Deathwatch by Robb White: Adventure! Danger! Death! A teenage boy from a small desert town is hired by a rich city man who wants to bag a bighorn sheep. The city dweller's madness and megalomania (look that one up) become frighteningly apparent. You wouldn't want to be alone in the desert with an armed madman, especially after he disarms you.
Notes from the Cave by Gary Paulsen: This book contains three novellas (very short novels or, more precisely, long short stories) about kids who have it really tough and have to deal with drunk and abusive adults, poverty, trying to avoid drug-dealing thugs who rule the neighborhood, violence, loneliness, stark poverty, homelessness, etc. This is the type of book that should be read first by a parent or guardian, or, better yet would be to read it and discuss it with a parent or guardian. As usual with Paulsen's books that address serious issues, it's well-written and thought-provoking.
As of June 14 (Happy Flag Day!) I'm reading The Hobbit and Everfound.
I finished both of those books. I enjoyed reading The Hobbit again -- in preparation for the movie coming out in December. (I'm excited.)
Everfound provided a very satisfactory ending to the Everlost trilogy. The premise of the books is that sometimes when kids die, they sometimes don't get where they're going (towards the light). Then they end up in a place called Everlost which shares space with but doesn't generally interact with the living world. It's sort of like the spirit world that certain religions believe in, and the kids become something like ghosts. In Everlost they are called Afterlights.
The main characters, Nick and Allie, don't know each other in the living world, but they are in the same car wreck and their spirits collide on the way to "the light," so they are thrown into Everlost. When they wake up, they find out that cars and busses can drive right through them, that they sink into the ground of the living world, but can stand or rest on "dead spots" which are places where someone has died or where something else very important has happened, and that it's very easy there to forget who you are.
July 9: I just read a book about Miles Standish and the Pilgrims by Cheryl Harness, and started reading The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm by Nancy Farmer.
July 12, 2012
Just finished The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm by Nancy Farmer. I'd heard it was a good book, and now I totally agree. This is one that shouldn't be missed. It's futuristic, set in Zimbabwe in 2194. The author had actually lived in Zimbabwe, so she takes traditions, beliefs, and customs, and transposes them into her own creation of a society of the future.
I also read The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer. This story takes place in a future in which an independent country, run by a powerful drug lord has been established between the United States and Mexico. The main character, Matt, is a clone created for this mighty drug lord. A few treat him kindly, but most treat him like an animal. The reader and Matt gradually discover why he has been created, and whether or not he is truly human. I highly recommend it.
I'm currently reading the second part of Avi's Beyond the Western Sea. It is actually one book published as two. It's a long historical fiction book with very short chapters, and is an exciting page-turner. That means that once you start you have to keep going to find out what happens to the characters next. The first "book" is called The Escape from Home, and the second Lord Kirkle's Money.
Beyond the Western Sea set in 1851, during the Irish Potato Famine, follows Maura and Patrick O'Connell, 15 and 12 years old, as they leave extreme poverty in Ireland to join their father in America. Their story overlaps with that of Laurence Kirkle, the son of an British Lord, who runs away from an abusive home only to be robbed and kidnapped. Escaping his kidnappers, he stows away on the ship heading for America on which the O'Connell children (and other characters -- good and evil -- introduced earlier in the book) are also traveling.
In the second book, the ship arrives at Boston, with the O'Connell children expecting to be met by their father and taken to live in Lowell where he works in a cotton mill. Laurence also ends up heading to Lowell, trying to recover something that belongs to him and his family.
Because I visited Boston and Lowell, earlier this summer with a group of history teachers, stood on Long Wharf where the ship in the book landed, and toured the restored mills in Lowell, I find this especially interesting. In addition, the book does indeed pull me along as I want to know what happens next. The main characters find themselves in so many dangerous and even deadly situations that it's hard to not keep reading from chapter to chapter to chapter.
Sample the first book at http://books.google.com/books?id=INeqBAyXEgkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false
