Awesome Axolotls

A review of Welcome to the New World by Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan (Mateo Herandez)             Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series, Welcome to the New World follows the Aldabaan family, who, faced with violence and conflict in Jordan, were given the opportunity to move to Connecticut in the United States as refugees. The family faced a time crunch of making the decision to leave for America before election day 2016, with the possibility of Donald Trump winning the election and shutting down immigration. The family was approved to leave, but some of the extended family members were not. After a lot of arguing over the decision to stay with Grandma in Jordan or leave for the U.S. to pursue a better life, they ultimately chose to come to America and arrived on election day: when Trump won the election. Even though the family was out of the war zone in their home country, they were faced with a new set of c...

  Clicking on this blog post, you may think, "Of course, Akeel's posting about video games he's addicted to them!" But, I made this post because I've been hearing about some of the positives of video games and how the effects are very similar to that of books. Also if there are blog posts about how analyzing music by Taylor Swift this should be okay (That blog post was amazing!)  Most adults tend to see video games as unhealthy and addictive and this mostly stems from video games being a more newer thing when they were kids. Jump to 2024 and you have the Super Nintendo World theme park and the Steam Deck which has over 8,000 games. Some of the reasons that video games have made an impact is how it feels like you are playing the story of a book and the game gives you a view of the main characters' perspective.  Are you part of a book club where you read a book at home and then come together to talk about it? Well, with videogames you can play online ranked matc...

Review of Divergent by Veronica Roth Review Written by Andrew Langer               One dilemma that continues to plague me is what book to pick at the library for the summer reading challenge. The glass case full of literature is intriguing, yet frustrating. The amount of choices is kind of overwhelming, but I can’t seem to find any titles that grab my interest. A large part of my time there is spent looking up reviews to try to find something interesting. This time, however, I was unable to decide on what to pick, and I had been there a while. I flagged the librarian down and told her that I was into dystopian novels, and if she had any suggestions. What came up first was Divergent . I wasn’t sure about it, but we had to go and I took the first and second books as my choices. When we got home, the book sat on my dresser for a few days before I went to read it, and I can say with confidence that I regret that wait complet...