Kate
This book is very cute. I love the illustrations, and the story is great. Sometimes everyone thinks your new sibling is just SO GREAT even though you're pretty sure they're going to eat everyone up...but then you realize you want to save them from the bear at the story! Hey, who let a bear into the carrot store anyway? Seems like they definitely have an ulterior motive.
This is a very very adorable book. The illustrations are gorgeous and the story is so relatable for anyone who has ever loved a book. I loved the books with prizes - the Pull Lizard Prize, the Called A Cat Medal!
Plus I think it's nice that this is my 200th book I've read this year :) A good one to end my 2015 challenge on!
I am such a sucker for a beautifully written rhyme! I couldn't read this book in my head, I had to read it out loud because the rhyming was so great. And the story was cute, too. Mr. Magee and his dog, Dee, have some skiing mishaps but everything turns out okay in the end. I just want to read this at a storytime so bad!
This book was cute, if longer than necessary. The premise was cute - before strict copyright laws, literature pirates called “bookaneers” would steal manuscripts and other literary etcs. and sell them for much cash. I wasn't sure if I was meant to sympathize with the bookaneers or not...there was a distinction made between the low-class and high-class bookaneers, with their wealth or lack thereof presumably being linked to their talent at their job, but to me it just seemed like the rich people got better descriptions. The top bookaneers were dashing and clever, masters of subterfuge and quite heroic, while the lower class bookaneers were “barnacles”, petty thieves, dirty, and dumb. Except to my mind, all the bookaneers are thieves so the class distinction was just there to make the rich ones feel better about their vocation. They're classy thieves, not like those dirty thieves. I could never really get into the glory of the search for rare manuscripts, considering that they're just doing it for money and they are hurting creative people's livelihoods. They just kind of seemed like assholes to me, or psychopaths, who were in it for the cash and the thrill of the chase, to see how well they could fool people into thinking they were benign. There were some inklings of Sherlock Holmes in how at least one of the bookaneers described the ways his plans unfolded. Especially considering the book was narrated by a bookaneer sidekick (one of the narrators).
There was also a lot of racism, which I know, it's arguable that in the late 1800s in Samoa all the white people were racist! So, yes, it doesn't come off as Pearl being racist, but as the characters he writes being racist - and especially considering that Robert Louis Stevenson is a main character in this book, the colonialist white man perspective makes sense...but there's a lot of talk of savages and cannibals, how Samoans are better than the other islanders because they're tall and their hair isn't kinky, “it may seem barbaric but remember, American Indians scalp people!”, RL Stevenson talking a bunch of BS about how all the Samoan people who work for him at his island mansion are his family, not his servants...there are some characters who are hatefully racist, and they're “bad guys” which I guess the hateful racism is supposed to indicate, but no acknowledgment that the white hero racism isn't so wonderful either. Which, again, the book was set in and meant to have been written in the late 1800s early 1900s so it's “true to life”, but there didn't seem to be anything tongue in cheek about it, no indications that Pearl was doing a send-up or a satire of writing of the time period. You can read a book actually published during that time and think, man those people were racist assholes! And then you can read this book fictionally published during that time but actually published in 2015 and hope that the emulation of the style was meant to be a criticism of it and not a nostalgic nod to times past but it really feels more like the latter. Like, I really want to honour these great writers by not changing any of their negative traits and especially not by challenging them or exploring them in any meaningful way from the current context that we live in.
Also the female characters mostly appeared to be around to provide character development for the men. RLS's female family members are less used as plot devices and more just 2-dimensional...I think the author tried to pull their characterizations from history so they weren't invented, which helped, but they also don't really have much personality. One of the other women was basically just where a main character's emotions and motivations come from.
Overall though, I liked the writing style and the general plot. The ending didn't do much for me, but by that time I was already skimming because the book was too long. It didn't ruin my enjoyment though, I can just pretend the book ended earlier! It's an adventurous romp with people I didn't care for but was interested in what would happen to them!
I think I was expecting more from this book, but I still liked it. There is a bit of a white saviour feel to it, which was not surprising considering it's a book about a “second chance” school written by a white lady. It's for sure going to have a white saviour feel to it. I didn't feel all that connected to most of the characters, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it was the art style, which wasn't my favourite. But in general, I liked it. It's definitely written more for adults who work with teens than for teens though!
The illustrations in this book are so cute. Earl sounds like an awesome friend, though I don't love stories where animals get in trouble because humans don't understand their language. It makes me sad! Because for sure Buddy and Earl are going to get into lots more trouble, and Buddy is going to be reprimanded because the humans won't think that Earl could make such a mess, and even though Earl's going to try to explain it, the humans won't understand!! But I still want to follow their adventures!
I did read the version with Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp on the cover, but I really hate doing that. I prefer to see what the author/publisher felt the cover should look like before there were famous faces to sell it with.
I found this book quite charming, much like the movie! I did see the film, a long time ago, and I didn't remember much of it, though it came back while I was reading the book. I did like that Armande in the novel got to make it fully clear that she was choosing to kill herself.I did find that many of the characters in the novel were sympathetic, despite their actions. I felt for Reynaud despite his position as “the villain”; he was damaged in his own way by past events and the gossipy nature of small towns. I don't know that it's a masterpiece, but I really enjoyed reading this book.
The tone of this book is almost exactly the same as 1000 Ways to Die, which was a great show, but it realllly doesn't work for me in written form. Plus there's a lot of entirely unnecessary and strangely judgmental background information about the people in these stories that just made me roll my eyes. “The technician, a devout Muslim who considered homosexuality the behaviour of deviants, opened the door and wheeled Jamal inside.” This little tidbit doesn't add anything to the story, because she just did her job and was never mentioned again, so who gives a shit? Is it really necessary for us to be reminded that some people might not approve of how the patient lives his life? Or in a different story, after the doctor couldn't identify a mass in a patient's breast: “She's from Africa, so this has to be something infectious.” No - it doesn't have to be something infectious. Africa doesn't have a monopoly on infectious diseases! The common cold is an infectious disease! You can take into account a patient's travel history and consult with colleagues without perpetuating the idea that Africa is just a seething hotbed of disease. Even airport customs asks about specific countries and not the ENTIRE CONTINENT and only when there ACTUALLY IS an outbreak. Just because the doctor was right in this case doesn't mean that all African people with symptoms you can't identify right away have an infectious disease (from Africa...because again there are plenty of infectious diseases an African person could have picked up in Canada).
Also I thought it was kind of weird that this book used the gimmick of having one of the stories be made-up. Especially since the page you're directed to to vote on which story you think is a lie is a 404 error. So I can't even talk about any of these stories being real because I have no idea which one isn't. This is a small issue but it still annoyed me.
