Final exams are next week. Although some tests require lots of prep, a few finals are designed as presentations or even those wonderful NWEA assessments that you can’t really study for. If you find yourself with extra time next week or even this weekend, get a jump on your summer reading with the free SORA program available through the FUHS library website. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for, the Tribe Tribune is including instructions on how to access the Fullerton Public Library online for free.
Sora is a new website that allows students to access 330 eBooks and 15 audiobooks from 62 different genres for free with any electronic device, anywhere and anytime, by going to the Fullerton Union High School website and clicking on the student resources to find the library page, which has a link to Sora. From there, students can access the website by logging in with their student ID. Sora’s selection of books includes well-known books like “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë, “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott, and “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but other popular works like the Harry Potter series aren’t available. Books are checked out for two weeks. Afterwards, they must either be renewed or returned.
While reading on Sora, there is a page scroller and a menu in the top right corner with four buttons. The menu can be dismissed by tapping the middle of the screen.
The first button switches the text format between a traditional book format and full-screen, while the second allows the reader to slide between different text sizes. Toggling the “Include accessibility sizes” button on and off gives the reader more options for text scale, which is useful for someone who is visually impaired. The reader can also change the book’s design and lighting among “Bright,” “Sepia,” “Dark,” and “High Contrast.”
The book designs included are “Publisher’s Default,” which has an “Apply consistent text scale” button that isn’t an option with other designs, “Legible,” “Scholar,” “Paperback,” “OpenDyslexic,” and “Custom.”
The third button allows you to search within the book’s text, and the fourth explains how to bookmark and highlight.
The large selection of books, combined with the accessibility features, makes Sora incredibly convenient to use. Now, if you want to read something that’s not presently available on Sora, you can add the Fullerton Public Library. It makes summer reading a lot easier, since Sora is accessible on other devices besides the school-issued Chromebook.
To help you get started, I’ve reviewed a few popular YA books. I didn’t like the two best-selling teen romances, but there are over a thousand titles available for FREE, so make sure you check out the catalog here.
Click the slideshow below to see Sora’s features
The Dirt Diary: Too-young tone becomes distraction
Eighth grader Rachel Lee prefers to spend her free time baking and hanging out with her friend Marisol, not cleaning people’s houses with her mom. But she desperately needs to earn some money to make up for the $287.22 she took from her college fund to get a plane ticket to Florida. See, her dad left not too long ago, and when Rachel tries to ask her mom about visiting, the conversation gets nowhere, so she’s made up her mind to go down to Florida and convince him to come back. That is, if her mom doesn’t kill her when she checks the bank statement in a month.
So, she becomes a maid to the most popular kids at her middle school. Turns out, her clients are all hiding dirty secrets.
When her crush, Steve Mueller, asks her for insider information on his girlfriend, Briana Riley, Rachel has to seriously consider whether she should take him up on the offer. On one hand, that’s really creepy. On the other hand, Briana’s mean, and this is a good way of getting back at her, spending time with Steve, using her “Dirt Diary,” and filling the three-hundred-dollar-shaped hole in her college fund all in one. What could go wrong?
A lot, apparently.
“The Dirt Diary” was a bit of a letdown. It captured the middle school experience painfully well, but it didn’t fully deliver. Its premise and title led me to expect wacky adventures with the skeletons in everyone’s closets, but I got petty drama and vivid descriptions of both baked goods and a failing marriage instead.
It was an intriguing mix, so I kept going. Author Anna Staniszewski did an excellent job of describing Rachel’s passion for baking and the fruits of her labor. It made the second-hand embarrassment I kept getting a lot easier to deal with.
About the second-hand embarrassment: everyone sounded a little too juvenile for middle school. Eighth graders are young, sure, but some of Rachel’s go-to phrases, like “Holy fried onion rings!” and “Booger crap!” made her sound like a nine-year-old, not someone entering ninth grade.
The scenes with her friend Marisol and her classmate Andrew made up for her ridiculous vocabulary, but I still had my doubts about “The Dirt Diary.” I never felt like I knew the other characters, not even Rachel’s bestie, Marisol. The main focus was on Rachel’s crushes and her worries about her father coming back, and those plotlines wrapped up so quickly that it left me feeling unsatisfied.
How did Rachel even access her college fund without her mother’s permission? Everything in “The Dirt Diary” hinges on this detail, but it’s never explained, which felt like a major oversight.
While reading, I got the feeling that I wasn’t the target audience; it was more “young” than “young adult.” It was an easy read, but I didn’t like it enough to want to read it again.
Catching Jordan: A female story that does disservice to females
Female captain and quarterback Jordan Woods lives and breathes football. All she wants is to get an athletic scholarship for her dream school, the University of Alabama, and to get her dad’s approval. Then Ty Green strolls onto the field. He’s cute and an excellent quarterback, which risks both her position and the possibility of catching feelings. But her best friend, Sam, has always been there for her and supports her no matter what—how is she meant to choose?
If Jordan weren’t the captain and quarterback of the football team, “Catching Jordan” would be a typical high school romance chock-full of tropes. She is the captain and quarterback of the football team, though, and that makes “Catching Jordan” a slightly less typical high school romance… still chock-full of tropes.
Jordan isn’t like other girls. There’s a love triangle, and her enemy is a popular mean girl on the cheerleading team.
We’ve all read or watched something like this before. It gets old pretty fast.
With the lack of diversity among the main characters, this book gets old even faster. Jordan, Ty, and Sam all look the same: tall blondes with either green or blue eyes. Everyone else just didn’t get a physical description.
All of the main characters in this book are misogynistic, too, which makes “Catching Jordan” hard to like. Her brother’s best friend constantly makes unwanted sexual comments about her that are apparently meant to be funny, and the boys on the football team, especially Jordan’s friend Sam, are all about hooking up with the cheerleaders and don’t really treat them like actual humans. Jordan herself disparages the other girls; this improves towards the end, but it was still irritating to read.
Speaking of the football team: I wasn’t rooting for Jordan’s relationships with either Sam or Ty, which is the exact opposite of what “Catching Jordan” should be going for as a romance novel.
Ty reads as immature, codependent, and self-centered; Jordan loses all sense around him, and they don’t seem to really know each other. They’re not very close, so that explains it, but Jordan’s friendship with Sam is similarly shallow. Nothing gave me the impression that they were actually all that close.
To make it worse, Kenneally’s writing style didn’t agree with me at all—her flat, spiritless descriptions of everything and the cringey, heavy-handed dialogue smothered Catching Jordan’s few high points. Who uses the word “hunk” unironically? Who compares someone’s eye color to a Crayola crayon of all things?!
The only parts I actually liked were Jordan’s relationship with her dad and her slow realization that girls were more than just giggling and gossip, and even those exhausted my patience. Jordan refuses to hear her dad out on why the University of Alabama might not be the best choice, even though he’s a star NFL player and knows what he’s doing in the industry. She avoids the girls around her as much as she can, so by the time she comes to her senses, I was completely exhausted.
I was relieved when “Catching Jordan” was over. It’s an insult to romance novels. Teenage girls may be “Catching Jordan”’s target audience, what with the high school setting and (dated) pop culture references, but as a teenage girl, I’ll say this: we deserve better. I understand wanting a cute book with a predictable plot and ending—I’v
How You Ruined My Life: Fun, quirky and worth your time
Sixteen-year-old Rod thinks his life is pretty awesome. He’s in a punk rock band with his best friends, he has an amazing girlfriend, and he loves his mom. Everything’s turned upside down when his stuck-up cousin Blake moves in for the semester.
Blake puts on a charming act around other people, but he shows his true colors with Rod; he’s entitled, rude, and just plain annoying. Too bad he’s staying for the next three months, which he seemingly plans to spend taking over Rod’s room, band, and life. Cue a series of mind games and pranks—who will win this familial battle of wills?
“How You Ruined My Life” by Jeff Strand is a wild, funny ride that feels far shorter than 384 pages. It had me laughing at the absurdity of the situations Rod kept getting into, and I couldn’t wait to see what he was going to do to get Blake back.
I really enjoyed Rod’s narration; he treats the reader like a casual friend throughout the book and constantly breaks the fourth wall with his chatting, but it felt a lot more natural than other books I’ve read. His silly lyrics and personality fit him and the lighthearted premise perfectly.
Blake, on the other hand, was awful in a good way. Strand toed the line of “infuriating to read” with Blake’s weird refusal to open car doors and his habit of gaslighting Rod into thinking he was losing his mind, but his odd quirks, like collecting rodent posters and looking forward to rat dissections, were hilarious and kept me from getting too irritated.
I laughed rather than raged at his and Rod’s rivalry. Even the stressful scenes were fun to read—not because I wanted the characters to suffer, but because I was excited to see what was coming next and how Rod would handle the curveballs Blake threw at him.
Although Clarissa and Mel, the other members of Rod’s band, Fanged Grapefruit, and Audrey, his girlfriend, weren’t seen often, I loved their occasional appearances as bystanders who got dragged into Rod and Blake’s war. Normally, it’d annoy me that they weren’t focused on much, but they popped up often enough that I still got a general feel for them as people.
Clarissa, Mel, and Audrey’s confusion and attempts to figure out what’s going on, while also navigating the hardships of being an up-and-coming punk band (or, in Audrey’s case, the girlfriend of the lead singer of the aforementioned up-and-coming punk band), added an extra layer of fun and drama to “How You Ruined My Life.”
Fanged Grapefruit’s dynamic was one of my favorite parts of the book. Clarissa and Mel tried their best to navigate Rod and Blake’s rivalry without getting caught in the crossfire, but they still got dragged into it anyway, and it led to some funny moments between the three bandmates.
Rod’s stage anxiety before performing was so vividly described that my palms got clammy while reading; I’ve been in his shoes before, and on-stage blunders come back to haunt you long after the show’s over. As the reader, I felt both Rod’s nervousness and Clarissa and Mel’s exasperation, and both were perfectly understandable. Hats off to Strand for capturing that feeling.
Out of every book I’ve read on Sora, “How You Ruined My Life” is definitely at the top of my favorites list.
