This books blog is now located at ToddReads.com. This is a change I have been considering for a while for many different reasons: expanding my audience and access to visitors, cost, and more. Shadyside.blog will point here for one additional year, but please make sure to change your links!
My Goodreads has been cleaned up. I am going to make a vigilant effort to regularly use it. I will list, update my progress on, and rate books I read there, but all book reviews will be here. Feel free to follow me on Goodreads if you are not already.
I told you guys that I would update you when I got my non-book web content online, and I forgot to do that when I launched my other domain last July; whoops. My other websites can be found at The Farplane (at Farplane.org). The Farplane is mostly a collection of static tributes to various characters I love from video games. There is no limit to my nerdery.
Finally, not really an update to the blog, but an update nonetheless: I am finishing college this month! I will no longer be stretching myself between working full time and going to school full time, so I should have more time for hobbies like reading for fun and updating this blog, so you should see more updates. Theoretically.
Thanks for sticking with me!
So, funny story with The Stranger: I read this seventh book of the Animorphs series in 2018 a day or so after reading The Capture. I got ridiculously busy with school shortly after, and I did not get to write my recap. I tried to write it when life slowed down again, but the details of the book were fuzzy to me, and I knew I’d have to reread it again to do the book justice. Now, coming back to the series in 2021, I decided to go back to book 7, recap it properly, and move forward from it. I had considered moving on and rereading and recapping book 8, but the lack of a post for 7 would trigger my OCD, so here we are.
So, a little backstory before I dive into this entry: When I was growing up, I loved Drew Barrymore, and Ever After was one of my favorite films starring her. Drew Barrymore’s character, Danielle De Barbarac, loved books, and the last book her father gave her before he died was Utopia by Thomas More. She quotes Utopia in the movie and lives by More’s ideals. She uses the book as a defense against selling servants, quoting More: “For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them?” The book was published in 1516, so it is old, to say the least. What I find interesting is the idea of an “appearance of justice” More wrote about back then is remarkably similar to the “justice” (or lack thereof) Starr sees in The Hate U Give. 
School is finally out. Boy, have I missed reading what I want to read.
What up, nerds? I am taking a little break from recapping the book series I am covering from the 1990s and early 2000s and am bringing you Shadyside’s first feature. Exciting, right? Before I get into it, though, I want to explain what a Shadyside Feature is. Unlike my recaps (Check out any entry here on Goosebumps or Fear Street) in which I attempt to write about anything and everything I have to say about a book, and unlike a review in which I focus primarily on my opinions on a book and if I would or would not recommend that book to others, a feature covers an aspect of a book I want to look into deeper. I might write about a recurring theme, a character’s development, or why a book should or should not be challenged by schools. Also, unlike my recaps and reviews, you may see me post more than one feature about a book. With features, I either do not have the time or energy to cover everything I want to write about a book, or I have so much to say about one aspect of a book that it warrants its own entry. For this book, the case is very much the latter.