No Choirboy By Susan Kuklin

No Choirboy by Susan Kuklin is a very intense, heart breaking, and violent nonfiction book about juveniles on death row. If you know anyone in prison, you would get a glimpse of their daily lives.

In the book, the inmates tell you about life in prison and how it changed them for the best. In some ways jail made them grow and mature. The author shows a photograph of every troubled youth in each chapter. When you look at their pictures and read their stories, you feel as if you know them and who they are.

The writing style was very interesting because it contains interviews between the author and inmate. Also the author gives her point of view on how the inmate responds.

Other nonfiction books by Susan Kuklin are Beyond Magenta, Families, Thinking Big, and many more.  Kuklin's main focus is to get the truth and give her subject a chance to speak about their thoughts.

Rating: 4 

One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies by Sonya Sones

You would think from the title of this book that it is completely depressing and darkly dramatic, but the author uses humor to lighten the basic plot line, which is that fifteen-year-old Ruby's mother does indeed die a horrible death from cancer, and Ruby does have to leave her beloved aunt and her best friend and her boyfriend to go far away to live with a father she has never seen before BUT. . .

Her father is a handsome movie star who is amazingly rich and lives in a fabulous house next door to Cameron Diaz. He has a collection of incredibly cool vintage cars and buys Ruby all sorts of trendy and expensive clothes and gadgets. He enrolls Ruby into an exclusive school where the children of other movie stars go and where Ruby's elective is dream interpretation, of all the kooky "California" things. So even though you feel sad for Ruby for losing her mom, and she goes through tremendous grief trying to deal with it, you have the comic element of Ruby dealing with this impossibly fantastic life that most kids would love to live.

Told in the first-person, in engaging free verse, the reader sees what Ruby sees and learns what Ruby learns as soon as Ruby herself does. And the end is a surprise. So, get over the title and give it a read.

Rating: 3.5