The newest winner of the John Newbery Medal is incredible and very deserving of its award. Neil Gaiman somehow manages to meld murder, and death into a fantastic children’s book. This book grabs you from its first sentence,
“There was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife.”
The tale of how Nobody Owens grows up in a graveyard is simply wonderful.
This is a fantastic story of a boy finding his place in the world. Told through illustrations with interspersed pages of text, this is the tale of Hugo. Hugo lived with his uncle in the rail station and helped him keep the clocks running. When his uncle disappears, he must keep his disappearance a secret and keep things running smoothly. Sneaking through the station, he develops a growing relationship with the toy man and his daughter and discovers that nothing is what it appears. A great children’s story, but also a great read for adults.
So I’ve been waiting for this book for almost 10 years. This is the third book in a series that I began reading in oh, second or third grade. In all that time Bruce Coville has only managed to write that much. I am going to recommend to him that he should try NaNoWriMo next year to see if he can get these books going faster.
The problem being that the three books occur back to back time wise. Each ends with a cliff-hang that so far has had to last for years. I really enjoy the world that he has created and the characters that inhabit it, I just wish I didn’t have to wait so long for sequels.
To lighten the mood, I read this for Children’s Literature. Now if this isn’t the way to take the edge off a bad day….I don’t know what could.
I wish I had not been told that this book was the prequel to The City of Ember. Actually, maybe it is okay that I knew, but it sent me into this really funny sort of expectant state. The novel is good and certainly DuPrau shows her ability to deal with reality just as well as her quasi-utopian giver-esque world. (And points for actually connecting the worlds.)
I was just so confused when I was twenty pages from the end of the novel and still had not figured out the connection from this book, to the first in the series. And actually although I was uneasy for two hundred pages, I think I have decided that I love this.
For those of you who have seen the movie please note that the end of the movie occurs about 3/8ths of the way through the book, and the rest is the best part. The book is 26 chapters long with each chapter beginning with letters A-Z.
What makes the Neverending Story so compelling to me is that it’s about the journey that one takes to discover what a person wants. It’s not about the journey of becoming an adult, but the much more difficult one of discovering oneself, and one’s desires.
Being that i am now in a masters program for childhood education i have been reading a lot more children’s books. I can’t say i’ve been disappointed, quite the contrary. It should be abvious to many of you why i took to this title. For those of you who don’t know, Shakespeare is one of my most favorite writers, and anything that can possibly get young people to read the bard is worth a look.
It uses historical facts, speeches, poetry and pictures to piece together who is the real Shakespeare. All while conquering the sixth grade. Set as a mystery looking for a famous diamond that belonged to none other than Anne Boleyn. For those historians among you will note that Shakespeare and Anne were not contempraries, hence the mystery. The book makes such wonderful use of primary sources, even sneaking in Emily Dickinson, who is also not contemprary to the main historical figures nor is she even English.
While this may be a little bit unorthodox for Reading to the Rain, Flotsam is the best book i’ve looked at in ages. This is the most recent Caldecott Medal winner (an award given annually to the best children’s illustrations) in fact this book doesn’t contain a single word of text. This wordless book is beautiful, poignant, mysterious, exciting, and thought provoking. It shows the story of a boy on a beach, when a mysterious underwater camera washes up on shore. He develops the film inside to discover an exciting and fantastical underwater world. Then the last picture is a picture of pictures reaching back to the past and showing all the children who have ever dicovered the same thing. I really recommend this book to anyone, not just children or those who read to them.
I have been told that i need to comment on this book. So i read it between 1 and 8 am on July 21st. I really enjoyed it. I liked how all the places and all the people that harry has come in contact with over the previous six books came back. right down to gringotts, and even sirius’ motorbike.
The use of the short little references has been a strength of the series but i thought we had seen most of them. I didn’t expect Grindlewald to be as important as he is. I am glad to know more of Dumbledore’s past, and to know even the little things like how dumbledore’s nose was broken. I knew that the room of requirement was important and especially the room where harry hides the half blood prince’s book. the diadem being there was super cool.
there was a lot of death, the only one i didn’t expect was Dobby and that was the only time i cried during reading. i’m torn about harry’s death/not death. part of me wanted expected and thought he had to die. and yet part of me is relieved that he didn’t die.
the epilogue, i have mixed feelings on this as well, i see that JK wanted to show that the trio were happy and that the wizarding world has been rebuilt and all, but it was a lot on the corny side. i have been more satisfied by the interviews.
I may write more later this laptop and my fingernails are driving me nuts.
Oh man. Well, we knew it was coming, and after my strong distaste for the Half Blood Prince let me warn you now this is not going to go well for Ms. Rowling.
Spoilers will almost certainly follow.
I had two main requirements which were necessary for me to like the book, which were:
My reasons for these are more complicated but are briefly as follows. In war, people die, and since there aren’t hundreds or thousands of soldiers to throw at Voldemort, many of our main characters must die. The second is more complicated, but if you were the bad guy and you knew your main target constantly hung out with two of his best friends, then those two are escalated up the target list nearly as high as Undesireable Number One himself.
In my opinion (this is opinion because of the first point), Rowling failed on both counts. The second is more obvious- here are the spoilers- Voldemort (in theory) died; Harry, Ron, and Hermoine all lived. Even if you count Harry as dying (which I don’t – and I think her little avada kedavra only took out the Voldemort part of you, theory is bogus) that is still only one, and I required two. As for the first, she had a few good deaths that were real and believable but most of these came early in the novel, since her battle scenes are rushed and we have really little time to feel any sadness over the loss of people in those last one hundred pages.
Sidenote: All of the trained aurors can get killed (except Kingsley – and I am not even sure he is techncially an auror) but not Ron or Hermoine (or Ginny, Luna, Neville, and a bunch of other kids who never get mentioned- cough: Cho).
Rowling can maintain her points for getting children to read long books that are fairly difficult and dense, and motivating them to be excited to read, but since I am going to judge books as literature, and at this point I am trying to validate these books as a (the?) strong point of fantasy this decade (they may have to simply settle for top-selling), it is tough for me to get past this.
To close on a positive note, I think she did handle quite beautifully the problem she almost locked herself into of the classic fantasy quest with the Horcruxes, by creating the Hallows and also not focusing the books like a giant list of destroyed Horcruxes, one of my largest worried at the end of book 6. (I am afraid the other worry does remain, the strangely shifting intelligence of Harry/Dumbledore/Snape/Voldemort, and in the end I still question many of the decisions these four characters made – Gringotts?/Was that the best time?/You couldn’t have done anything better with the students at hogwarts?/Expelliarmus- that was all it took?)
The plot remains twisting and complex, interesting and original, many of the ideas are quite wonderful, even if in the genre of fantasy it might have little lasting impact, and even if the more recent books could have been improved hugely by a strong editorial hand.
The Second in the Abarat series this is another picture book adventure of Candy in the Land of Arabat. This one gets more into the secrets of Candy and her connection to the crazy place.
