M.C. Higgins the Great Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I have read MCHiggins the Great so many times my copy is falling apart. I've read a lot of Newbery books too, and this is one of the best. In some ways it is the best. Each time I read it, I see more. First the scene is one that will stay with you long after you close the book--the hills of Eastern Kentucky that MC walks, his house, his mountain, the pole he sits on, looking out over all these hills. Then the people are unforgettable. MC's best friend, Ben, has the most unique family you will ever meet in fiction, very strange but very loving with magical connections to nature. They are vegetarians, who live on an Appalachian family commune. The mother is a healer. MC's own family includes a mother who could be a famous folksinger if she wanted to leave home, a father who is tied to the hills because his own mother, a ghostly presence in the book, owned the mountain where they lived. She was an ex-slave, and her courage has seeped into MC. He must save his f! amily from a heap of soil that is threatening to bury his home and family, because of stripmining interests in the area, and he does at last find the way to do this. But not before he has a lot of fun chasing a girl who isn't going to be caught, hunting rabbits, swimming, listening to a city "dude" who wants to make his mother a star and imagining what this would be like, visiting his best friend's family, taking care of his spunky and sassy little sister, and sitting on his pole watching the world and trying to find his place in it. This book was written 25 years ago, but it is timeless. It's about teen feelings and finding your identity. It's about father and son conflicts and teen romance. It's about nature and the environment. Most of all, it's about family heritage, and taking a stand for what you believe in. Newbery books are for everyone--people of all ages, colors, regions, genders, cultures. And this is a classic Newbery --it's a rainbow of ideas an! d experiences, with a pot of gold waiting on the last page.

Click Here to see more reviews about: M.C. Higgins the Great

Get 22% OFF

Click here for more information about M.C. Higgins the Great

Deception Point Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)"Deception Point" opens in Washington, DC, during a tight Presidential campaign. The incumbent, a man of strong principles, is a major NASA supporter. His opponent, who is basing his campaign on turning NASA into a private, non-governmental agency, thus saving the US taxpayer billions of dollars annually, is way up in the polls. He is also accepting enormous illegal campaign contributions from private aerospace companies who have billions to gain from the privatization of NASA. After many failures & much spending, NASA is badly in need of a success.
Then a NASA satellite detects a large, high-density rock buried 200 feet below the Milne Ice Shelf on Ellesmere Island, high in the Arctic Circle. NASA scientists determine the rock to be a meteor containing fossils proving that life exists elsewhere in the universe.
To verify the authenticity of the find, the White House sends a team of independent experts to the NASA habisphere, built over the meteor in the Arctic Circle. One of these experts is the intelligence analyst Rachel Sexton, the daughter of Senator Sedgewick Sexton. Senator Sexton is the man running for election against the President of the United States. The plot thickens.
Rachel, while in the Arctic, uncovers what could be scientific trickery - an incredible deception that could cause political and scientific upheaval and cost the President his bid for re-election. When she & her colleagues attempt to investigate further, they are plunged into life threatening danger. To escape assassination they flee for their lives. Their only hope for survival is to discover who is behind this extraordinary plot and expose the truth.
Dan Brown has proven to be one of the top writers in the suspense-thriller genre. The originality of his plots, his amazingly accurate research, and his ability to catch the reader's interest from the get-go and hold it until the last word in the last sentence of the last page, make him an exceptional author. Plus, after completing each of Dan Brown's books, the reader usually comes away from the experience having learned much more than a storyline. I loved "Deception Point" - couldn't put it down. I also highly recommend "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels and Demons."

Click Here to see more reviews about: Deception Point

Get 32% OFF

Click here for more information about Deception Point

Dark Winter Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Agatha Christie took ten people off to a remote location for a weekend, and they started to die, one by one. William Dietrich isolates twenty-six people at the South Pole for several months, and guess what? "Ten Little Indians" happens to twenty-six ice- and dark-bound South Pole residents. (There are no penguins at the Pole; they are at the ocean hundreds of miles away.) Jed Lewis is a geologist turned meteorologist assigned as a last minute replacement to the team that will "winter-over" at the Amundsen-Scott Base at the South Pole. When the plane that bought Jed leaves, along with the last of the "summer people", the twenty-six remaining scientists and support staff are stranded-there will be no way in or out over the long, perpetually dark winter. (The very real April, 2001 evacuation of a critically ill doctor from Amundsen-Scott by a heroic small plane flight from McMurdo base emphasizes he isolation of the characters in the book.) Jed is actually a sort of secret agent. After becoming disenchanted with his work with "big oil" in secretly surveying the Alaskan nature reserves for oil deposits, he is looking for a new job. He meets a scientist who is working on global warming and needs data from the South Pole winter; but the technician who was going to winter over and collect data for him has canceled. It also seems that the top scientist at the Pole has found a rock buried deep in the ice. Since there are no rocks at the Pole, this must be a meteorite, but it is not the typical metallic rock. The find must be kept secret, because it could be very valuable-scientifically and commercially. Since Jed is a geologist, he can do the preliminary evaluation over the winter while collecting climate data. Meanwhile, he will have several months to consider his life and his options. In an almost foreseeable fashion, the plot begins to twist and turn when the rock disappears and then its finder is found dead. Clue after clue points toward Jed, who is the new guy and suspicious anyway-why was a geologist sent down to do climate research? There is romance, and there is skulduggery. The story is told well and the reader feels the isolation and fear as everyone seeks to find an easy answer to calm their terrors. Even if many parts of the plot are anticipated, the story is interesting-after all, Agatha Christie was not all that original in her stories, and they are still classics.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Dark Winter

Click here for more information about Dark Winter

A Death At The North Pole Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)When I first began reading A Death At The North Pole I thought I was going to be reading a horror book. I quickly discovered this was more of a fantasy. Usually I do not chose fantasy type books to read, but I was already hooked by the end of the first page.
At the beginning of the book I did not like the main character one bit. I thought she was mean and very rude. By the end of the book my feelings had completely changed. I cannot wait for the next book to find out what happens to Lauren.

Click Here to see more reviews about: A Death At The North Pole

Detective Lauren Bruni has dealt with death for her entire life. She has watched it ruin lives, and brought people closer together.Her job taught her to separate fact from fiction. But on a cold December day, all Lauren had believed in would be shattered and tossed aside. Thrust in a world unlike any she has seen before, she investigates a prominent figure's grisly murder, and searches for answers along a strange new set of people. With a killer watching her every move in the background ready to strike again at a moments notice. What is the secret of the death at the North Pole, and what is the larger horror at hand? Life lessons are learned and a realization that sometimes the most real things in this world, are the ones we believe in the least. **This title won a 2009 Editor's Choice Award**

Click here for more information about A Death At The North Pole