Shift - a review by George Morejon

Shift by Jennifer Bradbury

**** stars

Shift is a book about 2 boys who travel across America, from West Virginia to Oregon, on bicycles after they graduate high school. Chris is the responsible of one of the two, planning out everything they pack up and managing it all. Win, Chris' friend, is the irresponsible kid that gets himself in trouble all the time.

They're having a great time on their ride at first. The ride's feeling good instead of hurting, they're doing crazy fun things like jumping into every body of water they see, and they're camping out under the stars most nights. One day they even meet the nicest people on a farm out in rural Montana and spend a night there. It sounds like a great trip, and it is, but Win goes missing at the end and nobody knows where he's gone. Chris is just starting school now, and has to deal with Win's overbearing father threatning him, along with FBI agents asking about what happened to Win.

I thought this was a good book that only took ~4 hours to read. The storytelling is broken up with a chapter of current time (school, FBI agents) and a chapter of their trip together over the summer. At first I didn't like that, but after about 10 chapters it really started to grow on me and it made both parts better. I got a feeling that both of them discovered som new things about themselves, but taken in a somewhat unusual way. I was always guessing what happened to Win through the whole book.

Prom -- a review by Hope Austin

Prom

by: Laurie Halse Anderson

***

Prom is about Ashley, a lower-middle-class girl in urban Philadelphia who touts herself as "normal". She has a job and a boyfriend who she plans on moving in with after grtaduation. She doesn't care about much: college, her sky-high stack of detentions, and least of all, prom. Ironically, that makes her abnormal, as every other girl in the senior class is absolutely crazy over prom, including Ashley's best friend, Nat. Nat is the leader of the prom committee. Ashley could not care less about prom, much to her mother's chagrin. Unfortunately for her, fate has other plans. The math teacher steals all of the prom money, leaving the school without a prom. Even though Ashley doesn't care about prom, she knows that the a great deal of girls and their families made massive sacrifices for that one night. At the urging of Nat, she begrudgingly joins the prom committee. Hey, it beats detention. Now Ashley must take on one of the biggest responisbilities of her life: planning an entire prom in about a week.

The other Laurie Halse Anderson books I have read are Speak, Catalyst, and Wintergirls. Imagine my surpise when I opened up this book and found a great deal of humor. It's good to know that an author who writes about such serious topics can be lighthearted at times, too. i could really have done without the comparisons to Cinderella, however. It's more of story with fairy-tale elements, but there's little comparison with any sort of Cinderella story. Otherwise, it's a good, fun story.