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Genre: Adventure

The Champagne Will Never Taste So Good

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“In the basement, when she wrote about her life, Liesel vowed that she would never drink champagne again, for it would never taste as good as it did on that warm afternoon in July” (357). In the last eight years I have mostly lost the habit of writing in the margins of books, instead keeping shorthand notes with page numbers near the beginning of the volume, or making digital notes files with transcriptions. I think this change must have been motivated by the constant need to useevidence to support claims I…

The Classic Legend of the Boy who Can’t Stop Running

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Next time your son is banging around the living room, nagging his siblings, groaning and complaining that there is nothing to do, that he is so so bored because there is never ANYTHING to do, hand him a copy of Maniac Magee. The surge of the adventurous and potentially destructive desire to run away seizes protagonist Maniac Magee from the start and sends him sprinting.  He has lost his parents in a tragic trolly accident, been placed in a cold home with relatives that do not talk, and he sees no option but to run.  Maniac runs…

“If it isn’t official, then it can’t be real, now can it?”

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When I first saw Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society on a shelf in Barnes & Noble, my first thought was, “Great, another New York Times Best seller children’s series.” In general, great art—the possession for all time—seems to me to gain more approval as the generations pass, whereas the accolades for the piece that is designed for a favorable hearing start loud and dwindle with the attention spans that it has helped to erode. So I usually avoid bestsellers until they are a few decades old. It is summer, though, and the…

Ranger’s Apprentice: The Ruins of Gorlan

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In the years following the defeat and exile of the evil Morgarath, a young man discovers who he is, and the important role he will play in the world. The Ruins of Gorlan, Book I of John Flanagan’s popular Ranger’s Apprentice series, follows Will, an orphaned ward of the Castle Redmont, as he and several of his friends cross over from childhood to youth. In Araluen, youth is a time of apprenticeship for adulthood, and that means taking on challenging and meaningful duties. In the course of the story, Will not only learns who…

A Seafaring Man Learns the Ropes

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Often perplexed, always resilient, Hornblower struggles through, learning his trade in a world of danger and duty. Set during the Napoleonic Wars,  Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, by C.S. Forester, chronicles the early career of one Horatio Hornblower as he cuts his teeth in the Royal Navy. A modern protagonist, Hornblower suffers from a number of imperfections, among them physical gawkiness, introvertedness, and a strong tendency toward self-criticism, that would likely undermine the progress of his career, were it not for certain mitigating, and ultimately triumphant qualities. These qualities—primarily a kind of…