Blog Feed

If you haven't had the pleasurable opportunity to read Maniac Magee by Jerry Spenelli grab a copy from you local library as soon as possible. Allow me to introduce a style of writing that engages you into a story of a young boy trying to figure out where he belongs in this world of “equality” and understanding the community we live in. Jerry Spenelli is a fantastic storyteller, and write for his audience of adolescents. He has won over eight awards for his amazing books and creative way of telling realistic stories covering taboo topics of society, for example racism, sexism, and homelessness. In his writing he also includes humorous content to keep his audience excited to read on.

Hola, me llamo Hayley Williams.Tengo veinticinco años. Mi cumpleaños es el veintisiete diciembre. Me encanta cantar y bailar. Estoy en una banda, Paramore. Me gusta viajar y ir de compras. Me gusta comer helado.

¿Qué te gusta?

Reviewer: Nicholas LePera

“From his bedroom window Mikhail Zinoviev could see that the barn door was open. It was swaying backwards and forwards into the wind and snow was swirling into the barn”, the vivid description and imagery of Child 44.  The novel was written by Tom Rob Smith, and the book is outstanding, considering it is his first.  The mere thought of future books written by such a talented person is intriguing. Child 44 is followed by two others, The Secret Speech, and Agent 6. His first book, Child 44, was so well received that it is expected to receive a film adaptation. Get ready to see it hit the big screen! This book is not for the faint-of-heart. The harsh Russian winter is as unforgiving as its people. Murder, rape, and alcoholism has its members and you may not take kindly to sexual themes.

The thriller Child 44 takes place in the midst of post World War II in Soviet Russia. From reading history books, I went into this book knowing Stalin was a mad-man responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people. He was responsible for the harsh and villainous tactics used by the secret police. Extortion, murder, torture, and more. This knowledge gave me a fear when reading that something unexpected could happen to my favourite characters due to the type of world they live in.  During such an eventful point in time is why this story flourishes. The time and place of all events created by Tom Rob Smith accurately correlate with the methods of the secret police and the propaganda used by the State to coerce people to following a maniac’s goal.  Agents huddled around the radiator of their GAZ automobile struggling to stay warm as they progress towards a farm they plan to raid has a militaristic feel to it that made me feel the brotherly feel among the crowd but also the connection to the dark deeds these men have done.  From Moscow, to Rostov, circumstances change, not all fear is the same and characters fit the living environment they are in through their dialogue to their actions.

In the boots of lead character, Leo Demidov is an MGB agent, also known as the secret police, which is responsible for carrying out Stalin’s orders. As the reader is introduced to Leo, they will find out his past is not exactly as obvious as one might hope.  His job was to blame crimes upon people who had done nothing.  Falsely placing claims and torturing confessions are the specialty of men such as Leo. The victims, taken from their rooms in the night, all traces of them gone. Nobody bats an eyelash, for if they do, they may be next. These are historical events that tie in with Tom Rob Smith’s main character, Leo who has put all of his faith in the state and lives to serve loyally. His loyalty stretches back as far to the time of being a soldier in the Red Army, it would only make sense for Leo to join the Ministry of State Security  One day events begin to take place which make their way to Leo’s attention causing him to challenge his belief in the state. He is married to a teacher named Raisa, though the marriage isn’t exactly working out. Though he cannot realize why, state deception has cast his mind away from his eyes so he cannot realize what he is doing.  Smith ties in the feeling of the harsh Russian environment through immersing the reader in its weather, but also in its appearance as a Communist nation ruled by fear. You will breathe and feel every city block, every farm, and path traveled by Leo.  From the streets of the Lubyanka to the slums of Rostov-on-don, Smith provides the reader a complete Russian geographic. As more and more events spawn onto the drawing table, Leo becomes baffled. Everything he has been taught and has believed is being disproved in a matter of days. I felt attached, as if I had been in his shoes and I was there for the battle to make a decision on what to do next. Struggling to figure out the truth, he begins to investigate these mysterious murders. We as readers are brought along in the journey, ever present yet ever distant to the story we are enveloped by.

The people he originally arrested had no correlation to these events. Leo knows this for a fact, but is hesitant to disobey the all-knowing state. Each murdered child he has come across has had the same exact autopsy report on how they were killed, surely this was no coincidence. Amongst the chaos, the protagonist is tested by the state. His rivals have given him a test, denounce his wife as a spy. For days Leo debates on the possibilities. Is his lover a spy for the West? He finds himself on the streets with his wife, Raisa, banished from Moscow.

Having been demoted for failing to denounce his wife, the couple finds themselves on their own and Leo at a disadvantage in solving the mystery at large, the murderer. He must conduct his operations in secret and find a way to bring the madman responsible to justice.  The reader may attempt to read this book and infer possible outcomes and scenarios by judging the book in comparison to other shows and books, but each one shall fail.

Within the pages of this book are vast amounts of mysteries and details making it impossible for you to draw conclusions but yet remain entertained. With countless history books, texts, and documentaries, Smith created the most historically accurate fiction of all time.

Searching for answers to his question, Leo will meet new people. What fate will he face in the harsh and barren cold of such an unforgiving land? Leo must redeem himself, for his wife, Raisa. Living a life of lies only makes it harder to search for the truth.

Book: Child 44        Author: Tom Rob Smith        Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

  Date Published: 2008        Pages: 400          Genre: Thriller         Language: English  

To understand the book Little Brother, one must first understand Cory Doctorow. Doctorow is a member of a group of minds who are of the opinion that all digital media should be shareable. He is against copyrighting, and most of his works are viewable for free online under creative commons licensing. Doctorow believes the creators of the media should have the copyright, and that said media should be free to be used as the creator pleases. These ideas come out strongly in Little Brother.

Little Brother is the story of Marcus, a teenager/gamer/self-made genius. He and his group of friends start out innocent enough, skipping school to play a game. But when a bomb goes off in San Francisco, their homeland, they become captured by Homeland Security. From there, the story becomes a technology driven war of attrition between Marcus’s fellow teens and the government. It is a compelling and terrifying look at what could happen as the United States government goes to extremes to neutralize an internal threat.

This novel is thrilling, full of the choking thought of having your worst enemy be the group you are supposed to trust. There are many points in the early stages of the novel that make you feel the setting well. You are constantly put into situations where it feels like you, not the character, lose people or feel hopelessly lost yourself. The setting, when it isn’t on the internet or main characters’ houses, can give off a very real, close feeling. You also are given enough insight into the characters to start to feel for them, especially during the early parts of the narrative. The most realistic feeling in I felt during this narrative was a growing, infectious paranoia. I truly began to fear the walls themselves, wondering what kind of people my government’s employees really were. Which departments I could trust? Which would readily take me away to control the people around me? The story does a remarkable job turning those we have learned to trust so deeply into the bad guy.

The “trust nobody” feeling of Little Brother is what kept me into it. Cory Doctorow’s writing is at first appealing and witty, but falls short and becomes repetitive uncomfortably quickly. His style feels like an attempt at comedy, and his language is so lighthearted that I almost lose track of the serious tone that the characters situation calls for. The laughs fall too short to actually call this book a comedy. Some people refer to Doctorow’s writing as glorified blogging. The masses are correct. The novel’s focus is lacking. Doctorow fills space that could be used to write a compact, concise story with descriptions of concepts and terms that he uses in the book. This may be an attempt at pushing into the first person point of view as fully as possible, as Marcus is the kind of kid who loves to teach himself as much as he can get his hands on, but it comes off as a drag on the reader. The book is constantly sidetracked by descriptions of random things Marcus knows that range from a paragraph to, several occassions, a full page.

The language posed another issue to me. It felt like Doctorow was trying too hard to play the part of a hot headed young teen. The sound of the book felt unnatural. It felt like someone who was trying to play the character of a teenager, but a forced, stereotypical teenager. For most of the book, I wanted Marcus to stop talking, and for a third person narrator to take over. You could never get behind Marcus on an emotional level. He had four modes: Doctorow fueled blog-like rants on minor things; angry, brooding, authority hating; perverted, unrealistic teenager; and whiny, scared, forced into the spotlight mode. None of these felt like a real human. It is difficult to read a first person novel when you can’t support the protagonist.

Little Brother isn’t a bad book, it just fell short on the expectations that I went into it with. There are plenty of readers who will enjoy it. Anyone who is entertained by the popular young adult novels such as the Hunger Games series and Divergent will be able to find a familiar style of writing and plot structure. Little Brother is also a good entry point for the young to introduce themselves into the cyberpunk and dystopian genres. It is the inflatable kiddie pool of cyberpunk. Any young readers interested in some light, reality grounded science fiction should take some time to read Little Brother.

Little Brother

Cory Doctorow

Self Published via Creative Commons

Published 2007

139 pages

Young Adult Cyberpunk, Light Scifi, Thriller

Digital Fortress — Dan Brown

Review by Zack Hersh

Snowden on steroids — Digital Fortress is an exciting and wild ride through the NSA and the controversial issues of privacy, but past the plotline, the writing falls short

“Who will guard the guards?” The premise of this book is interesting enough: the National Security Agency’s top code breaking machine, the massive and multimillion dollar TRANSLTR, encounters a code it cannot break, called Digital Fortress. It turns out that Digital Fortress is actually unbreakable encryption software that, if released to the public, would be able to encode any digital message or data, effectively protecting it from any unwelcome “snooping” done by say the NSA. This software was created by a former NSA employee, Ensei Tankado, who was outraged by what he thought to be corruption, injustice and abuse of power in the NSA. More specifically, their everyday intrusion into people’s private lives. At the threat of releasing this software to the world, which would cripple NSA intelligence and power devastatingly, and the fact that the code is already inside TRANSLTR, preventing the mighty machine from doing anything else until the code is broken, Digital Fortress essentially holds the NSA hostage.

Only the secret passkey can abort the code, and that is where Susan Fletcher, the main character, and her fiance David Becker come in. Susan is the NSA’s head cryptographer, or code maker and breaker, and is brought in to try to uncover the passkey in a race against time, before Tankado auctions it off to the highest bidder worldwide. At the same time, Becker is sent to Spain, where Tankado had just died of what appeared to be a heart attack, to try to find Tankado’s personal copy of the passkey, all while being persecuted by a mysterious and relentless assassin. For the sake of national intelligence, the passkey must be uncovered before it is too late.

By this point, it should be quite clear how interesting the plotline of the book is. It is twisted and dynamic, with many layers, sides, and surprising or big reveals. But the complex and captivating plot was basically all the book had going for it, and was the only thing that would keep readers. Past the story, the writing fell short. It was mostly hollow and not very sharp, only really descriptive of actions, meaning along the lines of “Then he did this. Then this person did this. Then this person did that”. Of what would be expected of a professional author, especially one as accomplished as Dan Brown, who has found success with other bestsellers like Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, his prose is of egregiously low level. Much of the story was written in a very disappointing way. Then again, this was his debut work. He has since had time to figure some of these issues out.

Each chapter, the story jumped around from different places and characters, which was not only somewhat distracting and introduced numerous additional, and sometimes unnecessary, characters and subplots, but also caused the book to read more like a screenplay than a novel. With the exception of the intricate and well developed plotline, the writing was not of the highest caliber. For example, at a highly climactic scene, when Becker is running from the assassin and encounters a dead end, Brown Writes, “And then it just stopped. [Paragraph] Like a freeway that ran out of funding, the path ended.” This poorly executed simile was just one example of many literary letdowns found within the book’s 500 pages, and took away so much from this moment in the story. Readers may find themselves thinking more about the writing they’re reading instead of becoming immersed in the story, which is a shame, because the plot itself is quite rich. As the plot thickened, the writing did become somewhat more readable and engrossing, however, this high point is the baseline of quality where most writers would be looking to as a starting point, not as a peak. Readers who can ignore and look past errors, questionable decisions, and little irritations may enjoy the book because of the captivating story it tells, but otherwise, Digital Fortress would mostly likely not be a worthwhile read. Readers could instead discover the plot through Sparknotes, or through a simple plot summary.