 This is Julia and welcome back to my channel and for today's video I'm good to be talking to you guys about some of my recent reads. Today I'm going to be showing you guys five books that I read recently giving you a brief synopsis as well as my thoughts on the book. Now I wanted to talk about Never Again by Lauren and David Hogg. This is a nonfiction very short book that revolves around the Parkland Florida shooting that occurred in 2018. So this book obviously trigger warnings for things like gun violence. Please do keep in mind how heavy this revolves around gun violence and if this is something that like is personal to you either prepare yourself properly to read it or skip it for now because it is a very heavy book and it talks about the actual tragedy that occurred. We follow someone that was inside the building during the shooting as well as the aftermath, campaigning and then also some politics around it gun violence. Small book this really packed an important message and it was really good to see the survivors perspectives and the campaigning process that occurred after the Parkland shooting. The running style was really straightforward easy to follow. You could definitely feel pathos for the characters and they're real people so I'm like not even the characters for everyone that was involved not the characters the people is what I meant to say. There are like more nonfiction books that go into more depth about this specific shooting but this was a really good overview on it and to give you kind of an inside perspective as well. Well this isn't going to be a video discussing gun control or anything like that but that is a topic of course in this book so there was discussion about that and a little bit of politics not too much but some controversial subject matter some discussion going on. I think this is important to read especially if you are like American I'm how want to just learn more about school shootings and kind of the aftermath and it was so tragic what happened but to see how much campaigning and stuff went into it after was really nice to see in this book. Overall for such a short book it really was like an excellent read and I think it's really important. I've been reading a lot of you'll see another book in this video about gun violence so I am going to be doing hopefully doing a video about books that deal with school shootings in the future. I have been reading a few books every month or so to prepare for that. It's a very tough subject a tough video I'm kind of nervous to film that and to upload that but I am going to be putting proper trick or warnings on the video and stuff like that but I do want to read more and educate myself so this was a good book for me in researching more of the Parkland shooting and getting a perspective from someone that was inside the building at the time. I ended up giving this book a solid four star reading. Next year I read a book that I do not own physically but that is Masquerade by Cyrus Parker. This is a recent poetry collection that came out that I was super excited for because I enjoyed their previous poetry collection. The collection deals with a lot of important topics such as self-esteem also talks about people who are non-binary as the author is themselves talks a bit about witchcraft pain and like body dysphoria. This was really refreshing to read about especially because I hadn't really read too much poetry that is more about dysphoria and like people who identifies non-binary and things like that. I just haven't read collections like that. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I really enjoy their writing. I think it's great to the point and overall just beautiful. I love so many poems from this. Illustrations were a perfect touch. I am so excited for whatever they come out with in the future. This author has so much potential and I'm so excited. They've only released two collections so far so I want to see what else they're going to bring to the table. I gave this one a solid 3.75 out of 5 stars. Next up here is the next book that I have to talk about revolving around gun violence so this is People Kill People by Ellen Hopkins. The book came out sometime last year. I am an Ellen Hopkins fan. I've read many of her books. They all deal with important subject matter. The majority of them are written in a verse format and this one deals with 16s who all somehow encounter gun violence and how all their lives intertwine and how they're all affected by this one thing. We go back and forth between this verse format to this like normal format which I thought was really weird. I don't think it worked in this case. I just really did not like the switch and I also just think that the way the verse was done could have been done like that alone like many of her other books. The normal kind of dialogue that like the normal kind of parts that were put in here with the actual like formatting were just locked for me and I think they were overall like it just didn't work for this kind of book. My main problem with this was the characters who were extremely one-dimensional even though we got this insight to their minds in the kind of normal formatting of the book. They are extremely flat characters and it was hard to differentiate them and figure out who was who and to keep track of who was who because they all kind of blended together. I just wish the topic had been done better. I just didn't care for the actual plot of the book. I was reading it mostly again for the gun violence kind of representation and for that point of view but I just didn't really get that like what I wanted from this book and usually Ellen Hopkins is kind of a bit known for her like dramatic endings and those endings that leave you like wow this didn't have that either so I was really let down by this one. I ended up giving this one two out of five stars. One more light heart to note I read Cheese Sweet Home Volume 3 by Konia Kanata. This collection is basically a full bind-up graphic novel about a cat and the cat's journeys with the cat with living in his bookmark spell out of this because I got this in New York. Not the most recent time I went but the time before that. So this is a full color illustrated beautiful graphic novel manga about a cat and it's in the manga section but like it doesn't read backwards like manga. Okay it doesn't matter but my point is I read the first two and absolutely love them. They're really expensive so I that's why you don't hear me talk about them a lot like the bind-ups a lot because these are like $40 bind-ups and justify spending that much money and then reading this in like an hour or two and being done with it. They are so so cute. I love like chi and the actual like just the cat in general like I love these stories and the illustrations are beautiful the coloring is beautiful beautiful but I got this at the strand for only 12 us so that's why I ended up picking it up because I could actually buy it. So I did like this one I didn't like it as much as the previous two so it kind of lacked for me in some areas and it just wasn't as like cute as the other ones but I did like the friendships that she has with other cats in the story. I think that was really cute and I love seeing the family dynamic with a pet involved. So I give this one a 3.5 out of 5 stars. Last book I have here to talk to you guys about is a poetry collection and this is with gratitude by Marla Scott. Marla Scott? Not really sure how to pronounce that. So this is a poetry book like I stated before. I was sent this a little while ago by Andrews Meal Publishing in exchange for an honest review. I do have a reading blog where I talk more about this and you can actually see me reading this and discussing like my thoughts and stuff but this is basically a collection of mostly advice. It's written as poetry and prose and things like that but it's mainly advice and gratitude for the things and everyone's life. I really enjoyed this. I think it's really important and inspiring. I hadn't read something like this before that was just overall like super positive because sometimes poetry collections mainly focus on tragedy and a lot of negative emotions because that's kind of what people write poetry about. But it's really nice to see a more positive outlook on life and in poetry and I think this is great even not even to read in one go but to read little bits of at a time and then like for inspiration purposes. This was like more advice than poetry like I said but I really enjoyed this. I am really excited to see what else is authorable right in the future and yeah I ended up giving this one a 3.75 out of five stars. So there you guys have it. Those are the books that I've read recently. Let me know your thoughts on them down below and if you've read them and or if you want to read them and your thoughts. Again thank you so so much for watching. If you want to subscribe you can down below as well as comment and like if you enjoyed the video. I would also really really appreciate it if you would check me out on other social media since as Instagram, Twitter, all that stuff, Goodreads I have. I also have a Patreon in case you want to support me on another platform which I'd really appreciate. So thank you guys so so much for watching and I'll see you super soon. Bye!