Stegosaurus Rex

 Book Review:  Baby & Solo  by Lisabeth Posthuma by: Luke Fahnestock           For my final book review of 2021, I chose to evaluate Baby & Solo by Lisabeth Posthuma. This is the same book that I read recently for my health class book talk. The story was very enjoyable, so I figured I would also write a blog review covering it.  Baby & Solo focuses on the life of a teenager who is trying to reintegrate himself into society after an extended stay in the hospital caused by psychological problems. Seventeen-year-old Joel Teague has spent the majority of his high school years in the hospital dealing with a severe case of psychosis. His condition causes him to have hallucinations of a girl named Crystal, in a way he has a much more palpable imaginary friend. Joel wants nothing more than to be accepted back into society as a normal person, but the years of hospitalized isolation make this difficult to achieve. So when his therapi...

  A lot of the books that I’ve read over this year have been manga, however, one of the ones that I’ve liked the most of this year was one called Blue Period. Blue Period is an art manga by Tsubasa Yamaguchi about a 16-year-old “delinquent” called Yatora Yaguchi, Yatora starts off the series as someone who goes through life doing this as if “fulfilling a quota” in his own words, and while he does have his friends, he doesn’t have anything that he properly connects to. During an accidental visit to the art room, he sees a painting, and finds a connection to art. He then proceeds to join the art club and try out for an extremely hard college: Tokyo University of the Arts Blue Period is such an amazing manga. The characters are built so well, each of them having their own backgrounds and connections to art. Yatora especially, he might be one of my favorite protagonists ever because of the way he was allowed to struggle and grow in this manga. Yatora starts off in art as a complete n...