![]() ![]() Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school's intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.īut his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. Publisher's Synopsis: Marcus, a.k.a "w1n5t0n," is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Published by Macmillan on April 29th 2008 Rebellious adults will also have a hard time putting this book down, even if it is geared toward the more technologically savvy younger generation. Throw in a little teenage insecurity about friendships and the opposite sex and the clueless-ness of adults and you have a book that teenagers should love. Just watch what happens to the teacher that dares to teach the kids about past mass citizen movements. This is a young adult novel, so there are some nifty little history lessons about the Free Speech Movement, Emma Goldman, and others along the way. Shortly after the government crackdown, a group of high school kids figure out how to circumvent the surveillance techniques of authorities and launch a movement to jam the system (and not trust anybody over 25, Woohoo!). ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() Sukie always keeps track of how she looks, whether it’s by checking windows or mirrors or car chrome or, in a pinch, by taking “selfies” with her cell phone’s camera. She has “mermaid hair,” a “long, wavy tangle of blond that falls below her shoulders” and “large, wide set, thickly lashed eyes.” Her beautiful, stylish mother reminds Sukie to sleep on her back to keep her skin from sagging and to do a “model’s pose” when being photographed to appear thinner her tall, handsome, charismatic and successful father tells her how to make eye contact during a debate or a report to “drive the point home” and shows her how to play killer tennis. Sukie Jamieson, age 15, has a perfect life - perfect hair and looks, perfect parents, perfect house, perfect grades. ![]() ![]() ![]() While looking around, he meets Ted the Bug who tells him to find a person named Thorn, who could help him return home. After hiking through the mountain range using the map as a reference, he makes it to The Valley. They realize it is not him and plan to eat him, but are chased away by a dragon. After following the trail, Fone Bone falls asleep whereupon the Rat Creatures come to see if he is the one they are looking for. He climbs onto the other side of the cliff and discovers a trail of Smiley's cigar butts. Fone Bone barely escapes and falls off a cliff. After quarreling, the cousins get attacked by a swarm of locusts and are separated. ![]() Smiley finds a map, but it is hand-drawn and crudely made. Two weeks after being run out of Boneville, the three Bone cousins are suffering from quickly diminishing supplies and are stuck inside an uncharted desert. But little do the Bones know, there are dark forces conspiring against them and their adventures are only just beginning! Eventually, the cousins are reunited at a farmstead run by tough Gran'ma Ben and her spirited granddaughter, Thorn. One by one, they find their way into a deep forested valley filled with wonderful and terrifying, creatures. After being run out of Boneville, the three Bone cousins - Fone Bone, Phoney Bone and Smiley Bone - are separated and lost in a vast, uncharted desert. ![]() ![]() The South Korean writer Cho Nam-Joo is best known for her 2016 novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, said Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The i Paper. You read him because, every few pages, there’s a sentence “so perfectly contrived it stops you for a moment, achingly, like a beautiful stranger passing in the street”. Fortunately, “you don’t read Banville for his taut plots”. ![]() But “no one dies”, or even falls out and, in fact, little of consequence happens. With its “assembly of characters” and country house setting, this novel seems to have the “makings of a whodunnit”, said Tom Ball in The Times. ![]() One doesn’t begrudge Banville his “game with his readers”: The Singularities is a “pleasure to read”. Various characters from that work are joined by William Jaybey (from The Newton Letter) and Freddie Montgomery (from The Book of Evidence), among others. The setting is Arden House – the crumbling Irish country house from Banville’s 2009 work The Infinities. But The Singularities takes this to extremes: so stuffed is it with “old Banville protagonists” that it is close to being a “literary greatest-hits collection”. ![]() As the author of three trilogies, John Banville is “no stranger to using recurring characters”, said Ian Critchley in Literary Review. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant–and that her lover is married–she refuses to be bought. In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones.” “There could only be a few winners, and a lot of losers. In this gorgeous, page-turning saga, four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan, exiled from a home they never knew. ![]() |