Chuyển đến nội dung chính

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...
Đăng nhận xét

The Secret

The Secret

Waking in Time, by Angie Stanton, for Timeslip Tuesday

Waking in Time, by Angie Stanton (Capstone 2017), is a timeslip story set at college, combining two things I love in books! The start of Abbi's freshman year at UW Madison, where her grandmother and great-grandmother had both studied, is not as happy as she'd thought it would be. She is still grieving the recent death of her grandmother, and this casts a shadow over all the things she'd been looking forward to.

But she doesn't get any time to feel at home. The second morning there, she wakes up to find herself in the same college dorm, but in 1983. And as the book progresses, she keeps moving quickly back in time. Then she wakes to find her own grandmother is her room-mate. She's thrilled to get the chance to be with her grandmother again, and wonders if she'll find a clue about her dying request to "find the baby." And then she meets her great-grandmother, and finds out a sad truth about her family. Meanwhile, Will who started at the university in 1927 is traveling forward through time, and despite not recognizing each other at the far ends of their journeys, Will and Abbi become more than friends.

But how can they stop traveling, and find a time where they can stay together? Fortunately, there's another almost constant person they both meet--the brilliant professor at the future end of the timeline, who's an insecure student toward the beginning of it...and who specializes in the quantum physics of time travel.

I found the various different glimpses of the women's dormitory life fascinating, but they didn't interest Abbi as much as they interested me. She was most interested in Will (which didn't interest me that much; there wasn't quite enough meat to their relationship for my taste, being basically physical attraction and a shared problem), and in solving the family mystery, which wasn't all that mysterious. I wanted Abbi to be more curious and engaged with each different time period in a historical/anthropological way, and she just wasn't. In fact, she doesn't seem to be interested in anything at all intellectual. Oh well. She is, after all, in a rather deperate situation, so I cut her lots of slack in that regard.

Something that more actively bothered me was the implication of Native American sacred sites as one of the causes of the time travel (one of the mounds was levelled to build the women's dorm) which I thought was unnecessary and which invoked a sense of "mystical Indians" which I found unpleasant.

 But if you are a fan of fate bringing soul-mates together, you may well enjoy this more than I did! (Judging from the numerous five star reviews on Goodreads, it seems to be the case that cynical older readers who love academia and detailed minutia about the material culture of the past  are not the best audience for it....)

Nhận xét

Đăng nhận xét

Bài đăng phổ biến từ blog này

Dead Voices, by Katherine Arden

Dead Voices , by Katherine Arden (middle grade, G.P. Putnam's Sons, August 2019), is a delightfully spooky sequel to Small Spaces , perfect for a chilling read as winter draws closer! Ollie, Coco, and Brian became close friends under somewhat trying circumstances last fall--the evil Smiling Man trying to turn them into scarecrows--and now winter has come, they're on their way to a fun weekend at a new ski lodge with Ollie's dad and Coco's mom.  They almost don't make it through the intense snowstorm, and when they arrive, they find themselves the only visitors.  The snow keeps falling, trapping them inside, and the power goes out.  And there are ghosts. The day after they arrive another visiter makes it through the snow, a young reporter for a ghost hunting magazine.  The owners of the hotel aren't sure that publicity about the hotel's previous incarnation of an orphanage with a dark, sad, history is what they want, but the young man is keen to get ghost hun...
Đăng nhận xét
Đọc thêm

Premeditated

I'm going to start with the blurb from the back cover of this book, because it does a remarkable job of introducing the story in very few words: A week ago, Dinah’s cousin Claire cut her wrists. Five days ago, Dinah found Claire’s diary and discovered why. Three days ago, Dinah stopped crying and came up with a plan. Two days ago, she ditched her piercings and bleached the black dye from her hair. Yesterday, knee socks and uniform plaid became a predator’s camouflage. Today, she’ll find the boy who broke Claire. By tomorrow, he’ll wish he were dead. Claire and Dinah are cousins who are incredibly close, close enough that when Claire ends up in a coma in the hospital from a failed suicide attempt, Dinah knows where to look to find Claire's diary (or the computerized version of one, anyway). Dinah figures out what drove Claire to the point of suicide--a boy from the private school that Claire was supposed to attend that fall. Dinah enrolls at the school herself, determined to get...
Đăng nhận xét
Đọc thêm

Storm

By: D.J. MacHale This is the sequel to SYLO where a small island off the coast of Maine was invaded by the US Navy (the US navy is called SYLO).  The main characters, Tucker, Kent, Olivia, and Tori escaped from Pemberwick and got to Portland, Maine.  In Storm they pick up another character, Jon, a doctor from a Portland hospital.  As it turns out the US Navy is at war with the US Airforce.  Over three fourths of the worlds population is dead.  Tucker, Tori, Kent, Olivia, and, Jon are trying to get to Nevada where a radio signal they picked up said to come if they wanted to fight back.  There is a lot of action and the plot moves along at a good pace.  One thing that was different from the first book was how much you found out about their relationships.  Kent is with Olivia and Tucker is with Tori.  It sort of bothered me that they were so into who was with who when they were trying to figure out why most of the world's population was killed. ...
Đăng nhận xét
Đọc thêm

Free $100

Free $100