The Ocean Within - V.M Caldwell

The book The Ocean Within was excellent yet at the same time surprising. The Ocean Within is sort of a sad story, but it has a happy ending.

This book is about a twelve year old girl named Elizabeth. She has been in foster homes her whole life and has hated all of the. They have been mean to her so now she thinks that all foster parents are mean. She doesn’t want any parents except her own. But that isn’t possible.                                                                                                                                                    

Then one day this nice couple come and ask Elizabeth to live with them for the summer .They go to their grandmother’s house for the summer. She lives by the ocean. The only reason she agrees to go with them is because   Elizabeth has never seen the ocean. The book is about Elizabeth meeting her big foster cousins and dealing with their Grandma.

This is a very descriptive book. Mostly the setting is on the beach and it sounded very pretty when the sun set. V.M Caldwell has a lot of good details.

I couldn’t really relate to what Elizabeth was going through, because I was never in a foster home. It must have been really tough and weird to be in a family that was already started.

The things that I did not like about The Ocean Within are that sometimes Elizabeth would be a little too gloomy. I know it must be really hard to be in that situation, but the least she could do is not be mean to the family. They were being very nice to her.

 I think that you should definitely read The Ocean Within it has very good description and good dialogue.

V.M Caldwell is a terrific writer and she has a sequel to The Ocean Within. It is called Tides and it is about Elizabeth and her new family.

Oddballs
Kara
The Oddballs is a creative way of showing your passion to be different and your creativity of acting. They express their feelings by doing fake skits in public. The characters in this book like Vicky are very odd but Vicky is different she could be popular if she wanted but she likes being odd with all her friends like, Avis and Danny. One play they did to express their feelings, was a play about things their parents do to make them mad or to embarrass them. An example of something was how their parents always talk about how perfect the Greenberg’s are and how they are so neat and kind.

I would recommend this book to people who like comedy and mystery. It's a very comical book because of the pranks they play to get noticed and the party's they have like the Halloween party's. That is always so scary with all the posters and paintings on the wall. For the people that like mystery the people like Avis always investigate things when they don’t sound true. When a new friend of theirs Leah told them she got an early exception to Harvard University only being a junior high school. So they went to the office and asked the principle if she had really gone and it was true she really did go but there were also many more mysteries too.

One major thing that I liked in this book was that the parents were so nice and easy going. When they did the play on what they hated about their parents Vicky’s mother discovered the list but instead of telling the other parents or yelling at her kids she decided to go along with the play. She directed the whole thing and kept it a secret until the play was over.

There wasn’t too many things I didn’t like about the book but I didn’t like that in the beginning of the book Vicky’s brothers Danny and Tycho were talked about and explained but towards the end of the book they were dropped off.

I related to this book a lot because I love to go out in public and play pranks on people with my friends. One prank we pulled was in a store we pretended to be fighting and every one was looking at us others just ignored us. This reminded me of what they did on the bus.

The Outsiders
Danielle

            I just finished the book The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. I thought it was a good book. The way Hinton describes the scenes, the characters, and the way they react to things and the way they feel. She also gives good description when she is describing scenes. One of my favorites was a scene with a church on fire. I liked it because she does not just say the fire is big and hot. Hinton says the flames are bursting to be larger and larger while the temperature begins to rise. She gives good details and description. This was one of the best books I’ve ever read.