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Time taken: 32 minutes
Pages: 1-85

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Hello Universe by Erin Entrada Kelly pt. 2

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Hello Universe by Erin Entrada Kelly pt. 2

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(See other 'Hello Universe' response for statistics)
The moral of this story, as far as I can tell, is that all it takes for your crush to like you back is to have them save you from a well and for you to text them one of the most common phrases on Earth instead of actually thanking them. (Yep. She saves his life, and he never thanks her.) Also, the next time you want to chase your guinea pig down an abandoned well, bring a flashlight or something.

Seriously, though, the voice in Virgil’s head that encourages him when he’s trapped in the well is probably the first sign of a significant deterioration of his mental health. He’s not that smart, he’s constantly being picked on, and he’s just been through a traumatizing ordeal. He’s currently trapped in an unfamiliar environment with no way out and no way to contact his family. He’s scared out of his mind and has only his guinea pig for company, so of course it makes sense that one of the figures from a story he heard would start talking to him in his mind.

Of course she would urge him to call for help - that fight between him and her about whether or not it would be useless is really his internal struggle about whether or not to give up hope. Of course she tells him that it’s possible to ‘send people letters’ using only your mind. He’s far away from his parents and his phone is broken, so this is just his wistful thinking, his wanting them to know where he is. And of course, according to her, her destiny is to ‘help people in trouble’.

Because Ruby (the name of the voice in his head) isn’t some ancient warrior spirit come to help him fulfill his destiny. She’s a coping mechanism he uses to stay sane and not lose hope. It works for a while, and it seems that Ruby has actually helped him.

But then Ruby follows him home.

Even after Virgil has conquered his fears and escaped the well, he can still hear Ruby’s voice. She’s still giving him advice, and who knows what will happen if he continues to listen to her. This coping mechanism Virgil used to save his life could end up spelling his doom.

…

Well, THAT turned dark quickly.

In conclusion, always bring a flashlight on your guinea-pig-saving expeditions into abandoned wells, and listen to the voices in your head… but not too much.

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Hello Universe by Erin Entrada Kelly pt. 1

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Hello Universe by Erin Entrada Kelly pt. 1

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Time taken: 138 minutes
Pages: 320
Note: This is a video response. (The video is there, you just have to scroll down a lot.)
Script:
As people who are actually good at being humans go, Virgil Salinas is not so great. Then again, as amazing at it as they seem to be, his parents are much, much worse.

Virgil is the shy, misunderstood one in his perpetually happy family. I would try to come up with some clever analogy to make this response slightly less boring, but I think Virgil sums it up best himself: “...The Salinas family was big personalities that bubbled over like pots of soup. Virgil felt like unbuttered toast standing next to them.” In other words, his parents are over-the-top social animals, and Virgil is the most introverted introvert ever to introvertedly introvert introvertedly on the planet Introvert. Pterodactyl.

Virgil isn’t all that smart, either. He’s very physically weak and extremely cowardly. He’s terrified of everything and hides behind his pet guinea pig. He’s not terribly nice and has literally no social skills. He has, in other words, no redeeming qualities. Well, except that he’s totally pathetic and lets everyone walk all over him - his parents (who always call him ‘Turtle’ because he ‘won’t come out of his shell’ even though he hates that nickname), the unrealistically cruel bully Chet Bullens (who calls him names and once tried to kill his guinea pig), and even, in a way, Valencia (the girl he has a crush on but has never talked to).

He seeks help for his issues with Kaori Tanaka, the local twelve-year-old lunatic who believes that she is the reincarnation of a 65-year-old freedom fighter and swears by spirit stones and Zodiac signs. Maybe I’m being a little too judgy, but seriously, Kaori! She is obsessed.

Kaori helps him through his issues and makes the stereotypical totally-fake-but-actually-come-true-because-why-not predictions about Virgil’s fate. Until, that is, Virgil gets stuck at the bottom of a well.

Meanwhile, Valencia is seeking help of her own for a series of nightmares she’s been having. She also seeks out Kaori after Kaori stupidly posts advertisements around about her fortune-telling business, which is just one tiny step away from literally going around asking for trouble. When Virgil doesn’t show up for an appointment, Kaori gets nervous, since Virgil is always perfectly on time. She and Valencia go out to search for him.

(Valencia’s deaf, by the way. Forgot to bring that up. Sorry.)

Like I said, Virgil gets stuck at the bottom of a well after Chet Bullens throws his backpack down because Virgil is going into seventh grade and still doesn’t know his multiplication tables. Just one problem: Virgil’s pet guinea pig, Gulliver, was in that backpack. Virgil loves Gulliver, so he descends the well to get him. Gulliver, thankfully, is safe, but now Virgil is stuck down there and can’t get out. I appreciate Virgil’s love and dedication towards his guinea pig, but couldn’t he just have gone and gotten an adult to help him, or at least brought a flashlight or something? Wow, Virgil really isn’t all that smart.

When he’s down there, he starts having these weird… things. I’m not sure whether they’re supposed to be visions or hallucinations or what, but this girl appears to him, calls him a weird name he’s never heard before, and makes him cry for help. (Not in a weird or evil way or anything. She just wants him to be found.) Since I don’t really believe in that guardian spirit stuff, I’m inclined to believe it’s just Virgil’s imagination bringing the stories his grandma told him to life after a traumatizing incident, but it’s kind of confusing.

Meanwhile, Chet is off to catch a snake, wanting to prove how brave he is or whatever. Of course, he does it in the dumbest way possible, planning to catch it by the tail (which you should never do). Eventually, he does find one, and when he attempts to execute his brilliant and well thought-out plan (sarcastic sarcasm is sarcastically sarcastic), it bites him before he can even touch it. He screams like a small child and waits to die.

Valencia, Kaori, and Kaori’s little sister Gen have been trying everything to find Virgil, convinced that he’s missing. When they hear Chet’s scream, they rush over to him, only to discover that his bite is so small and harmless that it might as well be a bee sting. (Unless you’re allergic to bees. In that case, it’s much, much less harmful than a bee sting.) Chet’s all grumpy and ungrateful that he has no amazing battle scars and walks off, insulting Valencia for being deaf all the way home.

Then they hold some sort of weird seance thing with Chet’s pillowcase and suddenly Valencia knows exactly where Virgil is. (They try to justify the pillowcase seance thing in the book, but to me it’s just totally confusing and weird and needlessly complicated, so I’m not even going to try to make sense of it.) (Also, don’t ask why a pillowcase. I am in no mood to explain that. Pillowcases are just powerful creatures, I guess.) They find Virgil and help him escape with Gen’s jump rope.

The book ends with Virgil texting Valencia one word: ‘Hello’. For some reason, this appears to make Valencia fall madly in love with him, because… logic??????
(cont.)

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Time taken: 198 minutes
Pages: 320
Note: This is a pictorial response. (The picture is there, you just have to scroll down a lot.)
This book was actually pretty good. Not the greatest - a lot of parts were confusing - but not the worst, either.
However, it was pretty hard to get through, not because of the plot, but because of the main character.
The main character, Eli, is equal parts sympathetic and so terrible you just want to throw him off a moving train and whack his remains with a machete. Like a lot of books, it was almost ruined for me by the fact that the main character could be so darn hate-able at times. However, it's supposed to be that way, and, while it made the reading experience very frustrating, it was also essential to world-building and his overall character development.
Eli is an eighteen-year-old who seems very smart but lazy. That isn't why I hate him, though - if it were, I would be a major hypocrite, since I'm the laziest person I know. Even when he got an awesome job working for Dr. Wyatt, a famous biologist, based purely on family connections which I will talk more of later, I didn't hate him that much. Sure, it was annoying, but hey, I can't fault him for having family connections. Those aren't his fault. The reason I hate him (at least at certain parts of the book) is how wholeheartedly he rejects his awesome girlfriend, Viv.
Viv is smart, philosophical, and really cares about him. She's not the athletic type, and she's not all that pretty. She's curious to the point of being nosy, but at the end of the day, she just wants to help Eli.
Eli, of course, coldly rejects her just because she wanted to know more about the family he would never tell her about.
Since Eli's mother has Huntington's disease, Eli is ashamed of her. He doesn't want Viv to know about her because he thinks she'll judge him or give him worthless pity for it. Naturally, Viv eventually finds out.
So what does Eli do? Does he break down crying? Does he finally tell her the truth? Does their relationship only become closer?
Nope. He ditches her to go out on a date with a prettier girl, and, when he finds Viv at his house, sobbing, he screams at her for not blindly believing everything he says and dumps her, leaving her confused and heartbroken.
(By the way, that prettier girl eventually turns out to be his half-sister, which I think is the best karma possible for him in a situation like this.)
Anyway, even though I could tell that Eli was supposed to be this hateable, it did make the book a bit hard to get through without screaming at Eli at the top of my lungs.
One day, Eli is hanging out at his job and playing with Foo-foo the rabbit when Foo-foo escapes from her cage. He chases her down the hallway before she leads him to a secret elevator hidden behind a door labeled 'utility room' that gives you access to the secret subbasement level where Dr. Wyatt stored Eli's siblings, whom he then proceeds to brutally murder, making him even worse than Dr. Wyatt.
Oh yeah, like I mentioned, Eli's mom had Huntington's disease, and because of this, she and Eli's father (who really isn't an important character at all) decided to test out a new biological process with Dr. Wyatt to ensure that their child wouldn't have Huntington's as well. Dr. Wyatt had several test subjects, one of which was Kayla Matheson (Kayla is Eli's beautiful half sister and the girl Eli fell in love with, as I mentioned earlier. Not gross at all, Eli). However, there is a reason why Eli and Kayla had never met before Eli got his job - Kayla was one of the unsuccessful test subjects. In other words, she has Huntington's. Eli, on the other hand, stressed about having Huntington's for the whole book but refusing to get tested for it in order to create fabricated and 100% avoidable tension for the reader, was successful. Kayla has Huntington's disease, and Eli doesn't. They grew up separately because Eli's mother didn't want to live with a Huntington's-infected child, and Dr. Wyatt stored the rest of the test subjects underneath the lab where Eli was working.
(Eli later kills all these test subjects - who are humans, by the way - in cold blood
This picture of a rabbit well represents some of the characters in this story. And, no, that's not just because the only reason Eli discovers the secret is that a rabbit escapes from her cage and leads him to it.
I did some research on rabbit psychology (which may be one of the strangest sentences I have ever had to write for a homework assignment), and it turns out that there are a few specific reasons why your rabbit will attack you. Some of these are:
1.) If you put your hand out for a rabbit to sniff and they attack, it's because they're startled by the gesture and have terrible short-range vision, not because they don't like how your hand smells. This is reflected in Eli, who attacks Viv when she tries to gently show him that she loves him by trying to understand more about his family.
2.) Rabbits are very territorial. If you try to take something from them, say, their cage, they'll get angry, since that's basically all they have and they can't see why it's being taken. This is reflected in Viv - after Eli leaves her, she's confused and angry at him for leaving her. We don't get much information about Viv's personal life, but it's clear that Viv doesn't like her mom a whole lot, which is kind of strange, since Eli describes her as totally nice, but whatever. Suddenly, for strange reasons, Eli is leaving her. She's upset and confused - much like a rabbit would be if you tried to take something from them.
3.) If you try to shake a rabbit out of a bad habit, they'll nip you - not because they're angry, but because they're annoyed. In much the same way, Eli 'nips' his father when he overpressures and overcautions him, Viv when she warns him not to do anything stupid, and even his mom (whose mind is basically destroyed at that point) for... being alive, I guess? He never really gives a good excuse for that. Anyway, Eli will nip at anyone who gets in his way because he thinks like a scientist and sees them as minor annoyances interfering with a major goal.
And, besides, this rabbit is adorable. That doesn't have anything to do with anything, just... they're adorable.
In conclusion, roses are red, violets are blue (they're actually purple but I'll pretend that they're blue for the sake of the poem), rabbits are killers, and Eli is, too! (I'm not sure whether I should feel proud or depressed that that's the most romantic thing I've ever written, poem or otherwise.)

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Time taken: 211 minutes
Pages: 336
When I first picked this book up, I thought it was some historical fiction book. I really hate historical fiction, but I decided to give it a try because I was literally desperate. (I'm too picky for my own good.)
It was not a historical fiction book. It was a book about the lamest kid in the world who runs the lamest bike shop in the world with some of the best siblings in the world.
I think I would've liked this book a lot more if it had been centered around literally any character other than Dewey Marriss, a fourteen-year-old wimp.
I mean, he has some really awesome siblings! His older sister, Lil (these children have extremely weird names), is a great artist who wants their family to be fully independent and not to accept help from anyone. She's stubborn and creative, like me. His thirteen-year-old younger brother, Vince, is a genius bike mechanic, but he's shy and hates interacting with people. He's sarcastic and doesn't talk much but usually hits the issue right on the nose, and I'd love to get into his mind. His five-year-old twin siblings, Angus and Eva, are very young and don't know much but are funny and surprisingly profound. Any, any of these characters would be more interesting to see the world of the perspective than boring Dewey Marriss.
Dewey is average. He has some pretty boring thoughts, and he doesn't really do anything of value for the family. He's a pretty good bike mechanic, but Vince is much better than him. He's kind of a people person, but he's very weak and lets the thief next door walk all over him. If he had even one tiny bit of Lil's personality, maybe he wouldn't be so pathetic. But no.
Anyway, Dewey's parents are driving out for their twentieth anniversary when oil completely runs dry. Dewey is left in charge of the family bike shop, because it's not like it should go to Lil, the oldest and most responsible, or anything. Pfft. That would be ridiculous. (Note the sarcasm.) As the inside cover of the book puts it, "Suddenly everyone needs a bike. And nobody wants to wait."
As you can imagine, this is pretty overwhelming, so Dewey accepts help from a random stranger he picked up on the road. (He is really not the kind of kid who should be left unsupervised for long periods of time.) That random stranger is Robert Deal, a guy with bike part thief written all over him. Yet, somehow, Dewey never even suspects him.
Which I guess is good, since it turns out that he wasn't actually the bike part thief. But more on that later.
Lil doesn't trust Robert. She doesn't accept his charity because she doesn't want him to think that they're just a stupid, dependent group of Lil kids (which is my worst and least grammatically correct pun to date). I totally get that, although Dewey acts like it's crazy not to wholeheartedly trust a random stranger. And it turns out that Robert is actually a super nice guy who just wants to help, but Lil's continued stubbornness just makes me relate to her even more, which... really says something about my insane level of stubbornness.
Anyway, about halfway through the book, supplies start getting stolen from the bike shop. Of course, Dewey instantly suspects Mr. Spivey, their next-door neighbor who's constantly stealing things from their farm. But it's a realistic fiction/mystery book, so of course the thief isn't the one it makes the most logical sense to be. This book and all mystery books like it are the worst enemies of Occam's razor.
An extremely unimportant subplot of the story is that Lil is working on mural for their shed. She's using a paint sprayer to do so, which she leaves out by the shed every night, thus leaving the fate of her art supplies for nature to decide. (DON'T DO IT, LIL! HUMANITY IS NOT NATURE'S FRIEND... too late.)
Surprisingly, this actually saves the bike shop. Dewey goes out in the middle of the night because he hears someone trying to rob them. Since he has no other weapon, once he catches them, he sprays them full force with the paint sprayer, filling their ear with blue paint and making them easily identifiable as...
the totally nice cop who didn't seem like he had anything to do with this scenario.
The cop, Darren Macey, had stopped by several times to help them look for missing parts, while he was the one stealing them all along, which makes no sense because he didn't appear to actually be doing anything with them.
Yeah. Occam's razor went out the window a long time ago, so I should probably stop trying, but this came out of basically nowhere and was super predictable at the same time. It's both impressive and depressing that it managed to pull that off, since it just leaves me in a state of confusion.
Something I thought was interesting was that, right after the end of the book, Macey shows back up to return Angus and Eva's bikes, swearing that he wasn't the one who took them. Dewey tries to push him away, but he just keeps coming...
...until Mr. Spivey, their next-door thief, throws the eggs that Angus and Eva had been giving them.
(Angus and Eva had this idea where they would 'get rid of their thief' by giving him eggs so he wouldn't need to steal them. While it's absolutely adorable, I seriously cannot believe that Dewey went along with this plan.)
I guess the moral the book is trying to convey is that you should give others the benefit of the doubt and that if you're nice to even someone as mean as Mr. Spivey, they'll return the favor eventually, but to me it came across as 'don't forgive your enemies - the mistakes of the past can never be made up for'.
I guess that, in this case, the moral message depends on whether Macey actually stole and then returned those bikes. If he didn't, then he's a good guy who's trying to do the right thing, and the twisted moral message never to forgive your enemies holds. If he did, then the message the book is actually trying to convey is the correct one. I guess we'll never find out.
Also, the whole town pitching in to help Dewey right at the end is sweet, but unrealistic. People don't care that much about charity events! I know for a fact that no group of people, let alone a whole town, would put in as much work as the people at the end of the book do just to be charitable.
In conclusion, in the cynical read-between-the-lines version of this book, trust no one and don't forgive anyone for their mistakes when they inevitably make them. Except for that random hitchhiker you picked up that one day. Trust him with your life.

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Time taken: 78 minutes
Pages: 264
I'll admit, I didn't expect this book to be as good as it was. The cover was bright, goofy, and cartoon-y. It seemed like a book for younger kids. But the first sentence - Maple syrup is good on pancakes, but it's really terrible on homework - captured my interest. And, while I was a bit disappointed that the book wasn't about a kid who ate homework for breakfast (what? I have unusual expectations), it only disappointed a tiny bit.
By the first chapter, it was clear that it was a book for younger kids - uncomplicated dialogue, lack of real conflict, etc. That, however, was one of the reasons it was so good.
Most books about teenagers involve romance subplots, alcohol, and swearing of such proportions that makes me wonder if the author really couldn't think of anything better to write than a bunch of curse words. This book, though, wastes no time on such stupid ideas, heading straight for the meat of the story. Actually, maybe that's why it's relatively short. For once, it might have actually been interesting to have some sort of romantic conflict between two of the main characters, Greg and Ana.
Nah, that's the insane, normal-teen part of me talking. Back to the story.
'The Homework Strike' is exactly what it sounds like - a book about Gregory K., a seventh grader who decides that he and his classmates have way too much homework and goes on strike because of it after the bad grades of his homework lower his overall grade and force him to skip an open mic night at a bookstore, which had the only thing he'd been able to look forward to for weeks. While I normally don't side with protagonists who are like this (normally, main characters who do things like this are total stuck-up brats - it's one bad day, kid. Come on!), I have to side with Gregory on this one. According to the following list that he makes on page 69, Greg claims that he has to complete a minimum of THREE HOURS OF HOMEWORK EVERY NIGHT:
Reading: 30 minutes (plus one minute to log)
Keyboarding practice: 15 minutes
Math: 30-60 minutes (takes Alex 10)
English: 20-25 minutes (takes Ana 45-50)
Vocabulary: 5 minutes
Science: 20-30 minutes (takes Benny 10-15)
Required science and math video lessons: 10 minutes 2x a week
History: 45 minutes
(I did the math, and it actually comes out to a minimum of 2.8 hours, but close enough.)
That is a ridiculous amount of homework!!!! The school day's long enough without having to do a half day's worth of school when you get home.
(Also, I am really, really glad that my Social Studies homework doesn't usually take me 45 minutes. Gregory, if you need a place to start, I would suggest suing your history teacher.)
(Okay, the history teacher is, like, the only nice teacher in the entire book, but still.)
Gregory's main argument for his strike against homework is that the sheer amounts of homework he and his friends have to do has forced them to give up, or at least spend much less time doing, things they used to love. For Alex it's filmmaking, for Ana it's painting, for Gregory it's writing.
Speaking of writing, Gregory seems at least a little better with words than he is with people. He could've just written a strongly worded letter to the superintendent. Then again, the superintendent probably just would've ignored it, so it was probably for the best that he didn't even try.
The plot's fairly simple, the characters are fairly likable, and the idea's fairly new. All in all, it adds up to a fairly good book. Not one of my favorites, but good. I just have one question and one complaint left.
First, the complaint, because that's what I'm good at. When books have a main character who's a writer, they often include at least a little snippet of that character's writing. This writing causes everyone around them (at least in the world of the book) to insist that it's amazing and needs to get published. While Gregory's writing skill is more of a minor subplot in this book, everyone, especially his friend Ana, makes a big deal out of it, and every chapter begins with one of his poems.
They're... okay. Most of them just describe the chapter's events. There were only a few poems I actually liked in there. Honestly, I don't understand why Gregory's writing is such a huge deal.
That's the problem with books that have writers for main characters. The things they write have to be truly phenomenal for everyone to love them so much, and, usually, they're not. I've read some books that were ruined by a main character's writing not living up to their writing skills.
Anyway, just a minor complaint not with this book in particular but with the idea of protagonist authors as a whole.
My question: if Gregory's such a writing genius, why isn't his English grade higher? I know that the work assigned in English class doesn't always parallel with creative writing skill, but he shouldn't be doing as badly as the book claims he is. According to the poem Gregory writes to start off the story, "My English grade could use some aid - my math one's even worse." Why????????
In conclusion, reality is an illusion, the universe is a hologram, buy gold, byyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyye.

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Newsela Article: Meet the 11-year-old science whiz who invented water-testing device

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Newsela Article: Meet the 11-year-old science whiz who invented water-testing device

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This article is about  Gitanjali Rao, an eleven-year-old girl from Colorado who invented a device to help detect lead levels in water. Gitanjali, after being awarded the $25,000 check for winning the Young Scientist Challenge, says that she will continue to develop her device, which she calls Tethys, and begin its large-scale production.
One nonfiction signpost I noticed in this article was 'Contrasts and Contradictions'. In sentences one, two, and three of paragraph one, the author writes, "In many ways, Gitanjali Rao is a typical 11-year-old. She's lively, chatty and often smiling. Yet, she can also talk easily about carbon nanotubes and Arduino processors."
This is a 'Contrasts and Contradictions' signpost because it starts off with 'normal' things about Gitanjali, things you would expect an 11-year-old girl to have, and then moves onto the things that make her different from other children her age. It 'contrasts and contradicts' what you would naturally assume about Gitanjali based on her age and grade.
The difference between a 'normal' teenager and Gitanjali is that most eleven-year-olds aren't genius inventors. Most eleven-year-olds don't even know what a carbon nanotube is! But Gitanjali does, and that's what makes her different from others her age. This difference matters because it makes what Gitanjali's accomplished even more incredible. It shows just how amazing it is that one eleven-year-old was able to come up with a solution to a problem that adults several times her age couldn't find. An adult inventing an instantaneous water tester is incredible; an eleven-year-old inventing an instantaneous water tester is mind-blowing.