Ms Rush Reads

copyright date: September 2013 primarily marketed for: young adults (7 th grade and up) Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson is not the kind of book you would typically find in my stack of books to be read.   However, something about it called to me.   And boy am I glad it did!   I am eagerly awaiting the sequel, promised to be released this fall. The story begins with a gripping prologue that takes place years before the action of the rest of the book.   It is the story of a young boy named David witnessing his father’s death at the hands of Steelheart, a sort of superhuman called an Epic.   Although David is in awe of Steelheart’s power to turn anything that is not living to steel, he is even more amazed to witness Steelheart reveal a weakness.   David is the only human who knows the truth about what happened during that attack and survived. Years later, when David is eighteen, he has finally caught up with a group of ...

copyright date: May 2012 primarily marketed for:  young adults (14 and up) I could probably start and end this review with: THIS IS THE SEQUEL TO DIVERGENT by Veronica Roth, because if you read Divergent , of course you want to read this next installment in the trilogy.  The sequel to Divergent is out.  Enough said.  Now you want to read it.   But I just can’t read a book this good without, well, blogging about it! I read LOTS of books between the moment I finished Divergent and the moment I got my hands on Insurgent.   However, it only took seconds for the details of the first book to come flooding back to me as I read the sequel.  Plus, Roth included helpful reminders about key character points (and there are a lot of characters to keep track of) to make catching up even easier.  In fact, other than a temporary (but crucial) mix-up between the characters of Johanna and Jeanine, I had no trouble keeping everybody stra...

copyright date: May 2011 primarily marketed for: teens (14 and up) I kept hearing hype about this book,   “If you liked The Hunger Games , you will like Divergent. ”   I was skeptical.   No book can come close to the power of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games, which I think is the perfect mix of every genre AND is well crafted.   So, I did not have my hopes up with Divergent.   Okay, maybe I was a little hopeful.   I was resistant at the beginning.   The voice in my head said, “This is a rip off.   This is just like when everyone started reading other vampire books because they liked Twilight.   As if the best thing about Twilight were the vampires.   Puh-lease.   This is just another post-apocalyptic novel some publisher knew would sell.” The voice in my head can be rather harsh sometimes. By the middle of the book the voice in my head was too focused on the characters and plot of Divergent to question anything else. ...