Red Cedar book reviews 2020

Title: My Life as a Diamond

Author: Jenny Manzer

Setting: Redburn, Washington

Main characters: Cassie Cadman, Mom, Dad

Summary:

This book is about a girl Cassie who moves to Redburn from Toronto because she has always wanted to be a boy. When she expressed that in Toronto everybody made fun of her. Since her family was already thinking of moving, that sorta “sealed the deal”. In Redburn everything is going well, but how long can she pretend to be a boy before someone finds out, dun dun duuuuun?

Rating: 1 2 3 4 5

Why: I think this was a good book and well written but it was lacking some elements of a good story like excitement. I am also just not a baseball fan.

Title: Kasey and Ivy

Author: Alison Hughes

Setting: Hospital

Main characters: Nina, Kasey and family

Summary: This story is about a girl who is diagnosed with a bone disease she describes as: a virus that is eating me from the inside out. She is in the hospital and every day she writes a letter to her friend Nina telling about her day in the hospital. She is the only kid in her ward because she is in the seniors ward and the kids ward is under construction. The food is horrible, it’s noisy and she has nobody to talk to! How is she going to survive for a month!? P.S. Ivy is literally her IV pole.

Rating: 1 2 3 4 5

Why: the whole story was made up with Kasey’s letters with nobody else’s perspective. Besides that it was really well written and the style of writing the letters were written with was nice.

Title: Krista Kim-Bap

Author: Angela Ahn

Setting: School and Krista’s house. (Vancouver)

Main characters: Krista, Jason, Madison, Mom and Grandma

Summary: This book is about a girl Krista who is Korean-Canadian and has to do a “heritage fair” for school so she decides to do kimbap. Except grandma is the only one in the family who makes Korean food and she and Krista are practically “enemies”. That’s not it though, this popular girl in Krista’s school Madison invites her to her birthday party and after that Krista starts to hang out with her. Only one problem with that though, once she started hanging out with them her best friend Jason stopped talking to her!

Rating: 1 2 3 4 5

Why: It was a very interesting book and the story in general is an amazing idea, which the author did an excellent job bringing from her imagination to ink. It was also a very intriguing book.