JCPS ELA Teachers
Book Love Cohort
The Books
On this page we will feature books that students have reviewed and recommend. Please send us your own! We would love to feature them monthly.
A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown
ISBN-978-1400052295
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Review By: Jocelyn M. @ The Brown School
Teacher: Neysa Jones
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This book is about a lady named Cupcake Brown who faces many obstacles throughout life, one of them being issues with her family, her family falling apart from gang violence to prostitution -- she faced many obstacles. In the end, she ended up rising above it all and becoming a lawyer. It's an awesome book that's very encouraging.
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
ISBN-978-0307887443
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Review By: 11th grade student @ The Brown School
Teacher: Neysa Jones
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This is a book based in the future in a world where virtual reality basically rules humanity. The world is dying and everyone neglects it because they are living in this virtual space. James, the guy who created it, left an Easter egg inside his game where the first person to find it inherits all his riches. Since humanity is starving and poor, the main character Wade Watts goes on a quest to find it. It is a really good book with a lot of realistic characters and relationships and it has a lot of different meaning about the Internet and anonymity. It's like, "Do you really know people in the world if you've never met them in real life?"
The Autobiography of My Dead Brother
by Walter Dean Myers
ISBN-78-0060582937
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Review By: 11th grade student @ The Brown School
Teacher: Neysa Jones
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This is a really sad story about an inner-city boy growing up who lost his brother due to gang violence and selling drugs. It spoke to me because that's the stuff I saw when I was growing up; I grew up in downtown Louisville. I'm not going to say it was as bad as my dad's life when he grew up in Chicago, but growing up in Portland, we've all seen the same things. We've lost friends and family to these things. This book spoke volumes about what you can do to get out of that life and to earn stripes for yourself. You can become a better person than the people you grew up with.
A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie
by Kathryn Harkup
ISBN-978-1472911308
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Review By: 11th grade student @ The Brown School
Teacher: Neysa Jones
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Agatha Christie was a mystery writer back in the day and she liked to kill people [in her books] with poisons. She was a pharmacist and this book gets into her life, and details 14 different poisons she used in some of her more popular books. Then it talks about how the poisons work and the inspiration from real murder cases she may have gotten (what happened in her books and how realistic she actually was in her books about how the posions worked). It gets into the science about how the poisons kill you, where they come from, what they're made of, antidotes, the best way to kill people...you know, the usual. :)