Nate's Book Reviews

By Nate Feldman Twilight: New Moon is the second book in the original four-book Twilight saga by Stephenie Meyer.  In this story, Bella is in love with Edward, an immortal vampire who is one of her classmates.  Edward and the rest of his family, the Cullens, no longer drink human blood for sustenance.  However, when Bella goes to his family's home for an event, she cuts herself, and in a brief moment, one of the family members have to be controlled from trying to attack her. Because of this, Edward decides it is too dangerous for him to be around Bella, and he vanishes.  This leaves Bella completely broken hearted.  She begins getting into risky behavior, such as driving motor cycles too fast because when she does, she can hear Edward's voice.  Bella also begins hanging around Jacob Black, a friend of hers from high school.  She doesn't love him like Edward, but Jacob seems to love her.  Things are further complicated when Bella learns that Jacob ...

By Nate Feldman In honor of the 50th anniversary of the 1975 movie Jaws, I decided to read the novel it was based on. For those unfamiliar with the story, Amity island, located off of Long Island, is terrorized by a Great White Shark that is killing people in the local waters.  Chief Martin Brody wants to close the beaches, but the local Mayor Larry Vaughn is against this for economic reasons.  When more people die, Brody joins forces with Matt Hooper, an out of town oceanographer, and Quint, a local fisherman to stop this menace. Both the movie and novel have this main premise, but there are significant differences between the two stories. In the movie, Chief Brody and his wife Ellen have a more loving relationship.  They also have two children, Sean and Michael.  In the movie, they have three children with mostly different names.  Also, Ellen is frustrated with the marriage.  For that reason, she has an affair with Hooper, who was the younger brother of a...

  By Nate Feldman Get a Grip, Vivy Cohen! is a story about Vivy, a young Jewish autistic girl who aspires to become a baseball player.  The book is written as a series of emails between Vivy and VJ Capello, a Cy Young Award winning pitcher for the San Francisco Giants.   Vivy admires VJ because he is great at throwing knuckleballs, something she is exceptional at.  However, because she is a girl, and she has no desire to play softball, she hasn't played organized baseball.  That changes when Coach K, a coach for a local little league team called the Flying Squirrels catches Vivy practicing with her brother Nate at a baseball diamond one days.  The coach is impressed with her abilities and offers her a spot on the team.   Vivy faces many challenges.  First of all, her overprotective mother doesn't understand why Vivy wants to play baseball in the first place.  Also, many players on the team, especially Kyle, the coaches son, taunt he...

By Nate Feldman Buster the dog is in big trouble!  He has violated one of dogkind's most sacred codes.....never let humans know how intelligent dogs really are and that they are able to communicate with one another!  But, Buster revealed this to Tonio, his young owner, and now he is at dog court and will be sentenced to life on the farm, a form of punishment for bad dogs, if found guilty! Buster admits to the court that he is guilty as charged, but he recounts why he showed Tonio the secrets of the dog world.  Tonio lives in a small town in South Carolina with his parents.  Tonio suffers from severe anxiety and has massive panic attacks often.  For that reason, he struggles socially with other kids.   Buster is a service dog for Tonio to help him deal with his anxiety.  He wants Tonio to make friends, so Buster tries to connect him with Mia, a girl in town who likes card games like Tonio does.   Tonio's anxiety continues to get in the wa...

  By Nate Feldman Sunrise on the Reaping is the fifth entry in the extremely successful Hunger Games series of books.  For those unfamiliar with the original trilogy and fourth story in the series, the books are about Panem, a fictional country, where an evil Capitol has forced 12 surrounding districts to put a boy and a girl into an arena in an event known as the Hunger Games, where the participants will all fight to the death until only one survives as a means of entertainment.  The purpose of this is to punish the districts for an uprising they had many years before due to mistreatment and inequality.   Sunrise on the Reaping takes place during the fiftieth Hunger Games, twenty four years before the original trilogy.  The protagonist and narrator is Haymitch Abernathy from District 12, who served as a mentor to Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of the first three books.  The fiftieth Hunger Games, also known as the second Quarter Quell (a special type o...

  By Nate Feldman Moving Target is about Cassandra, or Cassie, a young girl going to an international school in Rome, Italy when all of a sudden she and her father are attacked by a mysterious man.  Her father is shot and Cassie is told to find Brother Gregorio, who will protect her.  Before she goes there, she visits her friend Simone's apartment, where they are attacked again.  Then, they go to Brother Gregorio's monastery.  Brother Gregorio lives with his nephew, Asher, who is Cassie and Simone's age. It turns out that Cassie is being chased by a mysterious organization called the Hastati .  They are after Cassie because she is connected to an item called the spear of destiny, a spear with special powers that gives the person bound to it the ability to control destiny.   Although Cassie is not supposed to leave the monastery, she leaves with Asher and Simone in search of the spear.  Meanwhile, the Hastati are always a step behind her....