Emmie & Friends

I've had these on my Amazon wishlist for months and finally got around to ordering. I got them yesterday and zipped through in a couple hours.

I can't really talk about them without spoilering, so I'll mark where I'm about to get into spoilers.

These are an interesting combination of comic style and prose style. Each book alternates chapters between two POV characters. One is written entirely in comic format, while the other is illustrated prose.

All the characters are seventh graders at the same school.

These fit into the newer genre of graphic novels for kids very well. They're not on the level of the Berrybrook series, but they're not bad at all. Not as dramatic and heavy as Raina Telgemeier and Shannon Hale's stuff. They do have one aspect that's very different and that is the twist ending. The first two books have quite unexpected endings. The third doesn't, but there is a little reveal near the end. It's just not as dramatic as the first two. 

So from here on out, if you want to read these...and I do recommend them...don't go any farther than this. I'm going to discuss each one with spoilers, including spoilers for the twists.

First up is Invisible Emmie. Emmie is our prose chapter protagonist. Emmie is a very quiet, artistic girl. She doesn't let anyone see who she really is except her best friend Brianna and her family. Her mother works at a fitness center and is obsessed with health stuff. I can't remember what she said her dad did, but he's quiet like she is. She has two college-age older siblings who aren't in the story at all.

The comic chapters belong to Katie, who basically has a perfect life. Popular, lots of friends, boys  like her, athletic, successful at everything she does. 

The entirety of Emmie's book, after a few chapters of setting the stage, takes place during a single school day. You see how Emmi struggles with avoiding communication with people. Everything is fine until lunch, when she and Brianna write goofy love poems to their unattainable crushes. Emmie accidentally drops hers and it's found by the school douchebag, who of course tells everyone. Emmie spends the rest of the day trying to deal with the aftermath.

While Emmie struggles, Katie watches. Emmie's crush has asked Katie out, so Katie watches how he acts during the day. She comes to Emmie's rescue a few times, eventually leading up to telling the crush she wants nothing to do with him because he teased Emmie once, alongside his friends.

That leads to Emmie yelling at Katie in the hallway, telling her she doesn't need to be rescued. Emmie has to pass her crush, the douchebag guy, and their friend on her way to art class and douchey guy teases her. She retaliates and he does the same. Then both she and her crush tell him to shut up and then burst into laughter. They walk to art together and by the end of class, they're friends, and Emmie has also opened up to another girl in class, Sarah.

At the end of the day, Emmie goes on Brianna's bus to hang out and study with her. Brianna sees a picture of Katie she drew and asks who it is.

Yeah. This is the twist.

You see, despite looking like she was there the whole time, Katie never was. She doesn't exist. Katie is a fantasy of Emmie's, having all the things she wishes she does. So all her scenes only happen in Emmie's head. Emmie has grown a lot as a person and she opens up to more people as the book comes to its end.

There are some neat visual things, too. Emmie is colored with a gray wash over her for almost the entire book. It's only at the very end, as she opens up and talks, that she gradually comes into normal color. Katie, on the other hand, begins to go gray. You can see her standing outside the bus window as Emmie talks to Brianna and slowly Katie fades away. It's quite a poignant ending, both written and visually. I'm not doing it justice one bit, but it's really good.

Despite being called Positively Izzy, I think Brianna comes across as more the main character. Izzy has the prose and Brianna the comic chapters.

I didn't get a great impression of Brianna from Emmie's book. She got mad at Emmie, because Emmie took both fake love notes and Brianna was afraid she'd dropped both of them, not just Emmie's own. So in her time of greatest crisis, Emmie is abandoned by Brianna, who's supposed to be super smart, but clearly isn't when it comes to friends.

This book has her getting saddled with a performance in the talent show thanks to an actor that got sick. Brianna's mom is the new drama teacher, so Brianna agrees to perform. Her dad is also another teacher at the same school. Her parents are divorced. Brianna is teamed up with another smart student, Dev, and he helps her learn the scene and some acting basics.

The prose chapters belong to Izzy, who is not actually named Isabelle or anything like that. Her nickname comes from something completely different. Izzy, unlike Brianna, isn't good at school and only wants to perform. Her chapters have her forgetting to do a take home test and the punishment for this is that she can't do the talent show that night. Her younger sister helps her sneak out so she can go perform and face her punishment later. Naturally, this scheme falls apart and she's caught, but her mom allows her to perform anyway.

Both girls are likeable characters, though also clearly flawed, and their situations both work out in the end.

The final chapter belongs to Brianna, who's at a family gathering where they're celebrating her mother's birthday. And they yell out "Happy birthday...IZZY!"

Yep, all along you assumed the chapters took place at the same time, but they didn't. Izzy's are in the past and you can reread them and watch the fun of her meeting Brianna's dad. You can see how her sisters have grown up in the final chapter. And you can see how all along the signs were there because there is literally no interaction with any of the characters from the different chapters. There's a nice sidestep where Brianna and Dev are talking about how good the 5th person's solo act is and that's where Izzy's spot was in her past talent show, so you assume they mean her.

I didn't like this one as much as Emmie's, but it was still quite good and fun.

Jaime is a character you've seen in the past two books. In the first, she's more of an antagonist, known as one of the two Gossip Girls. In the second, she's just kinda there in a few background scenes.

Jaime gets the prose chapters. The comic belong to Maya, the other Gossip Girl. The other two characters I don't remember from either previous book.

Jaime is having friend drama, because her group of friends has changed and they've basically told her that she's not cool enough to hang out with them anymore. Led by the horrific bitch Celia, they're quite the terror. Think those Junior Plastics from Mean Girls.

So the book has Jaime dealing with being dumped. She's friends with Anthony, who's Brianna's crush in Emmie's book, and through him, she starts hanging out with Emmie, Brianna, Sarah and Tyler (Emmie's crush). Jaime has a few run-ins with nasty Celia, culminating in Celia almost untying Jaime's bikini top in the pool, something that ends up outing her as the bully she is.

Maya's chapters are about her changing friendship with Jaime and what it's like to be friends with popular mean girl Celia. At the end, Maya saves Jaime from being topless and realizes who her real friends are.

No twist in this one. I'm not going to explain in detail, but the aha moment is a connection between two adult characters.

I liked this one, but not quite as much as the other two. Although I do like Jaime as a character and her maturity by the end of the book. She realizes how she acted in the past two books was terrible and actually apologizes for it. Maya I don't really care for, but perhaps in a future book where she wasn't an antagonist half the time, I'd like her.

The fourth book is about Brianna. Again. I would have preferred Sarah, but maybe she'll get a future book.

GIRLS SURVIVE Series Part 3

Yay, it's been since July and now it's finally time for more Girls Survive!

These are still coming out in fours and still coming out earlier than expected. They weren't due until February 1st, yet they all came today. (ETA: I started writing this post back in January and got sidetracked from it for an embarrassingly long time.)

As always, I'm going in chronological order with these, so we're starting in May 1838. This book takes place over the course of ten months of terrible things. Reading anything involving the Native American genocide is always painful for me. I'm not Native American a bit, but it was absolutely horrific what was done to the US's indigenous peoples. One of the worst things to ever take place in this country and it's not talked about enough.

Mary and her family are living in Georgia. Her family is quite large. One cabin has her parents, her older sister Margaret, her younger sister Becky, and herself. A second cabin is for her maternal grandparents and a third has her oldest sister Nelly and Nelly's husband Raven. And their unborn baby.

So the family is doing normal daily life things when suddenly Grandma has a heart attack. She ends up dying overnight and everyone is preparing for the funeral when the house is approached by a bunch of white men. Things escalate quickly from here. Everyone is forced outside. The women gather as many possessions as they can, but also watch as their livestock and other possessions are claimed by the white men. Mary's father has gone elsewhere to build Grandma's coffin, so he's not present for almost the entire book. Grandpa goes along for a bit, then runs back into his home to be with his wife, who won't be buried properly now. And he ends up getting shot. Two people who won't be buried properly.

The family is herded to one of the internment camps by a fort. They're here through June, then off to another camp in Tennessee. They're there until almost November, then finally start heading west. Well, most of them do. Nelly goes into labor right before they're supposed to leave, so she, Raven and her mother stay behind while Margaret takes Mary and Becky on to Chattanooga. Thankfully, they reunite eleven days later.

Then the book time jumps to March, where they're in Missouri, then Arkansas. Nelly loses her baby to illness. Thankfully, the book ends on a slightly happier note as Mary's father is finally found.

Agh, this book should have been a least three times as long as it was. I thought it was quite well-written, but went way too quickly and none of the characters were very well-developed, because you just saw them reacting to tragedy after tragedy with occasional scenes of strength and determination. That's the trouble with cramming an important story into 103 pages. It didn't need that many to convey its sadness though. It was good, but as I said, definitely hard to read.

One thing this series does quite well is choose its authors. This was written by a Cherokee woman and you can tell.

Next up, the Oregon Trail where the main character is black. I honestly don't remember ever reading another historical fiction book with that set up. The author is the one who wrote Ann, Noelle and Charlotte's books.

And I basically described the whole book in the previous paragraph without even having read it yet. (I write these reviews in sections after finishing each book, not all at once after reading all four.) It's the same as other Oregon Trail stories only not nearly as detailed, due to the page constraints, and with bonus racism,

It's pretty good though for what it is, which is too short. Length is the main thing that would improve this series a lot. They're good books with good authors, but they feel rushed and leaving you wanting more.

Sarah and her family live in Iowa where they're free. Her father decides he wants to head west, alongside a neighbor and his son. So Sarah, her older brother James, and their parents all go on the Oregon Trail, leaving the paternal grandparents behind. From there on out, it's your basic Oregon Trail story with a couple added moments here and there. Of course, there are some people in their travel group who are racist dicks. There's a cool scene where Sarah's father sticks up for the Native Americans, as does an older white woman. And another where Sarah's father puts himself in front of the biggest racist asshole's gun to protect some innocent Native Americans who actually just want to help them across a river. Basically, Sarah's dad is a badass. He was my favorite. Sarah herself is fun, too. Her mom's on the feminist side, so she's been raised on "women can do anything men can do," and when her friend is lost, she takes it upon herself to join the search and she's the one who actually finds her.

My biggest issue with the book, aside from the length, is that it feels like the author had a checklist she was going down. And there's a reason for that. She pretty much says the same thing in the afterword. She says she wanted to show the trip from the perspective of a black girl. Check. She wanted to show it was difficult. Check. And she wanted to show it was tragic for Native Americans. Er...half a check? She gives more useful information about that in the afterword than she does in the text itself, where there's only that one conversation plus the gun incident. I'd also add that she wanted to show Sarah doing something men couldn't accomplish. Check.

Really, it's a fun read. I just get nitpicky when I write these reviews.

Up next, earthquake! This is the one I was most looking forward to from this batch.

And sadly, it was a bit disappointing. I like Lily and her family a lot, but the story was all about the two kids making their way to the ferry to Oakland and it took up most of the book. Most of the book for just a few hours and then most of it wasn't interesting. Devastation. Broken things. Racism. Nothing new. 

Unlike some of the others though, this one has a happy ending. The kids find their parents on the other side. Both the older man and young woman with bound feet who accompanied the kids also make it through the story alive. So that's good anyway. 

I wanted this one to dig deeper, but it just didn't. 

This book came out in January, but it's the one I recommend most. Who knew that we'd be facing a pandemic at the time? There were hints, but none of us really had any idea what we'd be facing. 

Daisy is a German-American, so she's facing prejudice based on the war, as well as the onset of the Spanish flu. 

I'm not going to spoil what happens, but this one was extremely well-written and is certainly relevant to today's times. 

American Girl of the Year: Saige

2013's GotY was Saige Copeland, a young artist and horse enthusiast from New Mexico.

Saige is obsessed with art and somehow manages to forget that her school won't have art that year. They only have enough money to have art OR music, not both, and it's a music year.

The first conflict comes when Saige is upset over not art and her best friend Tessa is happy because she gets music. She and her new friend Dylan went to music camp over summer and have come back super close and even more obsessed. Tessa is not the best friend in this book. She's not a complete ass, but she lets Dylan control her too much, saying she has to practice all the time if she wants to be good. Sure, practice is important, but you need to balance that with an actual life, too. You're like freakin' ten.

Saige finds solace on her grandmother's ranch. Mimi is a professional painter who raises Spanish Barb horses. So we've got a bunch of art stuff and a bunch of horse stuff going on.

Saige meets Gabi, a new student in their class, and those two bond over a love of art, horses and dogs. Gabi is good at training both types of animals.

There's going to be an arts fundraiser to help the school earn money for an after school art class and Mimi wants Saige to lead the parade on her old parade horse, Picasso. So Saige begins practicing for that, while Mimi works on her old trick act. Then Mimi ends up tripping over her dog while he's chasing the new kitten that was dumped off at the ranch. Active Mimi ends up in the hospital with a couple broken bones, including her painting wrist.

Saige is upset about this and then left to her own devices with Picasso. She and Gabi have the brainstorm to create a new act where he does simple tricks like nodding, making a silly "duh" face and even painting.

I probably don't have to tell you that everything turns out a big success. That's the way these tend to go.

In the second book, Saige is still without an art class and she's not happy about it. Things aren't moving fast enough for her.

She ends up working with Mimi and her old art teacher from last year to start using the art room in the rehab center where Mimi is. This is fun, but not enough.

So she gets the idea to stage a minor protest. The kids in school all wear beige one day to show how colorless their lives are without art. Saige survives leading a press conference and handling questions from reporters.

She's also dealing with training one of Mimi's younger horses, a mare named Georgia. As she's falling in love with her, Mimi says it's time for the horse to have a new owner. Jumping to conclusions, Saige assumes she's selling her and is depressed for a good chunk of the book. Nah, turns out Mimi gives the horse to Saige as a birthday present at the end.

Saige is a really likeable character. Her horse love and red hair almost make her a modern day Felicity, but she lacks Felicity's ballsiness. She's likeable anyway though. Not one of my big favorites, but I do like her a lot. Gabi is also a good character. Tessa and Dylan I have mixed feelings about. Dylan turns out okay by the end of the second book, but neither of them is exactly my favorite of the secondary cast. Saige's parents are okay. Her dad is a balloonist, which is really interesting, but neither is very present in the books. Mimi is the main adult and she's cool. Luis, her neighbor and fellow artist, is also awesome. It's nice to have a stronger adult male character for once. There really aren't a lot. So yeah, Saige's books are good. Not the best, but far from the worst. A solid addition to the line.

The Girls

I really wanted to like this. Sigh. This is a very short book (121 pages) written by the same author that did Kailey's American Girl of the Year book.

It's soooooooooo basic though.

All of the action takes place over a single weekend and half the next Monday at school. There are five characters, each getting point of view chapters, and then a sixth gets the last chapter.

Unfortunately, not one of the characters is actually that likeable. And most of their parents aren't either.

We'll just go down the list of characters in order of their chapters.

MAYA: Maya is the girl that gets left out of a Saturday night sleepover at Darcy's. This is all on the whim of Candace, the group leader. Maya's father says they're going to Six Flags and she can invite one friend, so when she calls around, she learns everyone else is going to this sleepover and she was left out. Very upset, she tries to back out of the amusement part, but can't stay home alone, so along she goes. That night, she's the victim of a nasty prank call by Darcy. Maya's mother is a Russian immigrant who came over 17 years ago, so Darcy makes cracks about both Maya and her mother. Maya's mom is the best parent of the lot. She calls right back and speaks to Darcy's older sister, who's another good character, about what just happened. In a future chapter, it's mentioned that Maya moved from a dangerous neighborhood and it's this that actually drew Candace to her. She gets interested in people and then loses interest. Maya eventually comes to terms with things and bravely goes to school the next day. She still avoids the others until she's forced not to. I want to like Maya more than I do. She's being dumped from the group because she's babyish. People do outgrow each other, but there are nicer ways to part ways. But her self-harm-level nail-biting and meekness managed to annoy me, too. Not that I'm justifying what the other girls did. Maya seems to know how to be a friend better than any of the others. I'm just saying she's not a perfectly likeable heroine.

RENEE: Renee is a strange character. She's caught in the middle of her parents' divorce and is actually the only reason they ever got married. They didn't really love each other, but her mom got pregnant, so married they got. And then look where it got them. Renee's dad is an okay guy. He works a rough job and tries to make his daughter happy, but he doesn't know exactly what she likes or needs. Not that she speaks up to tell him though, so I see this more as her fault than his. Her mom is an asshole. She's obsessed with her looks, spends hours getting ready, and wants plastic surgery. When Renee tells her about them excluding Maya, her mother asks why she's worried about it when it's Maya's problem. See. Asshole. Renee has some weird habits. She's very slow to speak and "um"s a lot when she does. She's mildly obsessed with Darcy's perfect older sister Keloryn. She's about as likeable as Maya, but there's something about her that triggers my protective instincts. She's the one who feels bad about how Maya's being treated, but she doesn't have the courage to do anything about it. She gives herself a time frame, planning on being nice to her in school on Monday, as opposed to calling her or emailing her over the weekend. It's better than the others did. Then at school, Renee sees that Candace and Darcy have now turned on Brianna, too, and try to make a big deal of something she said to Renee at the sleepover. But Renee isn't mad about and refuses to be. Renee is the one who ends up approaching Maya in the cafeteria to make amends, so she might actually be my favorite of the five.

BRIANNA: Darcy's chapter comes first, so I'm going out of order to skip to Brianna. Brianna is interested in acting and hates her big nose. Both her parents are professors. Her mom teaches microbiology and her dad astronomy, so she's grown up in a very educational, intellectual environment, although she also talks about God. She's the only one to do so, which is rather interesting considering what her upbringing seems to be. Brianna is a go along. She goes along with Candace ditching Maya, but unlike Renee, she actually has her own thoughts almost in agreement. She thinks Maya acts too young and doesn't like it. She even asks Candace how to act around Maya in class, which Candace does not like one bit. Brianna is the first to say to Candace that she doesn't hate Maya though, which of course Candace doesn't like, and Monday morning, Brianna finds herself the next target. Once she's in that position, Brianna is finally able to put herself in Maya's shoes and realize how wrong she's been. She hides in the nurse's office for a lot of the day, then rallies and joins Maya and Renee in the lunch line. But she's still mostly a go along. She goes along with Renee making up with Maya, even though nothing's going to change her own personal thoughts about Maya. She does realize, there at the cafeteria table, that she's happy to be free of Candace, so perhaps there's hope for her yet!

DARCY: Oh, this bitch. She's actually worse than Candace. She's the one who acts on what Candace only says. She's the one who pranked Maya. There's no explanation for Darcy's behavior. She's a rich girl, so I'm sure she's spoiled, but her older sister is a very nice person and their mother seems decent, too. She's super pissed at Darcy for the prank call and grounds her until she apologizes to both Maya and her mom. Darcy is the one who will truly be lost without Candace, as she's really got nothing else. She lives for pleasing her so-called friend. After overhearing Darcy's end of a phone conversation with Candace, her older sister Keloryn says "Brianna's next, huh? It should be your turn in no time. I'm looking forward to it!" Yeah, so am I, Keloryn. Darcy's downfall begins Monday, when Candace turns her attention to another girl, Nicole. She's not impressed when Darcy says she has to go apologize to Maya and you can tell Darcy's not going to last long, especially after what Nicole says in her final chapter. Darcy does go apologize, but it's so fake that all you really want is to see the little bitch's downfall, but we never get to. It will happen after the book ends.

CANDACE: The queen of mean herself. But she's an odd character. She's not rich as mean girls typically are. She's unhappy at home, where she gets her three younger siblings foisted on her all the time. I think a lot of her attitude comes from that, but she also is rather strange. Her entire first chapter has her disconnected from the other girls, staring at fire and thinking how destructive it is, remembering seeing a sequoia and feeling freaked out by its age and immensity. Her second chapter is mostly her being annoyed at her mom, because she's given up her whole life to parent and lets herself look like a frumpy mess. She only gets those two chapters. The rest of the time, you're just reading about her through the other girls' eyes. The way she gets interested in people and then drops them is very problematic, but there's something deep about this girl that interests me. Her chapter about the fire and the tree was the best in the book. It's just weird.

And then Nicole gets the final chapter, where she and Candace, sitting alone at lunch, pick apart Darcy. Nicole thinks to herself that she'll help Candace ditch Darcy. Nicole feels like a cross between Candace herself and Darcy. Not Darcy's level of mindless follower, but still coming in second to Candace.

I think this book could have been at least twice as long. Get more into the girls' heads. Into their lives. Have it stretch out more and show what happens after these three pivotal days. It's a decent quick look at young girl bullying and its consequences, but it's not handled to its full potential. At the same time, it's done differently, too, with the more complex characters. 

American Girl of the Year: McKenna

2012's GotY was McKenna Brooks. McKenna's main thing is that she's a gymnast.

In the first book, McKenna has fallen behind with the harder schoolwork of fourth grade. Her teacher and parents decide she needs a tutor, so she meets Josie Myers, a slightly older girl in a wheelchair.

After her initial reservations, McKenna finds herself liking both Josie and her tutoring methods, though she ends up in trouble with her gymnast friends for not telling them she was being tutored.

She gets sidelined with a broken ankle near the end of the book.

McKenna's second book has her recovered from her broken ankle and caught up on her schoolwork. She doesn't even need tutoring anymore, but she and Josie remain friends.

McKenna goes along with Josie on her first horseback-riding lesson, because Josie's afraid. There, McKenna learns about the place, which works with children with all forms of disabilities. She loves it and wants to volunteer there by the end of the book.

The big conflict in this book is really Toulane, McKenna's supposed best friend, but really, she's borderline frenemy. Toulane is just not a very nice character. She comes into her own by the end of this book, but she's one of the least likeable "best friends" for the GotYs. Toulane is struggling with no longer wanting to do competitive gymnastics. She wants to do rhythmic instead, but is afraid to tell her overly dominant mother about it. Near the end of the boo, both she and McKenna make the competitive team only for Toulane to hand her medal back, saying she wants to do rhythmic instead and giving her spot to their third friend, Sierra.

 McKenna's books are all right. They're on the dull, slow-paced side, which is why it took me so long to slog through them again. Josie is by far the best character. She's the one who really should have been GotY. I love her. McKenna isn't horrible but she's not spectacular either, and Toulane is 99% unlikeable. Not the best efforts from AG.

American Girl of the Year: Kanani

Our Girl of the Year for 2011 is Kanani Akina. She lives on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Kanani's dad is Japanese-Hawaiian and her mom is French-German, so she's quite multiracial.

Kanani helps out in her family's store: Akina's Shave Ice and Sweet Treats. I love the depiction of island life in both books. Everyone knows everyone and they all work together like a community.

Kanani's books both deal with two problems. The first is a problem with another female character. The second is a problem involving an animal.

In her first book, Kanani is playing host to her cousin Rachel, who's from New York City. Rachel's mom just got remarried and Rachel will be staying with the Akinas for a month, while her mother and stepfather have their honeymoon and then move the family to a new apartment.

Kanani and Rachel get off to a rough start, each thinking they need to talk up their home to make it seem good enough for the other girl. Rachel is also very withdrawn, having a lot on her mind about her current life changes, but not wanting to talk about it. It takes a mistake with their diaries, which happen to be identical, for Kanani to bring up Rachel's misgivings about her new life and Rachel becomes a much more likeable character for having talked about her worries.

The girls see a Hawaiian monk seal, which is an endangered species, and get involved in helping her, as well as becoming more interested in helping all monk seals.

Kanani's second book continues her interest in helping seals, as she uses her family's new shave ice cart to earn money to print posters with information about monk seals.

The girl-related problem this time is the Best Friend Fight. Ugh. I'm never a fan of the Best Friend Fight. Kanani's bestie Celina is obsessed with surfing, which we saw in the first book, but Kanani is struggling with learning to the point that she really hates it. Celina agrees to help out at the shave ice cart a couple hours a day before the girls go surfing, but starts cutting out early, surfing with a new girl that she met that's in town for an arts festival. Kanani is of course hurt by this. She really cares about the seals, so I can see why! Personally, I think Celina's a bit shallow. Yes, it comes out at the end that she's really serious about surfing and was preparing to compete, and she does admit she was wrong in assuming Kanani loved it as much as she did, but come on, chick. Yeah, you help with your parents' restaurant, but Kanani helps with her parents' store. Both of you work. If you can't sacrifice a couple hours of your day to help your best friend with a good cause after you said you would, you're kind of a shitty friend. It's not like it's for all of summer. I do like Jo, the other surfing girl. She seems really cool, so it wasn't the best move on Kanani's part to automatically be jealous, but at the same time, they're doing something she hates, so yeah, I get her side of it. Naturally, they work it out at the end.

The animal problem is that Kanani's rooster disappears, so she's upset about that for several chapters. But he turns up at the home of one of the older residents that she's friends with and seems so happy there that she lets him stay.

Kanani's interactions with the older people are probably my favorite part of this book. We met one of them in the first book and she provided some excellent wisdom and she does the same again, but we also meet a few more people, too. I like that Kanani is so quick to help everyone and it puts her even more apart from Celina, who's only furthering her own needs. Kanani is much more selfless and it's her best character trait.

I enjoyed these two books a lot, despite the rather overdone girl has trouble with other girl themes. I love the depiction of a quiet Hawaiian life and a lot of the characters in it.