If you know me, you know I’m not a horror movie girl. In fact, one of my first articles for The Hoot was a list of “spooky” books for horror-movie haters like myself. However, I...

In “The Lost Story” by Meg Shaffer, two boys, Jeremy and Rafe, go missing for six months after getting lost on a school field trip to a forest in West Virginia. During that time, they...

Do you ever read a book and think to yourself, “Wow, what would I give to discuss this in my high school AP Lit class?” Sure, maybe the discussion wouldn’t be especially intellectual, but it...

“Station Eleven” was initially released in 2014, and it was adapted into a miniseries in 2021. Nevertheless, I did not read it until 2024, and I am glad I did not first encounter it at...

I have a bad habit of refusing to quit books, even when I really do not like them (as evidenced by my article from January, “Every book I read instead of finishing ‘Silver Nitrate’”). In...

If you have heard a song by The Killers, it probably played while you were at a party, when the host made the wise decision to blast “Mr. Brightside” so everyone could scream along. You...

It would be easy to label “Mr. Texas” as Lawrence Wright’s love letter to Texas, but this novelization of Texas politics is so much more than that. It’s an exposé, it’s a warning and it’s...

I very rarely abandon a book without finishing it. This is quite a bad habit, as it means I waste my time forcing myself through books that I don’t like very much when I could...

Ali Hazelwood’s latest book, “Check & Mate,” recently won the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Young Adult Fiction, but it’s not a stereotypical YA novel. This book, which is Hazelwood’s YA debut, is about a...

I have read many, many romantic comedies in my time. I say it’s my favorite genre, but the truth is that I am extremely picky and I have found that few of the romcoms I...