Books from 2002 | Re-reading 7th Grade Favourites

so i changed my name in seventh grade reading and writing i got a b this is 400 pages and you know what it's not that good 2002 2003 when i was in seventh grade is a pretty iconic film year justin and brittany had just broken up and i predicted an ending of a book that i've already read and loved and forgot apparently if you want to get an insight into early 2000s fashion this is it [Music] hi friends today is another childhood favorites video um there's no one around don't worry it's just empty but i wanted to take you here because this is an important part of my seventh grade life um to start we didn't we don't like seventh grade kayla although seventh grade kayla her name wasn't even kayla so let's talk about that okay this is my kiwanis music festival certificate this is the one from sixth grade that says kayla this is the one from seventh grade that says rose so i changed my name in seventh grade with all of like my school paperwork the reason i wanted to show you here i want to give you a little tour of downtown kelowna because um i don't know i just felt like it this this is a part of my seventh grade this is the place where i performed poetry to get that uh certificate basically in seventh grade i decided um i was gonna be famous i was acting in plays i was performing poetry i had a poem published oh i did a video for the school um as like a tour for the younger kids who were just entering the elementary school i just wanted to reinvent myself i decided i was i was i was done i was gonna be someone else i was gonna be rose which is my middle name screw the girls who you know wrote kayla's fat carved into the bathroom stalls screw the girls who walked around like this and were like i have a little green lemming friend if you can't see him you're not part of our friendship group screw the girls who wouldn't be my friend because i went over to their house and i gave him the middle finger wait that wasn't my fault yeah i was i was not a fun person to be around in seventh grade not not a good friend not a good person we like to pretend she didn't ever happen you can see here my library cards this is the one i showed you in fourth grade this was my one in seventh grade so that's one for me and then behind me is prospero place i have a ticket back from when it was called sky reach place i'm pretty sure this is actually the year that they changed their name in 2002. here's one this is prospero and then this place was actually built in 2002 so it's kind of cool next spot on the tour is the kelowna community theater okay this is my ticket from the biff naked concert from 2003 where i went with my best friend who's also on my kiwanis thing i think it was my first concert ever without my parents like we just got dropped off and got to go i don't know if i explained what the kiwanis music festival is it's like people singing playing instruments doing dramatic reenactments reading poetry i read a poem we'll talk about it i got a merit one year i got third place one year and i got third place again so this is basically me and my best friend i told you about d her and i had to like practice our performance there was like this certain i guess like teacher who helped the kiwanis students and she taught us like how to project our voices and like how to stand because when we were doing duos or duets or whatever we had to stand the same way dress the same way and i actually have the notes that were given to me for one of the performances this ties into the things that i'm gonna read this week basically seventh grade me was into um poetry and horror but then i got into silly middle grade girly books too barbie sweet valley high flowers in the attic the making out series i'm gonna start reading today ariel by sylvia sylvie plath was one of my favorite poets i haven't read any of her novels until high school but poetry i was all over i think i performed one of her poems at kiwanis or i wanted to perform one of her poems and then they asked me to do something else i know i performed elizabeth bishop's one art though because to this day it's my favorite poem it's the one that goes the art of losing isn't hard to master so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost their loss is no disaster this one though i apparently read my shadow by it says stevenson i don't remember his name i think it's robert louie stevenson i'll give you a little taste i have a little shadow that goes in and out with me and what can be the use of him is more than i can see he is very very like me from the heels up to the head and i see him jump before me when i jump into my bed so my notes for this were thank you kayla lovely vocal colors oh god good phrasing and lots of vocal vocation be sure to something drag the voice on periods my bed stress bed not my okay try to lift the pitch at the beginning of verse two good work she mean 86 and i got uh third place with that so i'm not really sure what i thought changing my name was going to accomplish but i definitely didn't accomplish it because everyone just made fun of me more and i had to change it back like six months later so overall seventh grade was not the best time although it was like the last year of elementary school so there were certain perks to being a seventh grader we called it the four b's of seventh grade bus loop benches back seat and band so basically i showed you in the clip of my school that there's like a big buffs loop in the front and essentially only the seventh graders were allowed to be in that bus loop every other grade you had to be in the back of the school like on the fields and then benches were like in the auditorium i don't know why i just called the auditorium there were two rows of benches at the back of the gym so anytime there was an assembly or something the seventh graders got sit on the benches and the back seat was on the bus so like if you took the bus home which i did you got to sit in the back seat if you're a 7th grader although a lot of times after school i was taking the city bus to the spca because this is the year i started volunteering uh i would clean like hamster and rabbit cages every day and sometimes there were puppies and we got to help like train them which was fun and then band i actually i hate that this is happening but i lost my pack of pictures they've been missing for like four months since the last time i did this video i can go back in my third grade video and see me holding out the pack of photos i've been looking for it for four months i have started filming this i've like planned you know out when i was gonna make time each month for childhood favorites and i kept pushing it off because i kept needing to find these photos i still have not found them and i've looked everywhere everywhere three times so i really don't know um i do have a pack of photos that like weren't good enough to be in that pack so like i organized all of my high school photos in that envelope so i better find it for future videos and then the rejects i just have left over in this skinny little one so i'll show you the photos that i never actually wanted to show you because this is all i have from seventh grade this is me at a girl guy camp on a horse it's the least flattering thing i've ever seen of myself was not stoked about that picture these might actually be eighth grade but like i have literally nothing else to show you so here's me in an inner tube we were actually building a raft this was again a girl guide camp that's all i have for you i have one photo from seventh grade that i've really i never wanted to show you because it's horrifying but i wanted to show you because it's horrifying but i don't i don't have it and it sucks so overall seventh grade it wasn't a great time i didn't have friends like i wasn't a great person people weren't great to me but all like the extracurricular activities that i did for myself were fun like i was still in girl guides i was writing for the school newspaper i was in charge of the kids page so like i was making like the crosswords and the word searches i remember there was like a q a in the newspaper um so some people would like submit questions there was a box somewhere in the school where people could submit questions and then i would like write an answer it was like an ask abby and i remember none of the questions were good so i like make fake questions oh god i would pay to see a newspaper from back then like i can't believe i never held on to one but then that video we made for the school was super cool there was like four of us and i remember like i had to wear the same shirt to school like every day for a week because they would film like in between classes we would like walk down the hallway someone would be filming us like pointing at different parts of the school and introducing like the younger kids to who were coming to the school and i remember getting in big trouble one day because i didn't bring my shirt and i had to wear a different shirt and i'd like wear it inside out and they were so mad at me because they had to like crop in really close to my face for that clip because it like the continuity i messed it all up i was also in choir i joined choir in seventh grade and i was by far the worst singer in the entire group but like i had convinced myself that i could say and i remember this one trip we went on to these cabins i don't even remember where it was but like every cabin had four girls and nobody wanted to be in my cabin so i got thrown in like a leftover cabin with three girls in it who hated me and i remember they convinced me to let them cut my hair and to me that was like a moment that they were like letting me into their friendship group [Music] don't panic you look great [Music] what i actually learned was that like they thought i was disgusting and greasy and wanted to chop off my hair i'm gonna read this and have some great memories of reading poetry as a seventh grader who took herself way too seriously the fact that 12 year old me was reading this by itself um but trying to read this at a at a poetry reading competition doesn't sit right with me i think there are only like two poems in here to begin with that um i wouldn't even say r appropriate but that maybe i could get away with reading in a crowd of 12 year olds oh god though i know that the addition that i would have read at this time would have been different from this um because this is like the what is it like 2004 when the collection got um fixed basically so when i read the other edition there's like 10 more poems that are in here and i don't know if they would be like more intense than these but wow i'm just like questioning everything like that i was reading this at this age i know for a fact i was reading this at this age reading like the n word and about the klu klux klan and about nazis and every poems about um abortion and god and christ placentas um scalping indians um lots and lots of references that are just i don't know leaving me with a lot to think about is making me just really bummed out so that was an interesting place to start i mean i know like i know sylvia plath for some reason still caught off guard with the intensity of this [Music] hello we're camping this weekend i'm not gonna vlog much like talk much but here's a couple clips and i'm currently reading the unicorn club all right hello it was just liam's birthday so we went camping i was planning on vlogging the entire time but i decided that i should put away screens for the entire weekend which was a very nice idea so liam's just gonna hang out with us and build his tinker crate maybe by the time we're done chatting he'll be down his catapult and he can show us but i didn't read that much this weekend anyway it was just one book the unicorn club book number one called save the unicorns which is the only one i ever read from the series that's pretty much a trend with my childhood reading is like we didn't have the internet so we couldn't just like find books online you just had to show up at the used bookstore and hope that somebody would donate a future book in the series if you wanted to read it this time around um i didn't keep my old book the unicorn club so i embarrassingly spent twenty dollars ordering this from i think it was thrift books this has a lot of nostalgia for me mandy right here was my everything uh the whole unicorn club basically as mandy describes it is it's the most popular pretty and liked girls in school and they all just hang out and call themselves the unicorn club and they all make a point every day to wear something purple that is like the color of the unicorn club so mandy here is in all purple look at her purple jeans her purple plaid i wanted to be mandy and we've got a bunch of other white girls and one black girl which is the trend in i think every uh most like 90s queen book series we've got michelle we've got jessie from the babysitter's club uh in the making out series we have aisha and in the unicorn club we have maria although technically she is described as having dark eyes and skin the color of milky coffee that's the best description that we were getting in the 90s and early 2000s of women of color in books milky coffee milky coffee you could put any amount of milk in your coffee so like what does that mean also no one else got their skin color described in this book except her she wasn't even so much a character in here like she barely got any description at all so i actually upon finishing this order the second book which is all about her i can't remember what it's called but i'll pop up the cover right here because i'd never even realized that uh other books in the series were from different perspectives so that's super cool um but if you know like the sweet valley high series that was a little bit before my time it's still the twins but it's just earlier in life in the all-encompassing series of the sweet valley stuff i think there are hundreds of books we have them as children as tweens as teens college age university like we followed them for so long and other people so mandy was our main character in here but we also have leela or lila and the focus of this book is they're choosing the club president and two of the girls are fighting who should be the next president of the club in order to do that they play a bunch of pranks like painting the lockers purple and they get in trouble and they have to volunteer at this child care place it was very babysitter club vibes which now it makes sense why i liked it so much there was some very interesting focus on foster care in here that i wasn't expecting because they're volunteering to take care of these kids uh just at a daycare and then there's this one girl they get really attached to and then one day the mom comes in and she's like i can't find a job and if i can't find a job soon my kid's gonna have to go to foster care and then that happens and then the girls like make this effort to find her a job and get their get them back together everyone in this book makes bad decisions does dumb things they fight they have all of this stuff going on but mandy is like the voice of reason throughout the entire book and she's just trying to do the right thing and make good choices and i'm gonna give you spoilers because i forgot that this happened but mandy gets to become the president at the end which i was so surprised by as the book was wrapping up i was pretty sure they were gonna choose the two girls to just be like co-presidents like that's the memory that i had and as i was reading i was like oh my god mandy would make such a good president that's how the book should have gone and the book did go that way and i predicted an ending a book that i've already read and loved and forgot apparently another interesting point that i forgot is mandy the year before had cancer and apparently lost all of her hair which is confusing because in the book it doesn't talk about like what her hair currently looks like but on the cover it's long and doesn't look like um she has recently lost her hair but specifically comments on the fact that she used to wear wigs but doesn't wear them anymore um and there's this whole thing where they're like stealing uh teachers toupee as one of the pranks and she gets upset with her friends because like did they forget that just last year she was wearing a wig and how upsetting it would have been if someone had stolen that from her it was really good overall some weird things but like a good message i felt really good about this book and because of the unicorn club and mandy my queen i painted my entire room purple this year and it would remain purple for like the rest of my years also this book takes place in seventh grade which i had no idea when i picked it up and this happened last time in fourth grade and i think in fifth grade i keep non-intentionally reading my favorite books that happened to take place in that same year and i don't know if like i loved that book because it was taking place in the same grade as me i guess that makes sense but it's always such a surprise when i see we finally made it to seventh grade and i'm like i read this in seventh grade babysitter's club was still definitely a thing for me in seventh grade in fact uh jessie became my favorite babysitter in seventh grade previous to that and i think after that um it was dawn dawn's always been my girl but then i've also always connected with claudia a lot but there was something in seventh grade that i was really loving jessie and i was picking up all of jessie's books and then embarrassingly which i planned to never talk about the and i threw away the evidence but i showed you in previous childhood favorites uh these laminated books that we would write and in seventh grade we wrote one um we got a signed one and i wrote the longest story in the entire class and it was this thick story about a ballerina named i think it was jasmine and i was writing i was writing i was writing and then we were getting close to um the deadline and i was not finished my story at all couldn't think of way to even like wrap it up so i literally took i plagiarized the babysitter's club i took like the second half of a jesse book and we didn't have again like the type of internet access or ability to copy so i flipped open the book and typed on my little computer the entire like second half of the book and just changed out the name every time i saw jesse's name to jasmine or whatever the teacher never caught me actually this is a great time to grab my report card i came across this when i was looking through uh the bin last time but i specifically did not like look at the grades but i have it i don't even remember my teacher's name mrs lum reading and writing i got a b i got a b i thought you said you were good i always got a's in high school i can't believe i got a b that's so embarrassing in math i got an a in science i got a b in social studies i go b in french i got an a wait wait wait you said a in math an a this is seventh grade i was good at math in fact i it's weird that i got a b because i skipped um eighth grade math english and something else in pe i got a b not bad uh in personal planning i got a b i'm shocked in fine arts i got an a a in art a and music a in drama so in music i played the flute it was like very cool like the cool popular girls were the ones who got to play flute i remember uh we all went to the gym and we got to test for the instrument so we had to sit there we had to listen to things and then write down our answers on this little quiz and then we got assigned an instrument and all of like the popular girls all got flutes and my sheet said flute or clarinet so i had the choice so even though i got like the popular girl instrument and i was finally like this is my year i fit in like i could be cool no i wasn't cool because i didn't get assigned the flute i got assigned a choice i still chose the flute but i still wasn't cool and then drama i got an a i was in a play in seventh grade i think it was red riding hood my friend played red riding hood my other friend played red riding hood's best friend and i got red riding hood's sister and my one of my most embarrassing memories from grade seven is during of the rehearsals there was this boy who i had a huge crush on who got cast as i guess like the woodsman or whatever and every time he would walk on stage red riding hood and all of her girlfriends their instructions were to like swoon after him and go oh my gosh it was like a funny part of the play and i remember in the middle of rehearsal i like piped up um when he walks on stage since i'm also a girl on stage am i supposed to soon after him and our teacher person was like sure kayla go for it so i did because i loved him i'm embarrassing liam so that's what i remember from seventh grade let's read the notes should we read all of them i'm going to read the last one june 2003 term three kayla had a very good third term she can be proud of her accomplishments kayla has been willing to help out in the classroom which is greatly appreciated yeah because i had no friends so i would stay in at recess and like put the chairs away and wipe down the desk because otherwise i was just sitting outside alone her presentation on ancient greek math was both interesting and well presented huh kayla volunteered to read aloud on many occasions and she reads with flair and fluency oh liam is done with his activity that was close [Music] i'm gonna keep it light i'm not ready to dive into anything that's going to take too much of my brain power so we're going to go on to generation girl new york here we come book number one much like the unicorn club i only ever read the first one i've only ever seen the first one i don't know anything that comes after this if there's anything else or what it looks like but this is basically a barbie book i definitely liked barbies um too late in life the same is true with some shows like i was watching the big comfy couch and barney in like seventh grade i think it's because i i didn't have those things so much when i was younger so once we like got cable and once i could like buy a couple barbies i was like i'm not too old for it like let's go it's weird because i feel like i remember this pretty well we've got barbie who i think is this one we don't even see her face and then all of her friends and i think at the beginning of the book she goes and moves in with this family that she doesn't know in new york in order to go to film school oh look you've got a map of new york i don't remember why i loved this but i definitely did it came out originally in 1999 i was probably also playing barbie video games at this age i know i was getting into video games i was really into uh lara croft tomb raider and uh grand theft auto i think vice city would have come out at this time and consistently in my life like i wouldn't actually play the games properly i would just like walk around and like be a normal person so in tomb raider i wasn't actually like completing the missions i remember there being this big training it was just like a gym and she would just like jump up and down on trampolines and like scurry along walls and then we would go swim in the pool in grand theft auto i like wouldn't do a single mission and i would never get the cops after me i would literally just drive around and i'll try to stay in my lane and i would stop at the stop signs and i would just like be a normal person and then i would get all the cheat codes my favorite chico's one where you made your car fly another favorite game was tony hawk i was all about tony hawk actually going back to vice city that's where i got a lot of my like musical taste was i don't remember the radio station now but some of my favorite songs i know because of that game and then in tony hawk also some of my favorite songs i also still absolutely loved mary kate and actually at this age i was playing this one game of theirs all i remember is it took place on a beach i'm pretty sure you had to clean the beach this is the type of video games that i was into i was cleaning the ocean so that's what i was up to i don't think i ever had any barbie video games which is a real tragedy i honestly don't have a ton to say about generation girl uh it's a pretty like basic story i can kind of get into it for a second while i hit you a very specific portion of my viewership with some nostalgia speaking about dolls barbie dolls um this the thing about these doll makers is every single one was different and you didn't really know what you were getting into until you loaded it so there'd be like these sites where you could like find different people making these doll makers and keep in mind like we didn't have google like you just had to know somebody who knew somebody who knew the site was here and then you had to wait like half an hour for your dial up internet to load the entire page and if you scrolled before it was done it would mess up the entire thing and then it would never load i don't think any of these are really going to work but like they were all different because sometimes you could drag and drop the outfits and sometimes you had to double click so like there's a body here and you would have to double click it and it would go to a different area it says make doll here and then you can usually like dress her up like that um so like ah i think this one might work yeah and you would wow oh my god am i kidding i'm the pale one um that's literally my skin tone this was all it was by the way like you just dress up the doll and then you go with on with your life obviously every generation and every age range has a different relationship with technology and i would never be like an out of touch old person who was like oh kids these days they don't appreciate technology they're always stuck on their phones or blah blah blah but i will say there is something that i find with the age demographic of people born from like 19 and it's really specific 1987 to 1994 when we didn't have internet and like specifically social media during our formative years but when we were like oh now i can't take her skirt off i just start all over oh this one's the whitest one she's gray that's okay but what i'm saying is we got internet at an early enough age that like i feel like a lot of the really um successful youtubers that you see exist in this very specific age range because like we know how to appreciate social media and um not let it consume our entire life i'm obviously speaking like pretty generally and broadly but i think a lot of us have a really healthy relationship with social media and at the same time got it early enough in our lives that we've always been able to be on top of like the most current technology put in some boots oh there was also sometimes an issue where like the clothes would go on in the wrong order so you'd drag it over and it would like go under the pants and it would ruin your entire doll this one is definitely my favorite i wish i could use it uh oh my god and it's so funny because there are like certain outfits that are very timely and we're very on trend oh my gosh if you want to get an insight into early 2000s fashion besides like looking at celebrity photos this is it i love this so much these fuzzy jackets oh my gosh i remember i bought one look just like this one it looks just like the one that mary kay nashville wearing on the front cover of their magazine and um i bought one like it and it shed like crazy and my mom said i look like stevie nicks and i had no idea who that was and then of course everyone talks about like um the games you got to play in school i know that we played the one that everyone talks about what's that game like the truck in no it was the hiking one oh oh what's that called yukon something something yeah yukon trail so i'll show you what our computers looked like they were like colorful did you have colorful computers no i was year older than you i was this generation before colorful computers it's right here you'd pick somebody oh my gosh i think this must have been the canadian because i know what people talk about the games that they played in school and i think they talk about something else but like maybe i'm wrong but canadians we had this yeah it was a really weird game now i think about it oh yeah and you can ask people questions oh god i remember that anyway the barbie book uh basically barbie goes to new york she goes to like an international school um there's these girls that she meets and one girl um something was stolen from her oh my gosh speaking about the yukon trail this is me this is probably more like eighth grade again but we like had to dress up for this like olden times photo shoot for again some girl guide thing i was going to pull out this um bookmark because i think i got this around this age i know i got it from the flea market which is my favorite place to be i talked about how um my dad always took me and i could get like a 50 cent archie comic every time we went and i remember seeing like a magnetic bookmark for the first time and it just like blew my mind but essentially what happens with the item that was stolen and barbie's trying to like solve the case is um another girl stole it but actually she was just taking it to like put in the lost and found that's the entire plot of this book also of course barbie wants to be an actress so she goes on like a an interview and immediately books a job and the australian character says g'day and mate at the end and beginning of literally every sentence in the book it was silly it was cute it wasn't as good as i remember as these books rarely are [Applause] today's read is misery by stephen king but it was published originally in 1987 and i know that the movie came out the year that i was born in 1990. if you don't know misery is about an author who gets like kidnapped essentially by his biggest fan i regularly call this like one of my favorite stephen kings but it's been so long that like who the heck knows he has basically written a book um where misery is the main character and in one of his books he kills off misery and now the woman who's kidnapped him is like you better write me a better book where misery comes back oh and i'm definitely gonna finish this today because i actually already started it but i didn't vlog like the first couple chapters because i started doing it and then a readathon happened and now i'm back in it i am just at this point which is part two i think there's four parts overall and it's called misery and it starts with the story that he's writing um and all the ends look weird because the n is broken on the typewriter that annie wilks his number one fan buys for him and then we'll watch the movie and compare i think i also want to watch another movie 2002 2003 when i was in seventh grade it's a pretty iconic film year we had legally blonde we had the lizzie mcguire movie freaky friday had to lose a guy in 10 days uh cheaper by the dozen charlie's angels uptown girls what a girl wants oh my god this is the year honey came out also swat came out this year which is one of my favorite movies ever grind one of my favorite movies ever how to deal which i'm interested to watch because i haven't heard anybody like ever talk about that movie um and then get over it didn't come out this year but i'm pretty sure this is the year i watched it because i remember who i watched it with so i'm now on to part three and like two-thirds of the way through this book and i'm really pleasantly surprised in all of these childhood favorite videos i always like talk about how this book holds up over time and i think we all know that stephen king writes a lot of questionable stuff in general i've talked about that in other videos um rereading other books by him and this one i thought would probably be the same they thought there would be more that i had to like comment on or that would bother me i am really impressed by the suspension that he is building in here all right i finished misery and i watched the movie and i don't have like a final writing or anything i definitely didn't mind the chapters of the book being in here as much as i thought maybe i would i definitely enjoyed the tension of it i enjoyed the writing a lot and i think it was really strong with that said i'm sure there's lots of conversation that we could have and that other people have had about perpetuating um a negative idea of mental health while annie wilkes is not um officially like diagnosed or anything in the book or the movie it's clear that she's mentally unwell on one hand you know it doesn't help the conversation about mental illness and it encourages the idea that people who are mentally ill are murderers we could go even deeper and talk about how like women are deemed crazy and obsessive fans we could go further and talk about how fat people are represented in books as consistently being villains and on the other hand we could just look at this and say it's a book it's a book about a woman who makes some really bad decisions and the man who um well i don't want to spoil the book you know the man who goes through it the movie was good uh it's well known the movie was good it was definitely different from the book in certain ways certain interesting ways um certain violence and um just like the ending you know just went a little differently but i enjoyed both and now i'm starting my second movie this is just a self-care day and i'm really happy about it i actually barely remember anything from get over it so i'm excited to watch it but i'm pretty sure this is the one that is shakespeare based and it has two of my biggest life crushes from childhood shane west and mila kunis so i deserve this movie it's also got kirsten dunst who was my everything we've established bring it on the virgin suicides dick like she was my idol oh also vitamin c um who's dancing behind him for some reason was also a style icon for me uh i seem to have completely blanked that he has uh what's supposed to be a british accent i think so that's horrifying lucky right are you guys listening to this candy ass my father's in the phone center so i've spent the last few years involved shanghai that's when i was in amsterdam the high school musical vibes are real the main guy is on the basketball team and he is just joining a play because he's in love with a girl and he has to like go back and forth between the two things and everyone thinks it's so weird that he's in the musical weird so get over it was actually kind of good i mean there's obviously a reason it's not a well known like movie nowadays that people remember and [Music] re-watch it's another day i'm really excited about what i'm going to be reading today this is zoe fools around it's the first book in a series written by katherine applegate this has been rebranded a few times i think this is its original state i read it when it was rebranded as the making out series and it looked like this current day it's called the islander series and it looks like this i think seventh grade is when we all started caring about how we looked relationships makeup fashion every single conversation you had as a group of girls was about boys that's all we talked about that's all we related over and i was just so obsessed with the idea of being a teenager and teenage relationships and all of this inter friendship drama so i was so into this series not just the series though like real life celebrity relationships was um my favorite thing like let me set the scene this is the time justin and brittany had just broken up nick and jessica had just become a thing hillary duff and lindsay lohan were currently fighting over aaron carter nick carter and paris hilton were just getting together and i wanted every single magazine to tell me about what was going on i actually when i was looking for that picture of my purple room i found a picture inside my closet there's actually some books in a picture that this photo was actually these set of photos were taken a couple years later but we'll dive into the books in this photo later in a later video i mean um but at the bottom of my closet you can see a magazine collection it's aggressive but like i can't explain to you how important these magazines were to my life our fashion icons at this time were mandy moore they were lindsay lohan hillary duff like hillary duff was our everything this is like right in the middle of the lizzie mcguire days so hilary duff was in every magazine spread she had her makeup brand melissa joan hart the olsen twins danielle fishel was a pretty big icon at that time for me tatiana ali was like one of my fashion icons but i think sometimes we sleep on amanda bynes like amanda bynes was kind of the blueprint peak fashion in 2002 was skinny scarves and one shoulder tops like i'm telling you this was it this was also the time of frosted white silver blue eyeshadow moments also for us canadian girls like we also had avril lavigne we oh my god lily from radio free rosco was everything manny santos from degrassi like iconic like set the scene for 12 year old canadian girl fashion i hope i can unlock a memory for someone by mentioning fifi dobson and sky sweeten them also also denise from breaker high loved her in future years it'll be all about nude lips like aggressively nude lips but in seventh grade the glittery the frostier the better and as far as hair goes there was lots of clips there was lots of accessories the one front braid this was always pretty iconic we can thank sabrina for that so i'm gonna read this and let you know how it goes all i remember is all of these covers i could never find them in like chronological orders love triangles there's drama it takes place on an island okay i definitely didn't finish this in one day it's slower moving for me than i thought i'm only like 50 pages in and i'm gonna try to finish it today but i also started flowers in the attic if you don't know flowers in the attic is this story of four siblings and their father dies and they have to go move in with their like evil grandparents and they get like locked in a room permanently and they just have to live there and now i feel like this is putting me in a reading slump because this page literally like is my life right now in like self-isolation all the days dragged by monotonously what do you do with time when you had it in super abundance where did you put your eyes when you had already seen everything so she's getting into like what she's not allowed to do her grandmother is very concerned that she and her older brother by two years are going to commit um horrible acts with each other which is a valid concern my mom is coming over to my house for the first time since march and i'm gonna get her to put my hair in the way that she always did it around this age you haven't touched my hair in like 15 years my hair's a lot thinner than it used to be too it is yeah when i make braids now like they look like they look so normal rubbers have such thick braids yeah well remember your father's hair well no you wouldn't remember your father's hair when he was yeah that's when we got matching perms i don't know why i always wanted curly hair i feel like i never wore my hair straight in school like it was either braids or it was a rag no no no no i used to spend so much time doing your hair and you'd wear it for half an hour and you'd rip it out little tiny butterfly clips i used to like do this intricate thing so the whole back of your head was these tiny little things with the butterfly clips and you rip it out after half an hour oh i'm so sorry but i always say you braid my hair or rag yeah we did rex and it would just be poofy yeah because he'd like brush it oh god that's a look okay it's a lot later i need to take these out there's no way i'm sleeping with these in and i finished this book so basically in the book we have a brother and sister zoe and benjamin and then we have a sister and sister claire and nina then we have a brother and brother jake and wade and then we have some other characters we've got lucas we've got aisha muka christopher okay now you know the whole gang basically zoe is with jake but right before um lucas killed jake's brother wade um zoe and lucas kissed so she cheated on her boyfriend then lucas went away for a couple years to like juvenile detention and now he's back and zoe is grappling with her feelings these are some tiny girls obviously nobody wants to be friends with lucas or no lucas or talk to lucas because he was drunk driving and killed a boy but zoe cannot keep her feelings to herself so she yet again cheats on her boyfriend who albeit boring is like a perfectly fine nice boyfriend but then we find out that he wasn't actually the one driving the car it was claire claire is our new villain and she is like seemingly in love with jake who's zoe's boyfriend but she's cheating on him so whatever but claire is actually dating zoe's brother benjamin who's blind and that's pretty much all we get about his character and then we have aisha and christopher who are the two black characters and the only two black teenagers who live on the island and aisha is very adamant about not dating christopher because she doesn't want to be seen as like a stereotype because she's expected to date the only black teenager on the island but christopher is very persistent and at one point technically gets employed by the high school that they go to and isn't like her teacher but i mean that definitely makes the relationship a little more awkward so weirdly while reading the book um i don't i didn't remember any of it usually when i reread my childhood favorites i have like memories of reading the book or i remember certain scenes certain sentences i remembered nothing and i'm assuming it's just because there were so many books in the series and it all just got lost over time so the book was um fine i actually really don't see what i saw in it at this age enough to want to pick up the entire series and also i could not read these i struggled this book took so much longer than it should have because i was like struggling suffice to say i won't be continuing in this series although i just got in the mail the next book in the unicorn club i still can't explain to you why i want to read this but i want to read more about maria so it's here tomorrow my goal is to finish flowers in the attic even though i'm not having the best time it's strange how upon reflection two hefty books about being stuck in a room i may not have any photos of myself looking like this in seventh grade but this feels um spot on so shout out to my mom see you tomorrow i brushed it out no one tell my mom and as we would do this like once a week and then it would turn into a poodle and i wouldn't know what to do here are some things that i would do with my poofy poofy hair to try to make it look normal it never did but i just realized it's my last day of reading like my childhood so we're finishing flowers in the attic today i am probably halfway through at this point i actually checked out the audiobook this is 400 pages and you know what it's not that good okay i just went live for a bit everyone was hyping me up for this i don't think you got the full scope of what was going on but i appreciate your love so let's talk about flowers in the attic no the purpose of rereading my childhood favorites for me are one to feel the nostalgia number two is to just remind myself of the book in general and three is to see if the book holds up this has become less and less important i guess depending on what i'm reading because like it's good to read it was good to reread holes because liam was going to read it and i wanted to know what he was reading i like to be informed about like current day middle grade it's cool to be able to see a comparison to what i read at that age versus what is out there in the world now but since there are so many books out there i really don't think that many am i wrong 12 year olds are out there now reading that barbie book in a unicorn club in flowers in the attic i don't know that that's a thing i don't know that it matters this conversation about does this book hold up and would i recommend it current day i wouldn't recommend this current day one it's not really that good it could be interesting if you're thinking about you know literature in general and you want the history of certain topics what i've learned with flowers in the attic is i didn't feel the nostalgia because i don't think that i enjoyed this book when i say it was my favorite i i really do think now being realistic um i probably just read this because of the controversial element and it was like a book that people at school were like oh my god have you read this i don't personally find it enjoyable or interesting to read about a rich family and their servants and the terrible ways that they treat each other and speak to each other here's the thing uncomfortable topics or taboo topics or whatever the have their place in literature but i think more so in a way to like have the conversations about things not to like root for an incestuous relationship so the fact that it pitches itself as like about forbidden love it's setting you up for a romance that you root for and that's obviously problematic but i was hoping that like my memories were just wrong i actually can't look at myself looking like this anymore so tomorrow i'm gonna check in with you and have like a a good wrap up okay i'll be right back okay here we are for final thoughts to be honest and i think what i've seen from a lot of other people talking about this book is that a lot of us who read it 20 years ago forgot um the rape portions of this and knew that it was about incest it was about brother and sister but i guess blocked out of our memory um on one hand that the the mother was also in an incestuous relationship and two um that the relationship the relationship i don't between the two main characters um is not consensual which like obviously you can't that's you can't consent as a 14 year old but two like the word rape is used multiple times she says he raped me he says i'm sorry i raped you she says it's my fault it was inevitable i could have stopped you if i really wanted even though she said no multiple times and kicked him i'm actually gonna leave some discussions down below about this book um and like maybe why it had the impact that it did it's really not well written uh the dialogue is some of the cringiest most unrealistic ridiculous terrible dialogue i've ever read this is also not a young adult book um it's pretty much marketed that way now which is kind of horrifying but originally when it came out like it was an adult novel it's about neglect it's about abuse it's really dark i'm gonna spoil the entire book if you don't already know because i'm sure most of you don't want to read this if you haven't already um but one of the four children dies and he was poisoned um they were all poisoned throughout their entire time in the attic their grandmother set out to kill them slowly and one of them actually dies and that was definitely a much more emotionally impactful moment as a mother on one hand i want to appreciate the children like taking charge of their life and their ability to escape at the end of it i love a survival story so i'm really struggling with my writing i don't think i was romanticizing it at 12 but i definitely don't think i was acknowledging the issues within it i really don't know as far as misery goes this originally had a four star i think from me on goodreads but i think i would stick with my four star as far as these two books i really don't know if i need to like sway anybody to them away from them but i really did enjoy diving back into mandy's experience not so much this one but there was nothing wrong with it um i talked about ariel which was another strange experience like did i understand the full scope of what was happening and then i guess we would have to say this was a pretty disappointing reread but again in the day and age when i was reading it like there wasn't that much competition so i'm sure this was interesting to me and it's definitely formed some of my reading preferences like maybe i love a friendship group where everyone is sleeping with or dating each other and it's all messy like maybe this is the reason why i love that trope now so props to that but like if you were planning on picking up the islanders at some point i i don't i wouldn't tell you not to but like i don't know if it's gonna do much for you i guess just depending like who you are how old you are your reading tastes your reading history for me this would have been a good offshoot of like all of the teen shows that were available to me which were few and far between it gave me what i was getting from like dawson's crink it's not going to give you what you're getting from outer banks does that make sense there might be some like universal teen experiences covered but the longevity of this series is not a thing in my opinion that's it for reading my childhood favorites i feel like usually in these vlogs i go do more but obviously we're in a weird time so just hanging out with me mostly in my room anyway i'll see you later thank you so much for watching subscribe if you haven't already what do you have to lose bye

Channel: BooksandLala

Views: 48,463

Rating: 4.9684587 out of 5

Keywords: books, booktube, bookish, booksandlala, obbsandlala

Id: _RvlKkAIglk

Length: 59min 56sec (3596 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020