Just finished Lois Lowry's wonderful, but perhaps not quite interesting enough for ten-year olds, book Messenger. There's a very nice plot summary available here. We had been listening to The Giver, the Newbury-award book that precedes, by perhaps 40 year, the events this book. It was a pleasant surprise as I was reading to gradually realize the books were connected. The genre is hard to pin down- it is very small-scale fantasy, I guess, more heavy on the awe than the fantasy. The awe, in fact, is constructed by the reader knowing that the fantasy is metaphor, and not meant to be literal. The two books complement beautifully Alan Garner's Stone Quartet, which focuses all on the awe, with the fantasy only hinted at.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Messenger
Just finished Lois Lowry's wonderful, but perhaps not quite interesting enough for ten-year olds, book Messenger. There's a very nice plot summary available here. We had been listening to The Giver, the Newbury-award book that precedes, by perhaps 40 year, the events this book. It was a pleasant surprise as I was reading to gradually realize the books were connected. The genre is hard to pin down- it is very small-scale fantasy, I guess, more heavy on the awe than the fantasy. The awe, in fact, is constructed by the reader knowing that the fantasy is metaphor, and not meant to be literal. The two books complement beautifully Alan Garner's Stone Quartet, which focuses all on the awe, with the fantasy only hinted at.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment