![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penmageAnd now, for something that has nothing to do with politics!
The Compound by S.A. Bodeen
Eli will never forget the night of the attack. He'll never forget the moment they heard about the nukes, how his father grabbed his family and rushed them away to the secret compound he had spent years building. How he locked them in, locked them away from the rest of the dying world for fifteen years, until it will be safe to come out again. It was the day everything changed. It was the day he found himself stuck on the inside, safe, while his twin brother and best friend Eddy was stranded on the outside, and doomed.
Six years later, Eli, now fifteen, hates himself, his life in the compound, and his family--his domineering, controlling father, his meek mother, his selfish older sister Lexie, and his delusional younger sister Terese. And he tries not to think about the growing food shortage, the way the flour has started moldering and they're running out of lights for the hydroponic bay.
They're supposed to stay in the compound for fifteen years, but it's becoming clearer and clearer that their food supplies won't last that long. And even worse, Eli is stunned to realize that his father has been keeping a secret from them all, a secret that changes everything--what if the outside world isn't a wasteland after all?
This book is chilling. It's a terrifying look at a family under the control of a madman. The business with the Supplements--chilling! It's a compulsively readable page turner--you cannot stop until you find out what happens.
The plot does get slogged down a little bit towards the end with the madcap farce of a treasure hunt, and I would have liked a little bit more in the aftermath. But overall, it's a shocking, fast read that will definitely appeal to reluctant readers.
----------------------
Taken by Edward Bloor
In 2083, kidnapping is a growing industry. Wealthy children are surrounded by security, and carefully trained in case the worst happens. They are told--remain calm. Cooperate with the kidnappers. Your parents will deliver the ransom and everything will be fine.
Charity Meyers has heard all the rules, and so when she is snatched from her house in the exclusive, gated Highlands community, she is prepared.
But what she is not prepared for is finding out that this is no ordinary kidnapping, and her kidnappers want a lot more than just a ransom payment.
I was excited about this book--both the concept of a world where kidnapping is an accepted industry (not so far off from what is happening today in places like Mexico, South Africa), and another book by the multitalented Edward Bloor (who brought us gems such as London Calling and Story Time) but the execution fell flat.
Kidnapping was not as "accepted" as the flap copy made it out to be--it was just more common. And while I was indeed shocked by the major revelation, I felt like it almost cheapened the rest of the suspense. And speaking of the suspense, it dragged. And the ending felt too neat and tidy, too easy.
----------------------
The Boy Who Dared by Susan Campbell Bartoletti
In a time when everyone was thinking the way they were told and following the rules, Helmuth Hubener found that he could not sit down and be quiet. As Hitler rose to power in Germany and began taking away all the freedoms and liberties that Helmuth had taken for granted, Helmuth knew that he could not sit by quietly.
This book is based on the true story of Helmuth Hubener, a Hitler Youth member who furtively distributed pamphlets that raged against the Nazis and their reign of terror. Helmuth was executed for his crimes at the tender of age of seventeen.
What Bartoletti tried to do here was to bring Helmuth alive for us, the reader. She tried to take the true story of a boy who stood up in the face of a terrifying machine and make him human.
Part of the problem is the writing. It's not bad, per se, but it's second person present tense, which can be good if the writer has a real skill, but most of the time isn't. And in this case, while I think Bartoletti was going for immediacy, the sense I got was distance. The second person distances me from Helmuth. I never really felt like I got below his skin at all--I just felt like I was watching events from a far distance. I never connected.
The other problem is the subject material. The Holocaust has been done and overdone in fiction, and for a book to stand out, it has to--well, stand out. It needs to bring a new angle to an old story, and do it really well, and this book doesn't.
None of the viewpoints about Germany and Hitler Youth was insightful. It all felt old, tired, like something I already knew. What I wanted was to see how someone could, from within the Nazi machine, begin to realize that things are wrong, and take the next step to wanting to change things.
I don't know what Helmuth Hubener was really like--he was a real person, after all. But according to this book, Helmuth never bought in to Hitler's propaganda. So there's no real character arc. There's no growing or changing--there's just a progression of the inevitable.
And the perspective of a German being angry with the Nazi takeover is nothing new either--for a book that does that well, read Markus Zusak's The Book Thief.
The Compound by S.A. Bodeen
Eli will never forget the night of the attack. He'll never forget the moment they heard about the nukes, how his father grabbed his family and rushed them away to the secret compound he had spent years building. How he locked them in, locked them away from the rest of the dying world for fifteen years, until it will be safe to come out again. It was the day everything changed. It was the day he found himself stuck on the inside, safe, while his twin brother and best friend Eddy was stranded on the outside, and doomed.
Six years later, Eli, now fifteen, hates himself, his life in the compound, and his family--his domineering, controlling father, his meek mother, his selfish older sister Lexie, and his delusional younger sister Terese. And he tries not to think about the growing food shortage, the way the flour has started moldering and they're running out of lights for the hydroponic bay.
They're supposed to stay in the compound for fifteen years, but it's becoming clearer and clearer that their food supplies won't last that long. And even worse, Eli is stunned to realize that his father has been keeping a secret from them all, a secret that changes everything--what if the outside world isn't a wasteland after all?
This book is chilling. It's a terrifying look at a family under the control of a madman. The business with the Supplements--chilling! It's a compulsively readable page turner--you cannot stop until you find out what happens.
The plot does get slogged down a little bit towards the end with the madcap farce of a treasure hunt, and I would have liked a little bit more in the aftermath. But overall, it's a shocking, fast read that will definitely appeal to reluctant readers.
----------------------
Taken by Edward Bloor
In 2083, kidnapping is a growing industry. Wealthy children are surrounded by security, and carefully trained in case the worst happens. They are told--remain calm. Cooperate with the kidnappers. Your parents will deliver the ransom and everything will be fine.
Charity Meyers has heard all the rules, and so when she is snatched from her house in the exclusive, gated Highlands community, she is prepared.
But what she is not prepared for is finding out that this is no ordinary kidnapping, and her kidnappers want a lot more than just a ransom payment.
I was excited about this book--both the concept of a world where kidnapping is an accepted industry (not so far off from what is happening today in places like Mexico, South Africa), and another book by the multitalented Edward Bloor (who brought us gems such as London Calling and Story Time) but the execution fell flat.
Kidnapping was not as "accepted" as the flap copy made it out to be--it was just more common. And while I was indeed shocked by the major revelation, I felt like it almost cheapened the rest of the suspense. And speaking of the suspense, it dragged. And the ending felt too neat and tidy, too easy.
----------------------
The Boy Who Dared by Susan Campbell Bartoletti
In a time when everyone was thinking the way they were told and following the rules, Helmuth Hubener found that he could not sit down and be quiet. As Hitler rose to power in Germany and began taking away all the freedoms and liberties that Helmuth had taken for granted, Helmuth knew that he could not sit by quietly.
This book is based on the true story of Helmuth Hubener, a Hitler Youth member who furtively distributed pamphlets that raged against the Nazis and their reign of terror. Helmuth was executed for his crimes at the tender of age of seventeen.
What Bartoletti tried to do here was to bring Helmuth alive for us, the reader. She tried to take the true story of a boy who stood up in the face of a terrifying machine and make him human.
Part of the problem is the writing. It's not bad, per se, but it's second person present tense, which can be good if the writer has a real skill, but most of the time isn't. And in this case, while I think Bartoletti was going for immediacy, the sense I got was distance. The second person distances me from Helmuth. I never really felt like I got below his skin at all--I just felt like I was watching events from a far distance. I never connected.
The other problem is the subject material. The Holocaust has been done and overdone in fiction, and for a book to stand out, it has to--well, stand out. It needs to bring a new angle to an old story, and do it really well, and this book doesn't.
None of the viewpoints about Germany and Hitler Youth was insightful. It all felt old, tired, like something I already knew. What I wanted was to see how someone could, from within the Nazi machine, begin to realize that things are wrong, and take the next step to wanting to change things.
I don't know what Helmuth Hubener was really like--he was a real person, after all. But according to this book, Helmuth never bought in to Hitler's propaganda. So there's no real character arc. There's no growing or changing--there's just a progression of the inevitable.
And the perspective of a German being angry with the Nazi takeover is nothing new either--for a book that does that well, read Markus Zusak's The Book Thief.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 09:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-04 12:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-03 06:33 pm (UTC)thanks! -erin