Wonder..Review 38

Wonder by R.J.Palacio

August has a face like nothing anyone has ever seen. Like a screaming and running away kind of face. He has accepted that this is the face he has. Now he has to figure out how to cope with a world that has never seen a face like his. He has been homeschooled his whole life and now for 5th grade, his parents want him to go to school. A regular school. With kids who don't know him. Kids who have never seen him. For fifth grade. I know I have always thought that 5th grade is the hardest school year of anyone's life, much less, someone like August.

As we watch him and his classmates grow it is gratifying that none of them are as cruel and heartless as we all know modern children can be. You will tear up and stand up and cheer as you follow along with the life of August, his friends, his sister, her friends and how everyone is affected by what happens in August's life. Yes, everyone deserves a standing ovation, at least once in their lives.

SBN#978-0-375-89988-1

The Whipping Club..review 37

The Whipping Club by Deborah Henry

A bleak and dismal tale of lost love, lost chances and lost lives. A young woman finds herself pregnant and in love. She sacrifices her child for the love of her man, who's Jewish mother can't accept her and who's Father dies the night he tells them of his love. Never knowing she was pregnant, she vanishes under a false story. She returns almost a year later. They marry, she never mentions their son, given up to be adopted in America. They have a daughter, and things are good. Until she hears from "Nurse" a woman who works at the "maternity home" where they took her child. Nurse tells her that her son is in an orphanage not far away. Guilt, and the need for her son, eat away at her. What follows is a dark depressing look into the orphanages, boys "schools" and the power of the church and police that will chill you to the bone. I found the type face changes (from one face to another and change in an out of boldface) very distracting. Sort of like a gruesome auto wreck I could not stop reading.

ISBN#978-0984553174