48 Hour Reading Challenge--Firestorm and The Game of Sunken Places

Update One: 4:20 pm to 7:02 pm. Off to a bad start. Read 30 or so pages of Boneshaker, then had to take child to swimming lesson. Thought I had put Boneshaker in bag. Hadn't. Forced to read the two books I had with me--both ones that were unfinished from last week. Came home from swimming lesson and was unable to locate Boneshaker. Valuable time lost failing to find it.

Total pages read: 378 Books from tbr pile read: 0 (sigh) Total time read: 1 hour and 45 minutes. Time spent on line: 20 minutes

The first of these was Firestorm, by David Klass (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, YA), which I hadn't finished for a reason--I didn't like it all that much. Basic plot--kid sent from future (when just a baby) must save world from environmental disaster. A bit heavy handed with the pro-environmental Message, and although lord knows I take plastic bottles out of my co-workers trash all the time, heavy handed-ness is still heavy handed-ness. And then when the Great Confrontation happened, I was unconvinced by the strange thing of great power upon which everything hung. I had hoped to use this for a Timeslip Tuesday book, but the time travel element is "it happened and now here we are in the present" and thus not that interesting time travel wise. I might, however, read the next book in the series at some point--I confess to being curious.

The second was M.T. Anderson's The Game of Sunken Places (Scholastic, 2004, upper middle grade-ish), because the next book of this has just been released and sounds good. Basic plot--two boys stuck in the middle of magical game whose rules they don't know and which involves deadly creatures. It was a fine book, funny at times, gripping at others, but since I never connected emotionally with either boys (their fault or mine, I dunno) I was never that committed to it. However, I did connect very strongly with the troll. Excellent troll work here, Mr. Anderson.

2004 was a long time ago, and Anderson sure has put lots of other great books under his belt (I don't think that metaphor quite works, but maybe you know what I mean). So I bet that the second book, The Suburb of Sunken Stars, is rather good...