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The city of Ember was built by Builders almost 250 years previous to the story. It was built in total isolation, and the people of Ember have no idea that there is anything outside of their own city. Supplies are running out, and the people of the City do not know how to make anything, although they do have a greenhouse. Doon and Lena find a message from the Builders and they think that it is instructions for leaving the city, but Lena's sister chewed on the instructions, and so they must decipher it. Meanwhile, the mayor is a total incompetent, and is letting the city go to ruin. This book will have a sequel.
The general premise of the book strikes me as a poorer version of The Giver, but the plot is good. This book is written in the third person, alternating chapters being about Doon and Lena (doesn't that make you think of Lorna Doon?).
Question: The premise for this book indicates that the world is ending. What do you think is the most likely cause for the world's ending, in this book or in our times?
Happy reading.
Tartabull's Throw by Henry Garfield First book in the Moondog series
Cyrus Nygerski is a left-handed second baseman playing for a minor league team belonging to the Chicago White Sox. The year is 1967. He meets a girl named Cassandra. Those are the facts that are true at the beginning of all three possible stories here. Because of time travel, three different stories are outlined over the same time period.
Figuring out what is happening is a big part of the fun in reading this book, so I won't tell you what I think happens. This book is a merger of the sports and fantasy genres, and it doesn't stick to either of those very well. It is also historical fiction, since the story takes place in 1967. The merger of these genres is particularly striking because I can't see any target audience going for it. Hardcore fantasy fans are rarely into sports. The 1967 that the book portrays has the real baseball season in it, in one of these versions. If you know your baseball history, this shuold be an easier read.
One thing about this book that really bugs me is an element that appears to be racist, linking Martin Luther King with warewolves. In one of the realities, blacks are portrayed as warewolves, and if that's not how the book turns out, that maybe mitigates and definitely doesn't obliterate the racism.
Happy reading.
After Deborah reviewed The Well Of Lost Plots, I thought that I ought to read a book by Jasper Fforde, and the one available when I looked was Lost In A Good Book. So Deborah reviewed the third book and I'm about to review the second and we are going backwards.
Deborah says that Lost In A Book stands alone well, which might be true, but reading this without having first read The Eyre Affair was confusing, especially as it kept being reffered to. Deborah's review ought to be helpful in being not so disoriented by the setting.
Thursday finds from her father that the world will turn into pink goo on December 12th, 1985(she lives in an alternate universe and is in 1985). She learns this as a series of strange coincidences almost take her life. Her eccentric inventor uncle gives her an entroposcope, which is supposed to measure the likelihood of coicidental happenings. Two more times, when coincidences happen, Thursday narrowly avoids dying. It turns out that the coincidences are being engineered by the sister of the villain whom Thursday defeated in The Eyre Affair. Her ultimate coinncidence is planned to wipe out power and all three generators stopping a nanobot orange cream topping from reproducing uncontrollably. Thursday's father interferes and saves the world, although I don't really understand how; he goes back to the beggining of the world to change something.
This book has a far too complicated a plot to do it justice in a review. Keeping track of all of the characters can be a little confusing, but they will quickly remind you. Thursday spends a lot of this book going into the worlds of other books, but it was not until I started writing this that I realize that that part of the plot doesn't really have anything to do with saving the world. This book reminds me strongly of Terry Pratchett's books. They're both humourous, happen in a different but familiar reality, have lots of coincidences, and are written by British authors.
Happy reading.
Dovey Coe is an outspoken 12 and then 13 year old living in North Carolina in 1928. At the beginning of the book we are told that Dovey denies killing her sister's suitor whom she didn't like, but it is not until page 119 of 181 pages that Parnell dies. The pages before 119 are the story of a proud boy trying to court a girl and falling flat on his face. They are a portrayal of North Carolina small towns in 1928 and 1929. And the pages after 119 are a story of court room drama and bravado, of a friendship that is siblinghood(blech-what a word. Anybody know a better word with the same meaning?).
Readers should keep in mind that Dovey's narrative is not the whole picture. I guessed the clue in the story that proves Dovey's innocence long before she does, which was annoying. See if you can, too.
Happy reading.
Books Reviewed:27
Total Books Reviewed:96
Days Blogged/Days In Month:12/30
New Members:one. Welcome, Ceribimotou!
Total Number of Members:3(one has not yet posted)
Number of Hits This Month:148
Toal Number of Hits:718
Features Added:none, but I intend to add a new hit counter to check the accuracy of the first. And the list of links in the index has grown.
17 year old Zachary Pearce has always lived his mother, but she has just died of cancer. While she was dying, his mother told him that after her death he should go to his father, so he does. His father is very surprised to meet him. He had thought that Zachary was adopted. His father has another family now; a wife, a daughter, and a son. Feeling that it is the right thing to do, they take Zachary in. The daughter, Tottie, is very resentful of Zachary. She feels angry at her father for having been with a woman other than her mother. And the attention heaped on Zachary does not help.
This story takes place in the author's hometown, Baltimore, and the details of the city make the story feel somewhat alien. The characters are realistic, although Tottie seems somewhat shallow. The chapters are alternately narrated by Tottie and Zachary, and sometimes the chapters overlap disconcertingly.
Happy reading.
One In Thirteen
The Silent Epidemic of Teen Suicide by Jessica Portner Forward by William S. Pollack
*One in thirteen highschoolers attempt suicide in the U.S.
*67.3% of boys and 51.9% of girls ages 10 to 19 who kill themselves usea firearm.
*More than 85% of completed suicides in the U.S. are by boys.
*In 70% of teen suicides, another teenager knew of the intent and did not act.
*People from every race, income bracket, gender, etc. commit suicide. Boys commit suicide more than girls, whites more than blacks, gays more than straights, the disabled more than the healthy.
This book repeats these facts over and over. It's a skinny book that should have had more examples of what it said than repetitions of what it said. To anyone who has studied suicide, this book will not present new information. However, this information is important for everyone to know. You probably know at least one person who has attempted suicide; you may sometime be in a situation where you need to convince someone not to commit suicide.
Read.
Stanley Yelnats has been falsely accused and convicted of stealing Sweet Feet Livingston's shoes. Given the choice between going to Camp Green Lake or jail, Stanley chooses Camp Green Lake. Camp Green Lake proves to be a misnomer. The lake has long been dry (story which is told intermingled with Stanley's story) and there is nothing green around. The campers have to dig five foot diameter holes every day, allegedly because this will build character. In reality, the camp Director is looking for the treasure of Kissin Kate Barlow, which is supposed to be buried somewhere on the premises.
Stanley's cabin mates have given themselves each nicknames, which they always use for each other. Stanley becomes Caveman, and the other boys are Squid, X-Ray, Magnet, Armpit, Zigzag, and Zero. Zero is called Zero because everyone else thinks that Zero has zero in his head, that he is a zero. When Zero sees Stanley writing to his mother, he asks Stanley to teach him to read. In exchange, he offers to dig part of Stanley's hole for him every day. When it is discovered that Zero is digging part of Stanley's hole, the Director makes fun of Zero for trying to learn to read. She tells him that he will never be fit for anything but digging holes. Zero runs away. Nobody follows him because they know that they have the only water around; Zero will have to come back or die. Stanley feels guilty, and after a few days, he runs away in search of Zero.
When he finds Zero, Zero has gotten very weak, but is still alive. He has been living on "sloosh", jars of which he found under a boat. He and Stanley do not return to the camp. Because Stanley remembers that his great-grandfather had survived in the same desert after being robbed by Kissin Kate Barlow by living on what he called the thumb of God, they head towards a mountain that looks like a big thumb.
Fortunately, it turns out to be the same mountain, and there are lots of wild onions growing there. Thinking that he knows where the treasure is, Stanley convinces Zero to return with him to Camp Green Lake, where they do find the treasure. Stanley's lawyer is there, having come to get him, and when she sees Zero, she wants his files. Zero's files, however, have been deleted because the camp wanted to cover up his disappearance, and the Director is thouroughly discredited. The camp is closed down and the boys get the treasure.
Happy reading.
Annabel goes to visit her father in Australia, where he has an entire other family that Annabel is jealous of. The front cover has a very useful family tree, although if you try to use it before you start reading the book, you will get very confused. Annabel's father has a step daughter, whom he expects Annabel to like. The stepsister, Lucy, is the last person Annabel wants to like, because she thinks that Lucy has stolen her dad. When they meet, Lucy is very enthusiastic about meeting Annabel, but Annabel's disdain quickly makes Lucy change her mind. When Annabel and Lucy go to a restaurant together, kids from Lucy's school make fun of her, and Annabel decides to stick up for her stepsister. She impresses the bullies so that they try to make friends with Lucy, and so Annabel and Lucy begin to get along.
With Annabel as narrator, this book has a saucy tone and a quick pace. One thing about the story strikes me as unrealistic, though. At the beginning of the story, Annabel's parents prefer to be addressed by their first names, but by the end of the book, they both ask Annabel to refer to them as Mom and Dad.
Happy reading.
Twenty Questions a collection of short and very short stories by Paul McComas
Collections of stories are always the hardest for me to review; I have to pick one story to talk about and try to figure out what binds all of the stories into an anthology. In this case, most of the stories take place in Chicago. The majority have a sexual theme. Two are connected more closely- they are two sides of one story. Some of the stories were written earlier than others and take place ten or twenty years ago, which is disconcerting.
OK, that's my attempt to bind the stories, now for one particular story. Roomie is the only science fiction story of the lot. The average human sheds its own weight in skin cells every four years. And four years to the day after Jane Weevador moves into an apartment, she sees her own discarded skin accumulate into a vaguely humanoid figure. She feels somewhat obligated to it, and takes care of it as though it were a child. Taking care of the thing requires more and more of Jane's time and life, and so in the end she decides to destroy it.
Happy reading.
Erick is a high school senior whose biggest problem is his mediocre SAT score. He's got a girlfriend whom he's been dating since the first day of high school, he's got a best friend with whom he is "like peas in a pod", and he's got a nice family, although his father is a workaholic with an apartment in the city that he lives in during the week.
But life starts to unravel when his best friend, Jack, starts to date a girl, Nicki, who is totally out of his league, and who seems to have a crush on Erick. Nicki asks Erick to get the four of them tickets to see a Bruce Springsteen(this is set in the '80s) concert in NYC. While they are there, they plan to stay in Erick's father's apartment. While they are there, Erick's girlfriend gets upset about the way that Nicki flirts with Erick. Erick doesn't have much time to worry about that, though; his father suprises them and comes to the apartment. Erick thinks that he'll get in trouble for inviting the girls to the apartment, but his father is too distracted to care. He tells Erick, very confidentially, that Erick's older brother, Pete, whom he idolizes, is in the hospital, and he has AIDS. Pete is gay, and had only notified his mother before his hospitaliztion. Erick's father is trying to be supportive of his son, but does not want it known that Pete has AIDS. Erick is mad that his brother never told him, and somewhat confused.
Nicki breaks up with Jack and Jack is heartbroken. He had believed himself to be in love with her. When Erick puts an arm around Jack to console him, his father comes in, and thinks that Erick is also gay, which makes Erick mad. Erick makes the unpopular decision to go out with Nicki, and so his ex-girlfriend and Jack both stop talking to him. Eventually, Nicki finds out that Pete has AIDS, and then she also dumps Erick. Erick is left with only Pete, who is dying.
The book ends with a discussion between Erick and Pete, where Pete is talking about his idea, that he wants to make into a book, about a world where the only scent was that which a dying person emmitted.
Happy reading.
These are 11 short stories about latino kids. The title story is the last story and the only one with chapters. It is about the neighborhood reaction when one boy goes missing, and is subsequently found dead. My favorites are chapters 9 and 10, which makes me wonder if the best stories were purposely put at the back of the book. Manny Calls is about Manny, whose grandfather died. Manny used to be close to his grandfather, and now that he is dead, Manny calls his grandfather's old phone number and confides to him as the recording plays. The Dive is about a girl who wants to dive off the bridge like the neighborhood boys do. She needs permission though, so she goes and talks to her grandmother, who gives her lots of stories that let her make the right decisions by herself.
Happy reading.
Jeremy is in (you guessed it) 10th grade. He keeps a journal for English, and this is it(I'm feeling sarcastic). His entries read like connected short stories and don't really flow together, as much as fit together, in the way that puzzle pieces do. The review on the cover from Entertainment Weekly says "exactly likea high school sophmore.... as punctuation plays hooky and sentences lilariously run past the bell." I think that the lack of punctuation and bad grammar is really overdone, though, and I'm probably a lot closer to being in 10th grade than Entertainment Weekly's reviewer.
Style aside, this is a story and a group of stories about the confusing parts of being in 10th grade, and trying to go out, and experimenting with drugs. The teenagers in this story are really naive, but not enough that they are totally idiotic. The setting is a suburb of NYC. Jeremy talks about the different groups of friends that he hangs out with- the soccer team, the rebels, and later on, the popular kids.
Happy reading.
Bloody Sundays: Inside The Dazzling, Rough-And-Tumble World of the NFL by Mike Freeman
Beginning with an introduction titled Condoleezza's Story, this book tries to talk about the parts of football that are less recognized. Condoleezza is Condoleezza Rice, an avid football fan who is not at all your steriotypical fan.
Another unusual topic is gays in football. Freeman says he interviewed a gay player in the NFL. The player prefers to remain anonymous, and is referred to as Steven Thompson. Thompson's view on gays in the NFL is given even though Freeman disagrees with Thompson on how many gays there really are in the NFL. That chapter of the book is written in such a way that I suspect that Freeman is not altogether comfortable with the topic. Chapter 6 is The League: An Antiviolence Plan, which looks at the violence that some football players carry off the field. This chapter is also written as thought Freeman did not believe what he was writing. Also discussed in this book are the effects of playing in the NFL left on the players' bodies, how their lives are shortened and many end up crippled because of football.
But this book also discusses what you would expect from a football book; a chapter on offense, on defense, and one on coaching. And the last chapter is pure fun- lists of the greatests in football according to Mike Freeman, what Freeman would do were he czar of football, and 99 reasons why football is better than baseball.
This book reads like it was written by a sportswriter, which it was. The reading level, sentence structure, and grammar are consequently forced to take a beating. The book is divided into only seven chapters for 300 pages, and I really thought that the chapters could have stood to be divided into two each. The topics are not seperated very well; even thought they get their own chapters, each topic strays into the other chapters. Nonetheless, the topics are interesting, they are true(except the 99 reasons claiming football is better than baseball), and most importantly, they ar fun to read.
Happy reading.
Percy, our narrator, is a student in Grade Twelve at Groverly High, in Sasketchewan. Percy's mother is a psychic. His father, says Percy, was killed by a tse-tse fly. Percy's father used to be an anthropologist, and Percy wants to be like him. Percy studies Darwin and all theories of evolution and writes journals about the habits of the "tribes" around him- the highschool cliques.
Percy's best friend committed suicide sometime before the book begins, by jumping out of a school window. He had earlier confided in Percy that he had a crush on a girl who already had a boyfriend. Percy's remaining friend Elissa is getting impatient with Percy's poor social skills. She is no longer happy to play along wiht Percy's way of Observing high school life; she only saw it as a game.
Because Percy's unusual narative is told in such a matter-of-fact way, this book is strongly reminiscent of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time, by Mark Haddon. The ending, which I don't want to give away, is also a lot like The Curious Incident.
Happy reading.
My Suburban Shtetl
A Novel About Life in a Twentieth-Century Jewish-American Village by Robert Rand
This is a humourous story about growing up in Skokie(a suburb of Chicago) in the 60s and 70s. The narrator in this story is called Bobby Bakalchuk, and the first name being the same as the author's, it gives the reader the impression that the story is true. A lot of the incidents in the story do have a lot of truth in them; the Nazis did march in Skokie, and as told in this book, the citizens of Skokie did try to stop them, although not by hitting them with salami. Integration was something that the citizens of Skokie opposed, although I don't know how much was actually as portrayed in this book. I suspect that this book would be enjoyed more by someone with more familiarity with Skokie's actual history.
Happy reading.
An excellent review has already been written about this book. Since the review really covers the plot well, I'm going to let you read the review, and I'll just comment on the format.
This story is told alternately as newscasts and as third person portrayals of four people. Those people are three of the rewound people and one of the scientists working with them.
The review also contains critisisms of the plot, but it missed an important one, which is; under U.S. law, the assumption is not made that one is the age that one looks. If you have proof that you are who you say you are, and that matches your birth certificate, you will not be considered a child.
Happy reading.
Treasure At The Heart Of Tanglewood by Meredith Ann Pierce
Brown Hannah is a healer who lives in the Tanglewood. If she has parents, she doesn't know it. The only adult with power over her life is the Wizard. Every month, she plucks the flowers that grow in her hair and makes a tea with them for him to drink. When Hannah grows curious about the lives of the townsfolk who sometimes come to her for remedies, she finds that they are terorized by a great boar who lives in the Tanglewood, and to whom they pay tribute.
Knights always come to Tanglewood, bewitched and stupid creatures. Their horses sometimes come back, but never with a rider. One knight stops and talks to Hannah on his way in, and she falls in love. She gives him a flower from her hair, and he goes in. Later, she finds the knight and his horse. The horse is dead, but the knight has been spared because of the flower.
Hannah heals the knight. She discovers that the Wizard has been using his magic to turn into the Boar. Hannah traps the Wizard and leaves Tanglewood.
The premises of this book are somewhat shaky. Where Hannah's power comes from is never revealed. What happens to Hannah and her knight at the end does not seem clear. This is still an original book.
Happy reading.
