The first book in the Camelot Code series, The Once and Future Geek , mixed time travel between the medieval world of King Arthur and our own, and it is a very entertaining book. The second book in the series, Geeks and Holy Grail (Hyperion, October 2019), is also entertaining (though not quite as funny; King Arthur as a modern day high school student is hard to beat....). When Morgana, sworn enemy of King Arthur, attacks the druids of Avalon, Nimue, the youngest of them, takes the Holy Grail and runs with it. King Arthur is dying, and only the Grail can save him. Desperate to keep it from falling into Morgana's hands, she stumbles into Merlin's Crystal Cave. But instead of Merlin there to help her (he's on vacation in Los Vegas, in our time), there's only his very inexperienced apprentice, Emrys. His attempt to hide the grail works, in a sense--as a small, flatulent dragon, it sure doesn't look much like a grail. But it isn't much use to Arthur as a...
During our weekly meeting we spent time doing a cross-walk of reviews from different publications. We selected the following titles:
- Mockingjay
- Shine
- Chime
- Across the Universe
- Divergent
- Anthem
- The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
- Midnight Palace
- The Night Circus
Reviews from these titles came from Booklist, School Library Journal, the New York Times, People Magazine, Publisher's Weekly, Horn Book, and a few additional sources.
We read all the reviews for a single title and then recorded our impressions of the differences between the various reviews. Did the author like the book or not, and how was that communicated? Was there greater emphasis on the plot, the author, or the reviewer's opinion?
After everyone read and reflected on the reviews of two books we compared our impressions of the different review publications. Booklist came out very favorably for hitting a nice balance of plot summary and recommendation.
It will be interesting to see if this influences how our group reviews ARCs, and what that will look like.
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