Announcements

Hi folks, I am popping by with a couple of announcements today.

Fist of all we will have some new reviewers joining us soon. PomPom has officially come on board and there are two other volunteers who I will be getting names from and announcing soon.

Also, the delightful Debbie Viguie co author of the Wicked series has agreed to be interviewed. Zobdy is reading one of her books now and she and PomPom will be conducting the interview in January.

You may also have noticed the shelfari widget. We will be adding the books that we review to it as we go along.

Have a Happy Christmas all and we will see you next year.

Ice - Sarah Beth Durst

I thought this book was amazing and I loved it. It is about a girl called Cassie, who has lived in a research station in the Arctic all her life and she loves it. When she was little, her grandmother told her that her (Cassie’s) mother was the daughter of the North Wind, and the North Wind had promised that she would marry the Polar Bear King when she was old enough. But she fell in love with a human man (Cassie’s dad) so she (Cassie’s mother) promised that when she had a daughter (Cassie), her daughter could marry the Polar Bear King instead. The North Wind was so angry that he blew Cassie’s mum into the troll castle where she has been ever since.

Cassie stopped believing that when she was four. Her father had told her that her mother had been killed in a blizzard. But, on her eighteenth birthday, the Polar Bear King comes for her and she realises that the story is true and her mum could still be alive. She makes a deal with the Polar Bear King and says that she will marry him if he saves her mum. He agrees so she stays with him. Gradually, she begins to love him and when he is taken away, she makes a perilous journey to save him.

It is a great book with magic, mystery, excitement, action, romance and a talking polar bear. What more could you ask for? In places, the story didn’t move on as quickly as I would have liked it to but I loved it anyway. I read it non-stop in two days. I would love to read other books written by Sarah Beth Durst. I would recommend it for 10+ (probably girls).

By Zobdy

Age 12

The Monstrumologist: The Terror Beneath by Rick Yancey

This is a non-review as I have not finished the book. It’s about a doctor who studies monsters (a monstrumologist) and his assistant, an orphaned, twelve year old boy called Will Henry.

I enjoyed reading this book and will probably get back to it later but if I waited that long to write a review, it would be too late. I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t get into this book, it didn’t grip me. I got distracted by other things and, like I said, I’ll probably get back to it another time.

I normally like books like this, mysterious, mythical, a little bit gory, but it just didn’t make me want to read it. It was well written and it had an interesting story and I enjoyed it but I just didn’t get sucked in. Ironically, the Prologue says that an old man had just died and another man had been given his journal (the rest of the book) to read because it’s the kind of story he might like, but it says it sat on his shelf for nearly six months until he reads it and decides it’s nothing but fiction. I will probably be the same except I think I might enjoy the story more than he did when I finally get round to reading it properly.

By Zobdy

Age 12