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Geeks and the Holy Grail (Camelot Code #2), by Mari Mancusi, for Timeslip Tuesday

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...

The Secret

There Will Be Bears

by Ryan Gebhart



   Tyson is thirteen, and he is going through something of a social crisis when the book starts.  His best friend, Bright, is gravitating towards a new group, and Tyson is struggling in several of his classes.  Instead, he spends time with his grandfather, who has promised to take him hunting, and Tyson can’t wait.
     Tyson loves bears.  A lot.  It’s almost all he thinks about and most of what he talks about, which got pretty tiresome.  There was basically nothing else to Tyson’s character except his crush on a girl from Texas, who also happens to really like hunting.  Tyson barely tells her a single true thing in all of his conversation with her.  His desire to go hunting led him down a questionable decision making path.  When his parents decided he couldn’t go hunting with his grandfather because his grandfather was sick and needed special care most days, he decided to sneak his grandfather out of the nursing home and out into the wilderness to shoot an elk.  Oh, and there’s a loose grizzly bear wandering around the one area they decide to go to that has been eating people.  But they had to go to that spot to shoot an elk.
     Most of the characters didn’t have a sense of characters.  They existed in an abstract way and did stuff, but they each had one personality trait if they were lucky.  The writing was straightforward and to the point, which normally doesn’t bother me, but it seemed really blunt here.  There was also slang, which just about always bothers me.  I don’t want to read about what people ain’t going to do, and nobody calls a grizzly bear a grizz (although I guess I shouldn’t say nobody - clearly Tyson does).  The tone of the book is similar to that of the cover.
     This is a 1.4.  It did amuse me quite a bit, just because of some of the ridiculous things that got written.  Other than that, the best thing about it was that it was short and I knew the end was coming.  If it was longer, I probably wouldn’t have finished it.  This is like eating the leaves of a carrot.  It’s something probably best left uneaten, doesn’t taste very good, but once you’ve taken a bite, it’s not so disgusting that it necessitates being spit out.  It might be a good book if you think the cover is really great, or if you also really like bears and hunting.

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