“Cheer! Three Teams on a Quest for College Cheerleading’s Ultimate Prize,” by Kate Torgovnick

Ready? OK!

“Cheer!” is basically a documentary in a book. You read about the struggles of three college cheer teams.

This book covers everything you can imagine about cheerleading, tryouts, football games and finally the championship, in which every cheer team hopes to be No. 1 so they can scream it out among the fans during the next game.

Kate Torgovnick follows three teams, the Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks, the Southern University Jaguars and the University of Memphis All-Girl cheer squad. She is there for the onstage performances and the offstage drama. She covers everything from the senior cheerleaders pranking the freshmen to the injuries incurred from the tough workouts required for cheerleaders.

The book is – I guess you could say – inspiring to some. To others, you probably will just read it and think, “What the heck are they talking about?” Hearing about all the double stop, turn, whatever the cheerleaders do in their routine was probably the hardest part of the book – for me, at least. For you cheerleaders, you’re probably reading this and shaking your head at my use at the cheer moves.

Apart from the hard-to-understand cheer moves, and the parts of the book where you just wonder “why?” I’d give this book three and a half stars out of five. The three and a half is because I really didn’t understand why the author would want to follow three cheer teams around for months at a time.

Parents, I wouldn’t let your cheerleader younger than 14 read this book – profanity and swearing is a big issue.

So the next time you go to a football game and you see the cheerleaders spelling out the name of their team like the perfect spellers they are, just think of all the hardships they went through to get to that point. All it took was a little C-H-E-E-R!

– Emma Machell will be a West Junior High School ninth-grader and a member of Angle, the Journal-World’s teen advisory board.

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“Blackthorn Winter,” by Kathryn Reiss

Murder? In this small town? Anything is possible. You see this concept come to life in “Blackthorn Winter,” an intense murder mystery written by Kathryn Reiss.

Juliana Martin-Drake is 16 years old when her parents decide to separate. She moves to the small town of Blackthorn, England, with her mom, Hedda, and her brother and sister, Edmund and Ivy. Something about the town makes her uneasy, though. “What is that smell, and where have I smelled it before?” she thinks to herself when the family arrives. “It smells like … death.”

Knowing she’s adopted, Juliana wonders a lot about her past. She can’t remember anything before she was 5. Her earliest memory is being found by a couple while she was wandering on the beach alone. Blackthorn is also stirring up memories she has never had before, or maybe she’s just afraid to remember.

When Liza, Juliana’s mother’s friend, is murdered, Juliana becomes a better sleuth than the police. Her memories come flooding back to her in a dream, and when she wakes up, she knows who the killer is and why they murdered Liza.

Kathryn Reiss does an excellent job capturing and holding on to the reader through the twists and turns of this chilling murder mystery. She really made me feel like I was Juliana. Reiss also made me want to solve the mystery myself before the book ended.

The plot is fantastic, and I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Anyone who loves an extreme mystery that tests their own skill to put the clues together will find this book especially enjoyable.

Keep these things in mind as you read: an underground tunnel, good luck necklaces and a house key that too many people have.

– Hannah Fowler is a Central Junior High School eighth-grader.

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“Math Doesn’t Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail,” by Danica McKellar

In the book “Math Doesn’t Suck,” I learned a lot about math. Some examples include decimals, percentages, common denominators and many more.

I know a lot of people, including my closest friends, despise math because it is hard, but in this book Danica McKellar makes these concepts clear.

School math books don’t have the same style as this book. This book does not just tell you how to do the problem but runs you through it so thoroughly that you can’t forget it.

Not to exclude the guys, but this book is mainly for girls.

Some of the content in chapters I read relate to life. One of the earlier chapters involves boyfriends with common denominators. You are supposed to fill out what your old and new crushes had in common. Then you find common denominators of numbers like how you find common traits of your crushes.

Another example is in Chapter 9. This chapter involves necklaces and complex fractions. McKellar talks about having a tangled necklace and how you need to clean it up before you can wear it. This is just like how you need to clean up or simplify big or complex fractions before you can understand them. I like these parts of the book the most.

You will also find McKellar’s handwriting in this book. For example, she writes out how to solve each equation. She writes most of the numbers, too. Quick Notes at the bottom of the problem are in her handwriting. An example is:

“QUICK NOTE! Because you can rewrite a whole numbers as fractions (like: 5=5/1), the reciprocal of whole numbers is easy to find. What do you think the reciprocal of 5 is? You guessed it: 1/5!”

Quick Notes give hints on how to make the problem easier or fun, or just something extra to remember while doing the problem.

Now that I have told you how much I love this book, here is something else: You don’t have to read this front to back! There is an index at the front that lists all the types of math in this book. If we were learning about word problems in school, I could just go to the front of the book and check what page number it is on and read that chapter and know everything I want to know about word problems.

I hope you try to read this if you are having trouble in math.

– Molly Lockwood will be in seventh grade.