And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

In And Then There Were None, eight people are shown getting invitations to a mysterious island by Mr. U. N. Owen or his wife, Mrs. U. N. Owen. When they arrive after taking a ferry to Indian Island, the Owens aren’t on the island. Told to take care of the guests, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers are the ninth and tenth people on the island. All the guests go up to their rooms and notice ten Indian figures somewhere in their room. Next to the Indian figures is a nursery rhyme about ten Indians.

As the guests arrive for dinner, they notice ten more Indian figures. They all start to eat dinner, giving no second thoughts to Indian figures. However, in the middle of dinner, a gramophone comes on and describes previous murders that the guests have committed. One by one, the guests start dying in was similar to the way the Indian boys die in the nursery rhyme. The next morning, they find that the boat giving them supplies has stopped coming. There is also a big storm so that no boats can come and rescue them. The guests start dying more frequently and the remaining guests try to find which of the remaining guests is killing all the others.

I really enjoyed this book. It had plenty of twists and surprises. This book was far from being predictable.  I never knew who would die next, how the killer would interpret the nursery rhyme, who the killer was, and how the killer would get away with the crime. I would recommend this book to people who aren’t scared by murder or other gruesome events.

~Taylor V. Class of ’11

City of Bones by Cassandra Clare

This book is about a girl named Clare. She’s an ordinary girl who has an ordinary life. Until one day her ordinary world was turned upside down. It all started when she was at a teen club with her best friend. She was having a pretty good time when something unusual caught her eye. Even though it was far away, she thought she saw a murder in progress. She saw the group follow a boy into a strange room, so she told her friend to get the bouncer while she rushed over to the storage room and slipped in silently. She hid in the shadows and watched. The group was torturing the boy, whipping him with a weird glowing gold whip. When she finally gets enough of this, she steps out and intervenes. The whole group was surprised to see her, even the boy who was getting tortured. She soon finds out that the world she thought she knew had another side to it. An unseen side that only she and a selected few other humans can see.  She finds out that myths and fairy tales are actually real and that her life intertwines and plays an important part in the role and destiny of this invisible other world.

~Daron B., Class of ’11