by Eoin Colfer

Science Fiction / Children’s Books / Young Fiction Ages 8-12

Click here to buy the Book: The Supernaturalists by Eoin Colfer

Click here to buy the [Audio Book: The Supernaturalists by Eoin Colfer]

Book Synopsis:

Future, Satellite City.

Cosmo Hill is 13 years old and lives at the Clarissa Frayne Institute for Parentally Challenged Boys. Cosmo Hill is an orphan, otherwise known as a ‘no-sponsor’. No-sponsors are put to work by the government as human lab-rats. Day in and day out, they test dangerous products. Night in and night out, they sleep in their cardboard utility pipes covered in scars, sores and burns from their hard day’s work.

Cosmo Hill needs to escape. But how? Cosmo prepares for the day when he can make his daring getaway from Clarissa Frayne…

After a tumultuous escape, Cosmo is saved by a gang of kids with amazing psychic powers. They are able to see ‘supernatural parasites’, invisible creatures who suck the life force of humans. Cosmo finds that he has psychic abilities of his own.

And this is where the adventure begins…

My Book Review:

Eoin Colfer is a young peoples writer and I enjoyed reading his first Artemis Fowl book (I’m about to read the second Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident). However, I guess I was expecting something more sophisticated when I bought the audio book for The Supernaturalist. I found it in the Sci-Fi section, and assumed it was an Adult Sci-Fi book. I realize now from Eoin Colfer’s website that the book is meant for 8-12 year olds!

I was not personally engaged with the story. However, I am really of the wrong demographic to judge this book so harshly. If I were pre-teens, I would probably quite enjoy this book. I think that The Supernaturalist contains characters that young people would identify with.

The story has larger then life characters (or in this book’s case, smaller than usual), and has high stakes and big twists.

I thought the narrator, Jack Davenport, was very easy to listen too, as well as being a very capable narrator. He shifts accents for almost every character, which sounds like he’s just showing off his range at first, but it also adds an extra multicultural aura to the futuristic Satellite City. However, the choice to make Stephan’s voice so deep, drew me away from the ‘reality’ that the characters are all young people, teenagers themselves. In the audio book, I began to think of them more as adults because of this choice and I think it would have been more effective for me if I been able to imagin them as teens trying to save the world.

If you have children, or are looking to buy a gift for a child, or if you are a child, I think you’d enjoy the adventure and imagination in Eoin Colfer’s books.

Click here to read my review of Artemis Fowl

x Julie

Online Bookstore and Book Reviews

Reading Like Rabbits

by Daniel Keyes

***~~ (3/5)

Fiction / Science Fiction

Click here to buy the book Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (free delivery worldwide)

Book Synopsis:

With an IQ of 68, Charlie Gordon works as a sweeper in a bakery. He thinks has friends, but little does he know he is the butt of their jokes, an amusing plaything.

Charlie’s life changes radically when he undergoes an experimental operation that to enhance his intelligence. Charlie becomes a genius.

However, Algernon, the mouse who had been successfully enhanced before Charlie, dies. Charlie has to live with the knowledge that his new life and his insights into the world are only temporary.

My Book Review:

This book, Flowers for Algernon is interesting on many levels. Firstly because of the fantastic ‘What if?’ question that it poses. What if there was an operation that could enhance a man’s intelligence? We could make all the mentally disabled people like us, they could integrate into society, they could live ‘normal lives’, they would no longer be a burden.

But this book goes deeper, as it charts the changes in Charlie, who undergoes this operation. As he becomes a genius, his eyes are also opened to the ugliness of the world and he realises that the people whom he thought were his friends, were actually making fun of him the whole time. So, despite gaining superior intelligence, he has lost what made him happy, friends who enjoyed his company, who laughed with him. As a reader we feel the cringe of Charlie’s lack of knowledge before the operation, that his colleagues are actually laughing at him. But in Charlie’s mind, he has great friends, and he is happy. Which begs the question: is Charlie better off in his lack of knowledge, or in knowing the truth of his situation?

Flowers for Algernon covers many areas, from the disparity in the intellectual and emotional growth in Charlie, to flashbacks to the past and the way his family treated him, to love . Charlie was severely taught that he was to keep away from women. This inculcated a fear of getting close to women, which stayed with him, even as he became intelligent and integrated into society. The love story with his former teacher, Miss Kinnian, shows the push and pull of these emotions. Will the old Charlie let the new Charlie be free of this fear?

The main arc of the novel is the lack of knowledge of whether this experiment will last, and then the knowledge through Algernon’s behaviour and subsequent death, that Charlie would end up back at square one.

The book is written in the form of Charlie’s journals, or Progress Reports for the scientific experiment. Charlie’s writing starts off simplistic with bad spelling. Then immediately after the operation, when he is told how to spell the word ‘progress report’ correctly, he remembers it, and continues spelling it correctly. That is the first sign of Charlie’s change, even if Charlie himself doesn’t recognise it. But then, he suddenly becomes super intelligent, learning new languages, going through pages of books at one glance. I missed the leap. So when the men at the bakery became afraid of him, and both the bakery workers and Miss Kinnian suddenly felt inferior to him, I missed the connection. I didn’t get the full impact of this intellectual shift, the wideness of the subverted gap, as I didn’t realise it had happened. I guess the author doesn’t have to spell the shift out, but I think my understanding and the impact of their reaction would have been clearer and more powerful if he had established this beforehand, as opposed to after. As a reader I knew that Charlie would become intelligent, but I didn’t realise that he’d become a genius.

The questions that were raised when I read the book were:

Would Charlie have been better off if he had never had the operation?

Is Charlie a better person before or after the operation?

Why do people make fun of disabled people? What in them makes them do this?

Reading about how Charlie’s family treated him, made me realise that we don’t truly treat the mentally disabled like human beings. Directly or indirectly, consciously or sub-consciously, we have an aversion to such people, a dread or sheer thankfulness that we are not like them. We see them as deprived of a real life, a burden. But we don’t know what’s really going on inside. Could they be happier than we the ‘normal people’?

I’m beginning to realise that what makes us happy is not what we think makes us happy. The external societal push towards this concept of ‘happiness’ doesn’t always equate to us actually being happy. Money, material things, education, career, marriage, children. The ‘normal things’, that everyone is striving for, may not be what will truly make us happier in our own skin. What we are striving for is the path that society has said is the correct and ‘normal’ one, or we end up searching for surface happiness, instant gratification that will soon fade away.

But then the question is: What DOES make us happy?

I don’t know yet.

x Julie

Reading Like Rabbits

Bookstore and Book Review Site