Ms Rush Reads

  copyright date: May 2013 primarily marketed for: Young Adults (high school) Have you ever read Looking for Alaska by John Green?   I never thought I would ever read another book that I could recommend as being just as good as Looking for Alaska .   Until I read Winger by Andrew Smith .   I laughed audibly at fictional characters while reading this book.   My heart ached for fictional characters while reading this book.   I had tears streaming down my face over fictional characters while reading this book.   It is a good book.   Great book.   Incredible book.   It is about a brilliant fourteen-year-old kid at a boarding school with sixteen-year-olds.   After getting into some cell-phone trouble, this self-proclaimed runt is thrust into living in Opportunity Hall, the dorm for troubled students.   The kind of troubled students who would love to squash a fourteen-year-old boy.  ...

copyright date: January 2014 primarily marketed for:   young adults “Leaning against my father, the sadness finally broke open inside me, hollowing out my heart and leaving me bleeding.   My feet felt rooted in the dirt.   There were more than two bodies buried here.   Pieces of me that I didn’t even know were under the ground.   Pieces of Dad, too.” -from The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson is undoubtedly her most powerful work so far.   And that is saying a lot.   Somehow this story managed to charm me, break my heart, coax me to giggle, steal my breath away, and fill me with hope.   From the moment I began reading, I allowed little else to interfere with my path to the last page.   Hayley has traveled the country with her war veteran truck driver father for years before finally settling down to attend high school and lead a ‘normal’ ...

copyright date: 2011 primarily marketed for: young adults (teens) The Berlin Boxing Club by Robert Sharenow opens with this quote: “There is one kind of sport which should be especially encouraged, although many people . . . consider it brutal and vulgar, and that is boxing . . . There is no other sport which equals this in developing the militant spirit, none that demands such a power of rapid decision or which gives the bod the flexibility of good steel . . . But, above all, a healthy youth has to learn to endure hard knocks.” -Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf As an opening, it is a perfect representation of Sharenow’s ability to craft a story that is at once rooted in history and grounded in contemporary relevance.   Karl Stern is a young boy growing up in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power.   He is Jewish by descent, though his family does not identify with or practice Jewish religion or culture.   His Jewish identity serves as t...

copyright date: August 2012 primarily marketed for: young adults (8 th grade and up) Every once in a while I read a book so amazing that I am torn between the urge to keep the wonder of its story all to myself and the desire to share its goodness with all the world.   Every Day by David Levithan is just such a book.   Becky Anderson, an owner of Anderson’s Bookshops said this is a book everyone should read.   She is right.   Every Day is the story of ‘A.’   ‘A’ wakes up each morning in a different person’s body.   ‘A’ has no gender, no race, no sexual orientation.   ‘A’ takes on the unique qualities of whatever body ‘A’ is inhabiting for the day.   Being that ‘A’ shifts from body to body, it is nearly impossible to make connections.   Any connections made have the potential to create difficulties for the owner of the body in which the connection was made.   As a result, ‘A’ seems desti...