Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews

Sometimes you encounter books that defy the labels they’ve been placed under. Considering the topic of this book, the author did a wonderful job of expressing a point of view that’s utterly realistic and brutally honest. This book is about a boy whose mother forces him to spend time with a girl dying of leukemia. Spoiler alert: No they don’t end up falling in love and no, the girl isn’t saved by some nearly-impossible miracle. Unlike other books with cancer patients *cough* The Fault in Our Stars *cough* this book did not make me weep but it did make me shed one tear. Four actually. There wasn’t a happily-ever-after ending, and everything about the book from start to finish was realistic, which is very unlike a lot of YA fiction books. It was harsh, crude, down-to-earth, and without embellishment. This book will smack you in the face with a dose of reality and will remind you that in reality, miracles don’t always happen and that superman doesn’t always save the girl. Heck, he may not even be in love with her to begin with.

Faatimah Solomon

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

This book was everything unexpected. Ready Player One is a book set in 2044 where an online video game OASIS dominates the life of the majority of people. Earth by this time is depleted of natural resources and everyone’s lives are ravaged by poverty. People all over the world are turning a blind eye and refuse to accept their reality by replacing it with a perfect life on OASIS. When the multi-billionaire creator of OASIS dies, he sets a competition that'll determine the heir to his fortune (and company). Five years after the competition is announced, a parentless boy named Wade becomes the first to unlock the first stage of the challenge and triggers a mad scramble of OASIS users trying to complete the challenge, a challenge that many would kill for. Along his journey, he makes friends and enemies and learns at the end that OASIS is not a substitute for real life. As a person who is no way a gamer, I had my doubts when I started reading the book. By the time I was done, I wanted to pick it up and read it again. This book was nothing like I’ve ever read before, indescribable, truly one of a kind. I recommend this to everyone, gamer or non-gamer, because this book drives you to consider where the future of humanity is headed and at which point rampant technology becomes too much.

Faatimah Solomon