Virtuosity By Jessica Martinez

I had mixed feelings about this book, but if there was one thing about it i loved it was the characters. Although the plot was alright, it was not intriguing enough to make me want to read on. What made it difficult to put down the book was the characters and their relationships. Carmen Bianchi, the main character of the book, is one of the worlds best violinists. She is constantly struggling, however, to break free of the "leash" her mother Diana puts on her. Carmen takes anti-anxiety pills to help her performance, so in addition to trying to break free of her mothers tight and controlling grip on her she must also try and break an addiction to her anti-anxiety drugs. Her over-bearing, music obsessed mother is not okay with her weaning off the pills, and this causes high tension between her and Carmen. Another character I was fascinated by was her violin teacher, Yuri. Although he is not a main character, he was still one of the characters I liked them most. Yuri is a very prestigious and kind of crazy retired violinist. Throughout the book, he is like a strict but loving father to Carmen. He has a very short temper, and a thick accent. He seemed very cliche to me, but for some reason I just thought he was really interesting. Carmen's relationship with Yuri has a lot of tension, just like Carmen's relationship with her mother Diana. Diana and Yuri are only two of the many characters that Carmen interacts with in the novel, but they are two of the most interesting. My all time favorite character and relationship in the book is Jeremy King and his relationship with Carmen. Jeremy is basically the British, male version of Carmen. The reason I like him and his relationship with Carmen so much is that not only is he is also her number one competitor in the race to become the best violinist in the world, but he also turns out to be the boy she falls head over heels in love with. He is her enemy, but he is also her true love, so there no matter how they feel about each other there is always going to be that underlying hate and competition. No, the plot in this book was not fantastic, but the characters defiantly were.

Letters to a Young Gymanst by Nadia Comaneci

Letters to a Young Gymnast is the story of gymnastics legend Nadia Comaneci's life. When I first started reading the book, I had no idea the what kind of detail it would go into. I figured that the autobiography would mostly be about her gymnastics career, but I was way off. Not only were there personal stories about her career and her training with Bela and Marta Karolyi, but there were in-depth stories about how life was for an elite athlete living in communist Romania under the rule of Ceausescu, as well as her defection from Romania. I found these stories about her life in Romania to be particularly interesting, because it's just so different from what I'm used to. The story about her escape from Romania was very interesting, as well as very dramatic. I had no idea what life was like, and it was interesting to read about it from a first hand account rather than from a textbook. Nadia wrote the stories in a narrative voice that made it seem as if she was telling the stories to a very close friend, and I was really drawn in by everything she wrote about. I found a lot of things in the book easy to relate to, being a gymnast myself. I have always found Nadia to be an incredible athlete, but after reading about her tough life in communist Romania and the circumstances she lived under, her victories seemed even more impressive. I found the book extremely interesting, and it really contradicts the pretenses people often have about such talented and well-known athletes. Nadia Comaneci's autobiography was really worth reading, and even though it was so short it gave so much detail and interesting information about her life, covering topics from her career, to her education, her life in Romania, and even her wedding to American gymnast Bart Conner. Even though I am generally not a fan of biographies, I enjoyed this book a lot.