Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. Earlier this year I tried this book and DNFed it, but comments said how good it was and it had good reviews on other sites, so I left it on my Kindle to try again later.

I think how you feel about this book depends on what you read. I read a lot of "last person left on Earth", "people crashed and have to survive alone on an island", those kinds of things. So for me, there wasn't much new in this story. And, because this is a book for younger readers, short cuts were taken on how the main character learns skills ("time passes" kind of short cuts, "it's suddenly 20 days later").

Near the end of the book, there was a moral I didn't like. After 40-something days lost in the forest, the main character got a gun and a lighter. He said just holding them changed him, that he no longer had such a connection with the wild world. It felt almost like a moral from White Fang or Call of the Wild or other books of that period: That "modern man" and "natural world" are antithesis.

It wasn't a bad book at all (it won a Newberry Award!), it just didn't really resonate with me.

Teen Wolf Academy: Year One Annalise Clark. I read this book last year, May 2021, but because of my Kindle's technical issues, it ended up on my Kindle again. Because I remembered enjoying it, I reread it. I can't find my review on my journal, but it's on Goodreads (LJ is having a fit linking it for some reason, but the URL is here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54597212-teen-wolf-academy).

When it comes to Shifter books (were-animal urban fantasy books) you can very much tell the book by the cover. But I love werewolves, so here I am with this one.

In it teenage werewolves are sent to a special school (so they don't end up killing non-werewolf students). The main character is the most Super Special Werewolf Ever (as is normal for Shifter books). She has to go through her first change into her wolf form and deal with the discovery that she's the most Super Special Werewolf Ever.

The book had a bunch of editing issues and was completely unoriginal, but somehow I still enjoyed it.

Oddly this book has vanished off Amazon. Ugh, the author sells BookTok services. Blech.


DNF #121: The Weirdest Noob by Arthur Stone. Poorly edited, poorly written LitRPG. I read it in 2017 (review here), didn't like it then, didn't like it now. I really wonder if my Kindle is having more technical issues, because I'm certain I wouldn't have copied this one back onto it. The title makes it clear what it is.

DNF #122: Wildling by Greg Curtis. I can't even tell you what this one was about. The writing had so many issues, I only got a few pages in.