was pretty clearly science fantasy, but this does away with most of the "science" element. While one might think that means it's just straight fantasy, it's not really; it's also not quite magical realism (though admittedly I judge that based on vibes), so...

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for violence. It would be rather a pain to turn this into a videogame, what with the telepathy (or kything; I'll excuse the Renamed Concept Rule breach because it's not really basic telepathy) and all.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Where did "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" even come from? Why is it a meme? Also, shouldn't it be "mitochondrion"?)

"Away" by Megan E. Freeman

Any y'all remember Alone way back in 2023? I do. This is the sequel slash companion novel.

It follows four random kids caught up in the evacuation, including one of the members of Maddie's aborted secret sleepover from Alone. Unlike in the first book, they're not alone for the entire thing; they get stuck in a refugee camp.

Oh, we also get more context for the backstory behind the "imminent threat" in this book. |It's California's fault.| They're having a |chronic drought| because they decided to |cram far too many people into a literal desert|, and for some reason they thought the best course of action was to |pipe the entire Eldorado River out of Colorado into California. Instead of doing sane things like, y'know, building seawater treatment plants or not having so many people in a literal desert|.

|While the plan is completely and utterly ridiculous, at least it makes more sense than "oh the government wants to steal a bunch of land that it then doesn't do anything with."|

(The |Eldorado River| is a real thing, by the way. I looked it up. Unlike in the book, however, it's |not in Colorado at all; it's in Alaska|.)

I have no idea why the cover is a guy in a Spiderman hoodie standing on a car. It doesn't have tons of bearing on the story.

The characters range from 12 to 15ish, a nice change from the Eternal 12-Year-Old Syndrome in most middle-grade fiction. Another nice change is that it explained why none of the adults are taking action against the evacuation or |noticing the signs that it's not real|.

I was not immersed in this book as much as I was in Alone. This is my own fault; I purposely held myself out of the story somewhat because I wasn't in the mood to wander around remembering the book for days afterward. That said, this book is also probably not as intrinsically immersive as Alone is; the viewpoint jumps around a bit (did I mention there are four main characters?) and, because there are actual conversations thanks to having more than one character, there's some prose. Well, sort of; it takes the form of film scripts. Though it's still mostly in verse, the inclusion of dialogue made it less... impactful, somehow? Or maybe that's just my experience differing because, as mentioned, I intentionally prevented myself from getting fully immersed.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for some mild violence.

3 stars. Would have gotten 4, but there's a woman pastor who features semi-prominently in one of the characters' lives, and I happen to believe that's unbiblical.

(Endnote: |And California would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids.|)

"The Walls Have Eyes" by Clare B. Dunkle

Series summary: A boy and his dog, but they live in a dystopia and the dog is a shapeshifting robot |who's also the President|.

The boy and his shapeshifting robot dog go back to the dystopia to get his parents out of it. Said parents do not react well to leaving the dystopia. They set up rules, complain about not having all the modern dystopian conveniences, and generally annoy the main character. While this was the expected outcome, it still irritates me; I'd rather the parents had been some semblance of competent.

We also learn the reason for the robot dog's abnormally high security clearance: |He's the President|. Well, actually, he has |a special chip that makes him parrot robots' individual identification codes back to them during the "ok bot who are you" phase of robot communications, so they think he is them. He was ordered by the actual President, who's also| a robot, to |get rid of the Secretary of State (the sole human left in the government; everyone else is robots) so he stops making things dystopian|.

This book also answers the question I always have with non-worldwide dystopias: what's going on with the rest of the world? In this case, the U.S. (well, former U.S.) is basically |a giant testbed for various consumer products. The popular ones get produced by the robot factories and exported to the rest of the world|.

 

My brain keeps insisting that "The Walls Have Eyes" does not naturally follow after "The Sky Inside", and the order of the titles should be reversed. Speaking of which, the title refers to a bunch of spy cameras some government robots are setting up on people's walls. 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for threats of violence.

3 stars. Less cloney than the last one, but the parents bit leaves something to be desired.

Oh, and here's a picture of Mettaton NEO, Spamton NEO's counterpart from Undertale. He doesn't show up in the book, nor do I imagine anybody as him, but I had a picture of Spamton NEO last post so I decided I should complete the set.

Mettaton NEO.

(Endnote: Are you tired of using the same two senses to spy on your dystopian subjects? Walls with eyes and ears just not cutting it any more? Have we got the thing for you! Introducing the SpySniffer: the Nose Your Wall Could Smell With.)

"What If? 2" by Randall Munroe

I liked the first What If? better, I think. My favorite hypotheticals from this one are:

"How many pigeons would it require in order to lift the average person and a launch chair to the height of Australia's Q1 skyscraper?" (|A few tens of thousands, or more than the mass of the galaxy, depending on how clever you get with your pigeon stacking.|)

"Can all the world's bananas fit inside all of the world's churches? My friends have had this argument for a little over 10 years now." (|Yes, they would fit.|)

"Dear Randall, what would happen if you shrunk Jupiter down to the size of a house and placed it in a neighborhood, say, replacing a house?" (|Jupiter is very hot and would violently explode.|)

"Why don't compasses point toward the nearest hospital because of the magnetic fields created by MRI machines?" (|They do, but you have to get pretty close.|)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for swearing, I think. Again, this would be a pretty fun videogame.

 

4 stars. I know I said I didn't like this one as much as the first, but that just means it's a less enthusiastic four stars.

Favorite lines:

    Decorating Tip

    The air in your house should be in gas form

    Page 14, from "Would there be any danger from standing next to a large object that was 0 Kelvin?"

    Q. What if your blood became liquid uranium? Would you die from radiation, lack of oxygen, or something else?

    A. [said by a stick figure in a lab coat] "You would die from what we in the medical profession call not-having-any-blood-and-being-full-of-molten-uranium syndrome. Or 'Jeff's disease' for short. Man, poor Jeff."

    Page 30. This is from one of the "short answer" sections.

    Q. What would happen if you microwaved a smaller microwave, while the smaller one was on as well?

    A. You would no longer be welcome in that IKEA.

    Page 91, from another short answer section. There's no "A." in the original text; I added it to forestall confusion.

    Congratulations to Australia, new rulers of the galaxy.

    Page 124, from "If every country's airspace extended up forever, which country would own the largest percentage of the galaxy at any given time?"

    "Can whoever is building these aqueducts everywhere please stop? We have enough!"

    "NEVER!"

    Page 158, from "How many people would it take to build Rome in a day?"

(Endnote: There's also one about "what if Nascar didn't have any rules and the only purpose was to get a car around the track as fast as possible", which ended up with building a particle accelerator the size and shape of the Nascar track.)

"The Notorious Scarlett and Browne" by Jonathan Stroud

Well, we're back in the land of relatively good books again, everyone. (At least for a bit. I'm not sure if my luck will hold.)

 

Basically, it's about a couple of late-teens outlaws (Scarlett McCain and Albert Browne, because we had to have our color-names theme) who wander around in dystopian post-apocalyptic England robbing the rich to feed the poor (at Albert's insistence; giving Scarlett money is a good way for that money to find its way into an unknown void). They're pretty much your classic fighter-and-mage duo; Scarlett is good with guns and pretty much any other weapons you hand her, and Albert has various apocalypse-induced anomalous powers like reading minds and occasionally telekinesis (in stressful moments).

The book kicks off with the pair of them breaking into the underground treasure vault of a not!church run by le badguys. (More on them later). It continues with them trying to escape le badguys (henceforth the not-Inquisition) and some other villains (I'll call them the not-Mafia) as they try to get at the main characters for various nefarious reasons. The not-Inquisition apparently has been collecting up psions like Albert to... I don't actually know what they want with Albert and the rest of the psions. Buuuut they keep throwing this one guy at Albert, and by extension Scarlett because she's connected to Albert and doesn't have enough caution to not pick fights with edgy weirdos.

There's also a bunch of stuff with a |sunken city| that the not-Inquisition controls and the not-Mafia wants to loot. So, naturally, our main characters get sent there by Scarlett's friends/contacts/handlers/nemeses in the not-Mafia.

As promised, more on the not-Inquisition. At first glance, these guys seem like a textbook example of Organized Religion Is Evil™. However, while that normally feels like a cheap stab at Christianity, these guys (well, their parent organization) are more like universalists. ("Evil organized universalists" isn't a phrase you hear every day, is it?) Since my stance on universalism is "wouldn't it be nice, but unfortunately it doesn't work like that," this doesn't bother me as much.

Also, these guys aren't even good at universalism. It's hard to be bad at something that's basically the Calvinball of religion, but they manage it. It's like if they looked at the medieval/Renaissance Catholic church and said, "What if this, but universalist." So on the one hand, they're even terrible at heresy; on the other hand, they're basically running most of dystopian post-apocalyptic England via the not-Inquisition and executing people for defying them.

Yep. This has been Silly Songs with Larry a long-winded explanation of why despite its villain being of a type that I don't usually like, I rate this book 4 stars.

And were it a videogame, I'd rate it: A very stern T for content: swearing. (Man, it's nice to be doing a content warning that's just swearwords. I used to think those were all Inappropriate Content that adults talked about.) It's mostly traditional and/or British-specific language; I can think of maybe one instance anyone uses a modern obscenity, and that one's fairly mild.

(Endnote: I rather liked that the two title characters have a completely platonic friendship. That was nice. Although, I looked back, and most of the books I've been reviewing have had pretty much no romance in them? Maybe it's just the expectation that when your protagonists [or protagonist and deuteragonist] are a boy and a girl, they'll obviously get together or at least liiiiike each other? If you have any thoughts on that, let me know.)

"Minecraft: The Mountain" by Max Brooks

As you may have guessed, this is the sequel to Minecraft: The Island. Unlike with that book, though, this one has two sapient characters.

I don't have tons to say here. The isekai version of Minecraft updates a couple times; specifically, it gets Update Aquatic and the Nether Update. It's nice having a Minecraft book that's not just set in World of Color Update Java Edition or Better Together Update Bedrock; they've added some pretty cool stuff since then! 

I especially liked how the characters got to see the world updating, with things reshaping themselves and fish-as-mobs (Update aquatic hallmark) suddenly showing up.

Anyway, I was annoyed with Summer (the other sapient character; the first one is our main character from Minecraft: The Island) for a lot of the book. However, when |the Nether Update caught them unawares in the Nether|, I started liking her a lot better, because she and the main character had to work together to |survive all the stuff that came with the changes|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+, just like Minecraft.

4 stars. Had I not started liking Summer, it probably would have gotten 3, but the author did a good job with her.

(Endnote: Reading through the update archives, I've placed our original acquisition of Minecraft at somewhere around the Friendly Update or Boss Update, so June-October 2016. I placed it there because I remember playing around with all the new blocks and things during the Ender Update .)

 

EDIT: Changed all the wiki links to the new Minecraft wiki.

"In Over Their Heads" by Margaret Peterson Haddix

This book went a lot faster than its predecessor. I feel like they could have been one long book, but the author had it as two instead. Maybe she thought fusing them would make it too long? Maybe she had plans for a series but then this one wrapped up too neatly for that? Maybe she wrote the first one with a sequel planned but didn't have quite enough material for the sequel? That last guess seems most likely, but I don't really know.

In Over Their Heads picks up where Under Their Skin left off, at |Mammoth Cave. Except that it's discovered there are other people living here. The plotting is messier than the first book, honestly, with half of it being about Jackson the illegal robot kid and his dad, and half of it about everyone else. Actually, that might be why I think it's both messy and short; the plots don't really tie together, and they're both individually too short for my taste.|

Now, don't get me wrong, I did like the book. Especially the part at the end where |(ENDING SPOILERS HERE) robot police show up and try to kill/arrest/otherwise inconvenience the protagonists, discover a bunch of illegally-not-decommissioned robot kids, aaaaaand... are promptly wrecked by a bunch of leftover war robots. (Granted, the leftover war robots don't actually turn out to be on the side of the protagonists, and they do turn out to be very insane, like, megalomaniac kills-for-the-fun-of-it cartoon villain insane. But it turns out fine and some of them do turn into good guys.)| Major moment of awesome there.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+, probably, since |all the characters KNOW everyone's a robot, and the descriptions of them revealing their inner machine side aren't played for creepy factor|.

I'll give this one 4 stars, like its predecessor, despite having messier plotting and feeling a lot shorter.

(Endnote: The funniest bit in the entire book was |one of the reformed war robots deciding his name was Ralph. It was just so random|.)

"Mr. Terupt Falls Again" by Rob Buyea

I just want to state that the title |is misleading. Mr. Terupt does not, in fact, have a devastating fall. Personally, I'm really happy about that, because Mr. Terupt Falls Again could have been basically a plot repeat of the original, and it wasn't. Way to go, Buyea!| Yeah, this post will be a spoiler-tag-filled ramble.

Mr. Terupt Falls Again has this underlying theme of "ignorance is bliss, but is it really?" going on. Honestly, the book has a lot of intermingled layers, with one or other surfacing at different times. So yeah, we have the "ignorance is bliss" layer. (The book's conclusion seems to be that ignorance is bliss, but only if you're also ignorant of the fact that you're ignorant in the first place, because if you know you don't know something then you start worrying about it and are no longer blissful, and if you know bits and pieces you'll want to find out more and aren't blissful either.) (Wow, that felt like "I know you know I know you know I know".)

Also, Alexia (the one who uses "like" way too much, though her usage has decreased from about 1900% more than necessary to more like 400% more than necessary) falls in with some baaaad influences. And, unlike everyone who gets labeled as baaaad influences in book 1 (hint: |Anna and her mom|), these guys  actually are baaaad influences. (I'm not bothering with spoiler tags because these guys show up in the beginning of the book and we can tell that they're obviously baaaad influences.) There's another layer for you. (Well, when I said "guys", I meant one guy and two girls, and the guy--who |has "weed" and vodka at different points| and generally behaves like the teen everyone tells you "don't be that guy" about, and eventually gets arrested and sent to rehab--is the main corrupting influence.)

There's also another layer of Mr. Terupt's |head trauma from the previous book|, which Peter |perpetually (and understandably) feels terrible about| and Luke |researches on the internet (silly boy, you should never research medical conditions on the internet)|. Like I said, lots of layers (subplots?).

Also, Jeffery finds |an abandoned baby| in a shoebox on the side of the road, which ends up being the catalyst for |his parents finally un-shellifying after his older brother's death|. It also makes several of the characters do a double take and go |"wait, really? what kind of jerkface would abandon a baby?"|, which I found completely plausible. There's a layer for ya.

Also, yeah, you may have noticed I labeled this "a kissing book". That too is a layer (number four, I think?). There's a lot more romance in this one, with the final pairings being |Terupt and Newberry|, |Alexia and Peter|, |Anna and Jeffery|, and |Luke and Jessica|; |personally, I think all the pairings are quite natural, and that we were all going "Terupt and Newberry sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-SOMETHIN'-SOMETHIN'-T!" since about the last fifth of book 1. To confuse people who don't highlight spoilers, this is a sentence that ends in| potato soup. 

Also, Danielle's grandmother Evelyn |gets a heart attack, learns about forgiveness (woot woot woot woot woot!), and accepts Anna and her mom as not baaaad influences. This sentence, for reasons of further confusion, also ends in| the aforementioned potato soup.

Also, we get to know how to pronounce Mr. Terupt's name! It's "tare-upt". In-universe, he gets annoyed when people pronounce it wrong.

This one gets three stars, because a bunch of the main characters |hit puberty, and more than half or them are girls. I mostly skimmed those parts.|

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ again, for the same reason (though everyone knows about [THIS IS THE SAME AGE-RESTRICTED SPOILER FROM THE LAST ONE, SO NOT-YET-TEENAGERS GO AWAY] |Anna's mom's teenage pregnancy| by now, so it's not as big of a plot point). However, if you've got a less-than-15-year-old who knows about that, this one is more of a T beneath it (for reasons as discussed above, and also due to |someone who's obviously not a good guy giving people the finger, drug and alcohol abuse,  and underage smoking|.

Disclaimer: |There is no actual| potato soup |in this novel. I simply added it to confuse people who haven't highlighted the spoilers, and amuse people who have|.