Jessica Blank

It's been a while since a book kept me up all night reading. How can you not though when you're reading a book set in the 1990s about a girl who goes to protect the redwoods with an environmentalist group? Maybe it's just that I was standing in the redwood forests of the Pacific Northwest myself not too long ago, but I could really imagine myself following the characters around in the woods and feeling like I was a part of their story.

I feel like this would be a good recommended read for someone looking for a book similar to Looking for Alaska. Lots of the same kinds of themes and a similar age group, but instead it's set on the opposite end of the country and the main character does not have loving parents.

This book probably won't win any awards, but as a reader who remembers the 90s and has felt the magic of an old growth forest, this was exactly the book I needed to spend all night reading.… (more)

It can be difficult to know how to rate a work like this; similar to the vagina monologues in style, with the dialogue taken from interviews done with exonerated former death row inmates. It's difficult to see this as theatrical, though the authors did leave some room for directors to add in a few little touches, but mostly it's just people talking about things that happened in the past...in short, it breaks all the rules of theatre. That isn't always a bad thing, of course, but you have to be careful when you are writing about a timely topic not to let the message overwhelm the audience. A play with a plot would probably be a lot more effective treatment of the topic in terms of getting people to notice. It has a rather sterile, antiseptic feel to it because you don't see anything that occurred, it is just people sitting and telling the story. Decent material for a book of essays, but questionable handling for a play.… (more)