Tuesday review: White Cat

So I just finished a book called White Cat by holly Black, who we all know from "The Spiderwick Chronicles" fame. Anyways, Cassel is the misfit in a family full of workers and con artists: since he wasn't born a worker, he has made up for his lack of gifts by perfecting the art of the con. With Cassel's mother in jail for working a man as a part of a con, and his boarding school kicking him out over an episode of sleepwalking, Cassel is left to the unstable care of his two brothers Phillip and Barron, and their grandfather.

Now just to let you know about "Curse workers", they can change luck, emotions, dreams and even more just by touching your skin. This makes it easy to con people, the reason for the conning of people is because curse work is illegal. Therefore, they all tend to join mafia families. I digress here though as to what I was hoping to say. The book has distopian mores in it, the enemy here ultimately being a destructive, and obviously adult, power structure within a society that mandates an entire group of people inferior because they are tainted by innate qualities they never chose to have

Almost everyone who reads this book, will find something to equate to Cassel's own problems as he struggles with the problems he has through the book being the only person in a family of Curse Workers who is not able to work one.

I am sure that anyone , young and old will be able to enjoy this book.

Spectacular Tuesdays!!

All right, so I got myself a copy of a book because it had a pretty cover. I will admit that I am totally a sucker for that kind if thing. often times I don't even know what the book is about until I get home. Such was the case with this book called "Incarceron". Silly silly me, I didn't realize that the book was a young adult book.

That however, did not matter as I could not put it down. Let me give you the premise really quickly. Incarceron is the name of a prison, in which many people struggle to survive. The vast prison, made of metal and cutting-edge technology, had a secret however and a fabulous secret at that. It was designed as a grand experiment: all undesirables would be sealed inside and given everything for a model utopia. But the experiment failed as Incarceron grew self-aware and tyrannical, resources dwindled, and prisoners divided into factions.

Centuries passed and soon the prisoners existed under Incarceron’s watchful eyes with a single belief to hold onto: no one from Outside enters, no one from Inside escapes. Finn, a young boy from the Inside, believes he is really from Outside, and after he finds a crystal key that is able to open any door, he embarks on a journey to escape. Outside of Incarceron, Claudia, who is the daughter of Incarceron's Warden, is also looking for escape, from an arranged marriage and from her role in a scheme to end Protocol, an archaic set of laws which forces everyone to live according to seventeenth-century norms, even if they are more advanced. When she also finds a crystal key, she comes into communication with Finn.

It is here that i will end with the synopsis. I don't want to spoil the fun of this book, but it is a fantastic read. I'll be honest, I picked it up because i thought that it had a pretty cover. Instead I discovered the vast world that was within the book. It was a little slow in the beginning, but then, the prison is a perpetual threat and actually becomes a character in the storyline between Finn and Claudia. Even though both of them are trapped in their own perspective prisons of life, Incarceron itself becomes a character whose own problems become the other character's problems as well.

When I got to the end of the book, I was shocked by the ending. I also realized that the story had been left open and it was in fact preparing for a sequel. Imagine my happiness when I discovered (much to my happiness, that there was in fact a second book in the works! This here is the book that I am speaking of.

I talk too much. Check it out.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPod touch]

The Terasian System - R.I.P. 3/23/2009

Today is a sad day, yes at this ungodly hour. After much gnashing of teeth, several cigarettes, a pizza, and several phone calls, it was determined that my beloved laptop, The Terasian System, was in fact destroyed and cooked and beyond repair. The Terasian System took along with it over 40 hours of work that had not been backed up or transferred to CD. However, some of it had been printed off via paper copies. Sadly, seventeen grains of Amaretto's Tale had been destroyed, where as only four of them had been copied down on paper (and it's a lot of lawyer legal pads).

As for the other stories and the website itself, it had all been backed up and it was not lost to anyone, so there is no need to worry. It is nothing that a whole new hard drive will not fix. So, within three weeks, I will have a whole new Hard drive (I will take names on suggestions as to what to call it) and soon, I will be back to writing things again. Yes, this means no more sleep as I start to massively update the site, but there will be no stopping me as I continue with what I am going to do.

The only really sad thing is the entire Book Log was deleted. I know that on the site there are only 6 books there, but there were in fact a total of 50 more that had been written. I guess I will just have to review these books all over again. That should be fun. I will enlist help on typing it all up, but they will be my words none-the-less.

Wish me luck!
Also I have a new e-mail. All queries and questions can be directed to Author@seananand.com.

~Sean