Trevor

I read the first book back in the '90s when I was a kid, a re-read it yesterday. After, I found out a sequel was released two years ago and decided to listen to the audiobook. Of all the books to get a legacy sequel, I never thought Frindle would be one! This was a surprisingly emotionally nostalgic book. The book itself isn't emotional and is still just as lighthearted and funny as the first one, but it was a slightly emotional experience getting an almost thirty year later follow up to one of my favourite books as a kid. It genuinely feels like a legacy sequel.

This book has a really interesting narrative style, which I can't explain without going into spoilers. It also has very believable characters, even though they're dwarves, elves, and orcs. They're each given distinct personalities and attributes instead of just tired clichés. It was really a really refreshing take on the genre and I'm looking forward to the sequel!

I've been a huge fan of Ashley's for years due to her podcasts, and know she's really good at storytelling. So when she announced she'd written a novel I was really excited! I figured it would be good, but it was even better than I was expecting! Also, the true crime inspiration is very obvious, but it actually makes it even better. It's not just a straight up copy and paste of the actual case that inspired it. It's like she started with the idea of the original case and tweaked it until it was an original story. And there are twists in here that leave you guessing until the very end!

I love that while this is a collection of stories about San Francisco, it's done in a way that it tells the story of San Francisco, from beginning to present. Therefore turning a series of unconnected stories into a connected narrative.

After a lifetime of watching every Zodiac documentary and movie I could find and listening to every Zodiac podcast I could find, I have finally read the main book. I don't know why it took me 34 years to read it, but I don't regret it. Even after everything I knew about the case, I still learned things from this.

This is the best Stephen King novel I've read in years. The amount of details he included, I wanted to go down the Rabbit Hole and live in the '60s.

I've read Rachel's Tears, and I still consider that the best Columbine Book, but that just focuses on her. This is the best book about the event in general I've ever read. I already knew alot about it, and am always correcting people when they repeat the long debunked myths about the tragedy, but I learned so much more in this book than all my previous research combined! It's the most in-depth look into it, and it's obvious Dave Cullen took his ten years of investigating seriously.

I highly recommend this book to both people who know alot about it, and those who don't know anything about it.

I love how it overlaps the original novel and you get that part of the story from different angles.

I'm largely fascinated with this event in history, and thoroughly enjoyed listening to full-length radio recordings and eyewitness interviews.

I figured it'd be a Star Wars prequel-like cameofest of characters we know from the main series when they were younger. I was greatly surprised to find that this was as good, if not better than, the main series. Pretty much the only thing I didn't like was at one point it contradicted the main series, then later contradicted itself. In Left Behind, Nicolae was relatively unknown. But in this book he's in TIME Magazine article age 12. Then when he's 19 he's featured in every business magazine, but the narrator says he had yet to be in TIME Magazine..... But other than that, this was a very good book.

(I originally wrote this review in 2014, when the movie was being advertised. Just now, I edited it to fix a grammatical error and it reset the timestamp)

My school library got this, like, the day it came out. I saw it on the “New Release” table and the cover caught my attention and I was the first to check it out. It was so new that when I got home and opened it, the spine cracked. That'd never happened to me before and it was very exciting.

First off, I found this book to be very uncomfortable to read. The main character falls in love with her cousin. Incest is normally frowned upon in society, so the fact this book became so popular that they are currently making it into a movie shows how good it actually is if you can look past the incest and not judge it for that.

Once I got past the fact that she was in love with her cousin, the story itself was very good. I didn't know what it was really about before getting into it, so when it's showing them at the lake and her obsessing over her cousin, I assumed that's what the book was about. The out-of-nowhere war was, well, out of nowhere, and very well done. I love the fact you never fully understand what's going on globally, just what's happening to the characters. You just know the movie is going to ruin this by showing bombs dropping around the world and show world leaders discussing things.

But one major thing I did not like about the book, and I don't know if it was just in first editions of if that's how it still is, is that the grammar wasn't good at all. There was no quotation marks and limited punctuations. I'll give an example (not from the book, but from my mind) in the next line...

I really like it here she said. Its very nice. She walked over to a tree and sat down. Why dont you join me she continued...

^Not from the book, I made it up on the spot, but that's how the whole book is, and it made it hard to read. If you do the audiobook I'm sure it's not a problem, but for the paper book, I didn't like it. That and the incest prevented a 5 Star rating. I liked the book as a whole, though, and recommend it to anyone who can look past the things I mentioned.

This book is an amazing sequel to a classic novel. Spoiler You think you know what happened, but in perhaps the biggest twist ending I've ever seen, it turns out nothing was as it seemed. The only thing I didn't like about this was that Bloch seemed to have been influenced by the famous Hitchcock adaptation of the first book. Spoiler In the book, Mary was decapitated, while in the movie Marion was stabbed to death. In this book, he says that she was stabbed to death....like in the movie.

This book is purely amazing, and I cannot wait for the sequel, which Rowling confirmed will be next year. Cormoran Strike is going to be one of the greater characters of literature.

This book is nowhere near as good as the previous one. It's mostly boring, in my opinion. At least the first half is. The second ha;f gets better, and the end is why I gave it 3 Stars instead of the 1 I was planning on giving it. If you want to get through the series, I would recommend it for that, but otherwise this one is skipable for the most part.

(updated 9 September 2013)

I was talking this over this my girlfriend and I have more to say... This will contain spoilers, so the whole thing will be one of those “Spoiler” links.

SpoilerWhile I am liking the overall story, I am starting to think Scott Westerfeld isn't that great of a writer. Oh, he's good, but he's not great . He changed the rules to his own story halfway through. It was made very clear in Uglies that Pretties needed the Cure to be free of the Pretty Mind. Yet in Pretties, Tally cures herself simply by thinking it away. When Maddy finds out, instead of being like, “HOLY CRAP!!”, she's just like, “Oh, well that can happen as well”. THEN WHY NOT JUST SAY THAT TO BEGIN WITH?!

Another thing is that it's got the same structure as Uglies. Uglies started off with Tally as an Ugly, then found out about The Smoke and went had a long wilderness journey there, stayed with people in the wild, Shay becomes a Pretty, then the Specials came in and made her a Pretty.

In Pretties, she starts off as a Pretty, re-finds out about The Smoke, went on a long wilderness journey, stayed with people in the wild, then Shay is a Special and the Specials come in and make Tally into a Special.

It just felt repetitive. I just started Specials, and I'm hoping it's not just another repeat of the same thing.

This book was very good, and very original.When I reached the Spoilercliffhanger I said, “AW, COME ON!!” out loud. Then I remembered it's part one of a trilogy... Can't wait to find out what happens next<

Minor Spoiler Warnings

I already knew when I got this that it would be different from the classic Alfred Hitchcock adaptation, which I've seen hundreds of times and is one of my favourite films of all time. I've always wanted to read the book, but just couldn't find it anywhere. So when I found the paperback on Amazon for 99c, I bought it without hesitating. The book is very similar to the movie, but different enough that it is it's own story all together (I know that Bloch and Universal went their separate ways when it came to the sequels, so that makes sense). I never thought I'd ever say this, but Psycho by Robert Bloch is better than Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock! The story in the book goes much deeper than in the movie. Not only is Norman older and creepier, but you learn more about Sam, who I always felt was a 2-dimensional character in the film. You even learn more about Fairville in this book. However, one of the few things I didn't like about it, and kind of threw me off, is that Marian in the movie lives in Phoenix and Sam (and Norman) live in/outside of Fairville, which in the movie is in California. To me, that fit the feel of the movie, and I loved it. In the book, however, Mary (another thing I didn't like) lives in Fort Worth and drives to Fairville, which in the book is in Oklahoma. It's a small thing to most people, but changing the location really threw me off. Other than that, and a few tiny other things (like the name change I just mentioned), this book is a classic that any fan of the film should read.

Perfect. That's all I can say. If I say more, I will cry.

This book is so good, and I am so made at the filmmakers for diluting it so much. They took out like 85% of the story to make it a hit. I recommend this book to everyone! But warning, the first chapter is VERY intense! I almost stopped reading after that, until a friend said that was the only part that was like that.

I watched the movie long before reading the book, and I was very pleased with the book. The movie is just like the book, only in a different order. It was so weird reading the book and it being so much like the movie, but I loved it. This is one of the most innocent stories I've ever read/seen, and I have no negative thing to say about it. Having a bad day, watch or read Because of Winn-Dixie.

I probably should have read the book before seeing the movie. The book is very good, and I did enjoy it, but the movie took the story and greatly improved on it. So when I found the book and read it, I was very disappointed. So if you haven't seen the movie, I recommend reading the book first. You'll enjoy the book better without all the expectations.

On 26 May 2011, the day after my birthday, my friend Mark took me to see The Avengers for my birthday. When I got home, I found out that my grandfather had passed away the previous day (my birthday). While we were out of town for the funeral, my grandmother was the ONLY ONE who even mentioned it. On the last day there, she pulled me aside into the guest bedroom where the bookshelf is and said, “I realized that Gene died on your birthday. Have they done anything for you?” I said no and she said, “I remember you loved this book as a kid when you would come here and read it the entire time you were here”. She held up the old copy of Strange But True. The book was very well used, and by me. I literally grew up reading this book, every time I would go to my grandparent's house as a kid. It's the book that got me into the paranormal. I hadn't seen it in over ten years, and I nearly cried when I saw it. She handed it to me and said, “I want you to have this”. After the Bible, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and Misery by Stephen King, this is one of the most important books in my life, and if there was a higher rating than 5-star, I would give it that rating.

I first discovered this book in 1999 at my grandma's house. She lived outside of San Antonio and we'd visit every holiday and randomly throughout the year. Every time, I'd read from this book. It's the book that got me interested in the paranormal.

In March 2024, my grandmother gifted me the copy I read as a kid, and is probably the best gift I've ever been given.

I feel bad giving a Suzanne Collins book a 1 star review. But I honestly couldn't finish this one. I thought Snow would start off a decent person and stuff would happen to turn him into the awful person we know from the trilogy. But no, he starts off awful. It's hard to follow a lead you can't get behind.

I listened to the audiobook read by her. Betty White was one of the most pure people who ever lived, and that's shown here. It's hard not to get emotional listening to this, especially when she's talking about animals and her own pets.

It's truly a shame she didn't survive the war, because she dreamed of being a writer, and if she wrote this good as a teenager, I would have loved to have read everything she wrote when she became an adult. I've lost count of the number of times I have read this book. My copy looks like it's about to fall apart, even though it's only ten years old, and I got it brand new. Every time I read it, I get something new out of it. When I read it ten years ago for the first time at the age of 14, I merely thought, “This is a good story. The fact it's true makes it even sadder”. Now I am 25 and I read the same words from the same copy and think, “Wow! This girl was very mature for her age!”. I can see why so many people think it's a fake, because most 14 year olds don't write like that, but that just goes to show how smart she was and how good a writer she already was. In some alternate timeline, Annelies Marie Frank survived the war and became a world famous writer and is still alive at the age of 84. Of course, had she lived, we'd have never seen the Diary because IT'S A DIARY and I highly doubt she would have wanted people to see what she wrote. So nosiness aside, this is one of the greatest books ever written. Which also proves how awesome a writer she already was, because she wrote so well and we were never meant to see it. 5 Stars is too low a rating for this book.