Sophomore Roland Rennick-Zuefle recommends: “Romeo and/or Juliet” by Ryan North.
“[Romeo and/or Juliet] is a choose-your-own-adventure based on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It’s one of the weirdest things I’ve read in a long time– there are over 100 different combinations of [outcomes] with love and robots and time travel, stuff like that. It gets crazy. I think the narrator definitely has a sense of humor with it,” Rennick-Zuefle said. “The narrator has a lot of conversations with you, and they’re judging your choices the whole time and I think that’s funny. There are so many stories within it where you’ll randomly be given the option to pull out a book, and there’s another choose-your-own-adventure story that just goes on within that. I like that a lot.”
Junior Minori Saito recommends: “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini.
“I read ‘The Kite Runner’ for my AP Seminar class, and it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It was super gripping, and it’s just such a beautiful tragic story that I feel like everyone should read,” Saito said. “It’s about these two boys in Afghanistan, one is rich and one is a servant, and it’s the story of their lives and how they intertwine and also about the tragedies that happened in Afghanistan, like the Taliban.”
Freshman Anna Karpyn recommends “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara.
“It’s about these four college students who meet at a prestigious law school, and it follows them from then to when they die. Everyone kind of revolves around the main character of the four, Jude, because he struggles a lot with mental health, and had a really traumatic childhood. It was really, really good. It was realistic and well thought out, and the worldbuilding was incredible, and it really made you feel like it was a real story with real people.”
I recommend “The Priory of the Orange Tree” by Samantha Shannon.
The story is a fantasy focused on two main characters in two warring lands, the East and the West. The East focuses on Tané, a girl training to be a dragon rider who has a secret– she smuggled a citizen out of the East and into the West. In the West, the reader focuses on Ead Duryan, a sorceress and assassin assigned to protect their Queen, despite the fact that she’d come from the East and disagreed with all of her beliefs. I liked the story because while it was long, it didn’t feel that way. It was fun, and it was interesting in the fact that it was a retelling of a story I’m unfamiliar with. I’m definitely interested in reading the original now, though! I enjoyed the unique storytelling of the different characters, and it was a wild ride emotionally. I’m very glad I read it, and if you like fantasy, you should too!
