AJ Dunn Reads

  Rick by Alex Gino Rick Ramsey is starting middle school. For a few years he's been best friends with Jeff, a not-so-nice to other kids video game buddy, and the kid who punched George (now Melissa) in the stomach in the fourth grade. Rick lives with his parents. His older sister just left for college, following their older brother. The two older siblings used to spend Sundays with their grandfather in turn, and now the task has fallen to Rick. He thinks it's going to be boring, but he finds that he and his grandfather have common interests and get along really well. At school, a new club called Spectrum is introduced to Rick in a science class. Rick feels funny. He is always ducking comments made by Jeff and his father about girls. "Or boys," his father knows he should include in the comments. Rick's parents are pretty progressive. But Rick doesn't ever think about girls or boys that way, and he wonders if there's something wrong with him. In secret, bec...

  George by Alex Gino George is a fourth-grader who desperately wants to play Charlotte in the school play of Charlott'es Web. The only problem is that the part will only be given to a girl and everyone thinks that George is a boy. But George knows she's a girl. George is bullied in school by Jeff and Rick who pick on George and call him a girl and a freak. George's friend, Kelly, also doesn't understand that she's really a girl uncomfortable in her boy's body. Living with her mother and older brother, Scott, George hides "girl's magazines" and looks at them in secret, afraid that if they are found, her mother will know her secret, which she is ashamed to let be known. When auditions for the play come around George and Kelly both read for the part. George's teacher tells her she has to be a girl in order to get the part. George is crushed and decides not to accept any part, but to be one of the crew members. Throughout the story George comes ou...

The Cider House Rules by John Irving I loved everything about this book! Homer Wells is an orphan growing up in St. Cloud's, a small town in main, under the care of Dr. Larch and his nurses Angela and Edna. Dr. Larch is an ether addict and abortionist, which is illegal in Maine during the story. Homer knows he belongs in St. Cloud's and has several failed foster placements, always ending up back in the orphanage. Dr. Larch decides Homer should be of some use, and teaches him all about obstetrics, how to deliver unwanted babies that will end up staying at the orphanage, and how to provide abortions to those women who want them and are not too far along in their pregnancies. Unlike Dr, Larch, Homer decides, as he is older, that he believes abortion should be legal and women should be able to choose to have them, but that he will not be performing them. As a young adult, still living and working at the orphanage and hospital, Homer meets Candy and Wally who arrive because Candy wa...

  Lila by Marilynne Robinson This is the third book in the Gilead series. It is told from the perspective of Reverend Ames's young wife, Lila, and follows her life from childhood up to the birth of the child she has with Ames. As a young child Lila is "stolen" by a woman named Doll after she is left outside of her home during the night. She lives with a bunch of people who seem to not care about her at all. Doll takes her and cares for her while they follow a transient group around the mid-western farm circuit in search of work during the Depression. Doll is a rough woman who teaches Lila not to really care about what happens in life, just to get by and to not take what doesn't belong to her. Doll eventually is arrested for killing a man, presumably Lila's father who may have come looking for her. Afterward, Lila makes her way to St. Louis and winds up at a brothel, where she fails to make it as a lady of the night, instead spending her time cleaning the place. Sh...

  Dune by Frank Herbert Young Paul Atreides leaves his home planet of Caladan with his family and royal house for the planet Arrakis. His father (Duke Leto) has been granted the planet to rule, but is betrayed by Dr. Yueh for political and personal reasons. Paul and his mother, Jessica (a Bene Gesserit) flee into the desert and become part of the Fremen people who are native to the desert planet. Paul has been trained in his mother's mystical ways, and trained in combat by his father's loyal men. Arakis (or Dune) is a crucial planet to the known universe for its habitability and production of a drug called melange, also known as spice. It is a substance that is addictive and is in everything on Arakis, but is also used as a power source throughout the galaxy. It extends lives and fuels enhances capabilities. The Fremen on Arakis have these abilities, though they do not explore or understand them. The royal Houses vie for control of Arakis because of the spice.  Religion and po...

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett How have I never read Ann Patchett before? This book was amazing! Danny and Maeve Conroy live in the Dutch House with their aloof and distant father, a poor serviceman turned rich property developer. Years ago their mother Elna, they are told, left them without explanation to go to India. Their father, Cyril, starts bringing a woman to the house and eventually marries her. Andrea is stern and cold, and the mother of two young girls (Norma and Bernice aka Bright). Andrea has her eye on the Dutch House - she loves it, whereas Elna hated it - and when Cyril dies everything is left to her. She's seen to that. Maeve, who was awya at college when this happened, is called back to take Danny. Both of them are banished from the house for good. Maeve becomes Danny's guardian. She has always been both a sister and a mother to him. She pushes him to go to medical school mostly to use up all of the money their father put into an educational trust for the four...

  Infinite Country by Patricia Engel Fifteen-year-old Talia escapes from the prison school she's confined to after having harmed a man who committed a horrible act in Bogotá, Colombia. She fleas to go back home to her father, Mauro, who intends to get her on a plane back to the United States where she was born to reunite with her undocumented mother (Elena), sister (Karina), and US-born brother (Nando). Along her journey she is helped by two men, one who hopes to get something from her and one who just wants to see her safely to her destination. Alongside this storyline is a retelling of how Mauro and Elena met, started a family, moved to the US, overstayed their visas, and how Mauro got arrested and deported after a fight. Talia was sent to live with him. Those left behind in the states lived in various cities, always wary of detection with the threat of separation and deportation for Elena and Karina. Elena longs for Bogotá, where things were familiar, she understood the language...

  Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones I love Stephen Graham Jones's writing style. It is conversational and youthful, and works well for the teenage main characters in Night of the Mannequins . The story is about Sawyer and his three friends who attempt a prank on another friend at her job in a movie theater. Previously they had all gotten her into trouble and in order to pay off her debt, she (Shanna) has to work in a theater which her friends frequent. The prank involves setting up a mannequin the group found earlier in the summer in a seat in the theater. But Sawyer sees the prank go awry when the mannequin fails to disturb the assistant manager, and actually gets up to walk out of the theater. Later that same week a tragedy befalls Shanna's family, and the group believes her to be dead. This leads Sawyer to conclude that the mannequin, Manny, is out to kill the friends because they decided not to "play" with him anymore, not to take him on adventures, ...

  The Drowning Kind by Jennifer McMahon The Drowning Kind follows Jackie (Jax), a therapist, who leaves her home and work on the west coast to go back home where her sister, Lexi, lives in the house she inherited from their grandmother, Sparrow Crest. The house was built on the site of a mineral spring that is said to be cursed, but also to have healing powers. The two girls were close when they were young, but as adults had grown apart. Lexi is bipolar and her manic episodes led Jax to separate herself from Lexi and the rest of the family, most of whom seemed to favor Lexi throughout their lives. When Lexi kills herself Jax returns to Sparrow Crest to find she has inherited the house, the land, and the curse of the springs. A mystery unfolds as to what made Lexi, a strong swimmer, drown herself in the pool (which was originally a small spring pool, but was widened into a swimming pool). The pool is deep, dark, and smells metallic and foul, but people have been taking its waters -...

The Dark Tower 1: The Gunslinger by Stephen King The first in The Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger follows the main character, Roland Deschains, through a desert wasteland of the End World in search of the man in black, who he hopes to kill, and who can point him towards the location of the Tower where he is to make his final battle. Roland comes from a wealthy and important family and became a gunslinger at the age of fourteen by besting his teacher in a bloody battle. Along the way he encounters a man brought back to life by the man in black, a woman who runs a saloon who uses him for sex in exchange for answers, and a town full of people who try to kill him. Then Roland finds a 12-year-old boy named Jake who seems to come from our contemporary world, but who had been run over by a car and killed, ending up waking in the End World. Jake has been staying in an abandoned building in the desert, and Roland takes him along on the journey, but ultimately sacrifices the boy in order ...

  David Copperfield by Charles Dickens In David Copperfield , Dickens explores his favorite themes of the industrial Victorian era: the exploitation of the weak and poor by the wealthy, and the moral integrity of the exploited versus the evil and greed of their superiors. The story follows the life of David Copperfield, who lives with his young mother and nursemaid as a young boy. As he grows he has to navigate an overbearing and abusive stepfather; an abusive schoolmaster; hunger and child labor; and the difficulties of making a life for himself out of those circumstances as he grows into adulthood. Along the way he encounters a large cast of characters, all with their own Dickensian quirks who help and hinder him along the way. Some he comes to love who then betray his trust and confidence, some he despises who return the favor, and some who seem bad at the beginning but become his saving graces. David Copperfield, himself, is very likeable, almost too likeable. He is morally upr...