Cat Pollock Writes

Double digits - super cool, yeah? Yeah, I thought the same thing. Reached (Matched #3) Ally Condie, 2012, Speak Find it here: Amazon.com Link Summary: Reached (Matched #3) is the third and final book in the Matched series, a series of young adult dystopian novels written by Ally Condie. It has the three central characters to the series - Cassia, Ky, and Xander - in completely separate parts of the world, but each working in some way for the Rising. The Rising's goal is rebellion and an overthrow of the Society through biological warfare (in this case, a virus that only they can cure). While all seems to go well initially, things get complicated when the virus mutates. Suddenly the cure The Rising thought they had is no longer effective, and finding a new one becomes a race against time that both The Rising and one member of the trio may not have. Why I Read It: I was on a young adult dystopian fiction reading kick (ala The Hunger Games ...

Hello, and welcome to week nine! This week, we're getting into relationships. Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy Donald Miller, 2015, HarperCollins Publishing Find it where I found it: Amazon.com link Summary: Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding  True Intimacy , by Donald Miller, is a book about the author learned to develop healthy relationships with people. Specifically, he writes it through the lens of his application of those lessons to his dating relationship and engagement to his now-wife. Why I Read It: One of my bible study leaders in college turned me on to Miller's Blue Like Jazz about ten years ago now (wow, that feels like a lifetime ago). I enjoyed it. My other bible study leader that year leant me her copy of Through Painted Deserts to read over the summer. I devoured that on a plane ride across the country to spend a summer with a really good friend flipping burgers and visiting Civil War battlef...

Another anthology, y'all. Ready for the review? Mixed Blessings: Classically Inspired Deborah A. Porter (editor/compiler), 2015, Breath of Fresh Air Press Find it where I found it: Amazon.com Link Summary: Mixed Blessings: Classically Inspired is a collection of devotionals, essays, skits, poetry, and short fiction written for the FaithWriters Writing Challenge. The specific rules to the challenge are here  (because I would probably spend a couple of paragraphs of this summary explaining them, and I'm pretty sure you're not that worried about them in the first place). The collection is a selection of the Editor's Choice winning entries each week for a quarterly theme. This collection's theme? Classic works of literature. The classics chosen were: This Side of Paradise (F. Scott Fitzgerald) Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) Much Ado About Nothing (William Shakespeare) War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy) The Importance of Being Ea...

Time for something a little bit different, y'all! Medusa (NUMA Files #8) Clive Cussler w/ Paul Kemprecos, 2010, Berkeley Books Summary: Medusa is the eighth book in The Numa Files series, which itself is a spin-off of the Dirk Pitt series, written by Clive Cussler. The series follows the adventures of Kurt Austin, the head of the US National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) Special Assignments team, and his team. This particular story has Austin's team trying to figure out how a top secret underwater laboratory doing biomedical research on a rare type of jellyfish disappears and where it disappears to. Adding to the mayhem are a super-ambitious Chinese criminal organization and a deadly (secret) virus breaking out in rural China with the potential to become a pandemic. Why I Read It: My best friend in high school turned me on to the Dirk Pitt series initially. My mom is a major reading enabler when she knows that there's an author he...

At the beginning of the year, I did something I never thought I'd do. I chose a word for the year. "...Hope..." by Darren Tunnicliff is licensed under CC BY 2.0 Yeah. Hope. Maybe that choice was a little bit cheesy, but last year ended on such a downcast note that I just... I wanted to spend some time exploring and reflecting on that word. Hope. Its definition, what it means to me, and what my life looks like when what I'm doing with it reflects that definition. As a part of that, I've been looking up quotes about hope and posting them as pretty pictures on Instagram . For those of you who don't have accounts there, I thought I'd round up all of last month's quotes and share them on the blog with you. February 4, 2017 February 11, 2017 February 18, 2017 February 25, 2017 Feel free to share the ones that resonate with you, but make sure you note where you got them from. And if you are on Instagram and want to ...

Fiber bars, strewn along the side of the road. There had to be at least a dozen of them, still in their wrappers and completely unopened. No box in sight. Really? That's about the reaction my younger sister and I had when we stumbled on them on our early morning run. Really? along with disgusted sighs about the wastefulness of it. These were the expensive ones, not a generic store brand that kind of tastes and kind of looks the same sometimes. So, when we weren't keeping an eye out for their box, we speculated about what had happened. And wondered how many more we were going to see before the end of our run. "Maybe they took one bite and thought they were gross," my sister said. "So they threw them out because they didn't want them anymore." I let out one of those disgusted sighs and nodded along with her theory. "Yeah, or they got in a huge fight, and threw them out in a fit of rage." "That's a possibility." And...