Unteachable by Leah Raeder

By -
Unteachable by Leah Raeder


                Maise has slept with older men before. She has accepted the fact that boys her age would never meet the cut. She is eighteen, about to start her senior year of high school and is determined to conquer her fears. The night she met Evan on the roller coaster, she didn’t expect anything to come from it. He was hot, the sex was hot and she was gone. Until she walked into her Film Studies class and there he stood. Evan Wilke. Her teacher. She had no idea. He had no idea. Yet here they were together and the temptation was too much to resist. The affair had begun before either of them had a chance to stop it. But now the secrecy begins and the teacher and student fall fast into each other and into a deception they may not be able to climb out of.
                Well this caught me completely by surprise. From the very first page I was lost in Maise’s life. This book was so many things: intoxicating, thrilling, sexy, addicting, detailed and forbidden. I wanted to get lost in a story and I did. I was completely lost in this forbidden but legal relationship between Maise and Evan. The adult in me wanted to hate the idea of a teacher and student ever being intimate in any shape way or form. But the teenager in me, that was attracted to older men, and was intrigued by the mystery of being with someone even a few years older and the mystique that age can cast, loved every single second of it. Raeder captured the voice of an 18 year old like I’ve never seen before. Maise is witty, flawed, beautiful, confident and frightened all at the same time. She is a ball of emotions and insecurity and can be a walking contradiction but she felt so amazingly, wonderfully real. Her relationship with Evan was intense and passionate and hot, oh so hot. These characters were so well developed and so beautifully sculpted. The plot unfolded amazingly. When I thought something was slightly predictable it imploded in my face to show the reality and I was forced to stay on my toes. I couldn’t stop reading. I didn’t want to stop reading.
                Raeder’s Unteachable easily gets 5 out of 5 stars from me. I crashed into this book and loved every second of it. My heart was racing through this story. There were just so many beautiful elements to Raeder’s writing. She created a novel where the intensity was palpable in every page, along with lust, fear, love and danger. There are so many things I didn’t even mention like the druggie mom, the forgotten father, the nuances of being in high school but it’s all there adding intensity and depth to the story. I couldn’t get enough. Some people may not be able to get past the idea of a teacher secretly dating his eighteen year old student so that could scare people away. I completely understand. But this is fiction and I got lost in the story. I loved it and I would take that ride again. If Raeder can keep producing books like this than I may have to get every single one.

                

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steve Johnson

By -
Image
Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steve Johnson Bringing to life the story of a notorious pirate to a modern audience isn’t an easy task. We’re too used to the comfort of easy travel, the mythos of pirates and the commercialized imagery produced by movies and television. Images of Jack Sparrow and Long John Silver have been part of entertainment for so long that the idea of true piracy and all it’s ruthlessness has almost been washed away. It isn’t until you’re able to wash away the false images and submerge yourself into the actual history that you can see piracy for it’s truly brutal nature. It also brings up many questions about governments, laws, corporations, scandal, colonization and other factors that allowed piracy to flourish and exist in the manner that it did for so long. Piracy didn’t exist in a bubble. Enemy of All Mankind takes the story of one pirate, who helped usher in the Golden Age of Piracy, and exa
Read more

Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack

By -
Image
Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack          In my case it is always the image of Odetta that comes to mind when I hear her name. The tall, undeniably Black woman, hair in an afro, guitar in hand. It must be that I simply did not know enough about her life, her struggle, and even her music to convey more than that image. But her image is memorable and her presence something not easily described. This book fills in the gaps in the story of Odetta that I didn’t know. Looking back at my childhood, her most memorable songs are the ones I’ve known most of my life, singing in my school’s chapel along with hundreds of other Black students, the words having meaning that I can only truly comprehend decades later as a Black woman.          Zack takes his time with this biography, letting the readers learn as much about Odetta as we do the time from whence she came. Her migration from Alabama to California, her feelings of coming from a loveless, forced marriage,
Read more

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

By -
Image
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood I’m going to cut right to the chase. This book is well written but we didn’t need it. I expected more. I wanted more and this fell flat. I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale , more than once, and I genuinely enjoyed it. The single narrative of Offred lent itself to the story well and it was genuinely a terrifying society. I watched the first two series of the show and though I have my reservations about it, I still thought it was a good show. It does a great job answering questions that the book could not because of its singular narrative. It filled out the world. This book revolves around three narratives: Aunt Lydia, who we know had a helping hand in stripping women of their sense of self and molded them to be controlled by the men of Gilead; Agnes, raised in Gilead with a Commander as father, privileged and set to marry well; and Daisy, a teenager raised in Canada hating Gilead and the abuses women endured that she’s learned about since she
Read more