When they discover that the museum has an angel statue that was purchased for $225 and may or may not have been carved by Michelangelo, they decide that this is it-their chance to be heroes. (Not creepy at all.) They're definitely on an adventure, but they don't know where it will lead. The kiddos sneak into the museum and manage to stay there after it closes by avoiding the guards and sleeping in a 16th-century bed that someone was murdered in. Rising Action (Conflict, Complication) Night at the Museum In the exposition, it's all about planning, planning, planning-and keeping their fingers crossed that they don't get caught. Here's how it's going to go down: they'll escape by hiding on the school bus until everyone gets off, and then they'll take the train into New York City (a fitting place to run away to). She clues her brother into the whole situation, and together, they come up with their daring plan. In the initial set-up, we see Claudia as a particularly hard-headed little girl, though she'd hate it if anyone called her that. Exposition (Initial Situation) The RunawaysĬlaudia Kinkaid decides that she's going to run away-and that her brother Jamie will be going with her (something he doesn't know yet).
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Titles of related interest from Waveland Press: Beti (trans. Winner of the prestigious Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. Considered a classic of contemporary African women's literature, So Long a Letter is a must-read for anyone interested in African literature and the passage from colonialism to modernism in a Muslim country. Ramatoulaye hopes for a world where the best of old customs and new freedom can be combined. Angered by the traditions that allow polygyny, they inhabit a social milieu dominated by attitudes and values that deny them status equal to men. This semiautobiographical account is a perceptive testimony to the plight of educated and articulate Muslim women. Addressed to a lifelong friend, Aissatou, it is a record of Ramatoulaye's emotional struggle for survival after her husband betrayed their marriage by taking a second wife. The brief narrative, written as an extended letter, is a sequence of reminiscences some wistful, some bitter recounted by recently widowed Senegalese schoolteacher Ramatoulaye Fall. 1 So Long a Letter By Mariama Ba So Long a Letter By Mariama Ba Written by award-winning African novelist Mariama Ba and translated from the original French, So Long a Letter has been recognized as one of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century. 5/21/2023 0 Comments Billy the Kid by Robert M. UtleyUsing previously untapped sources, he presents an engrossing story-the most complete and accurate ever-of a youthful hoodlum and sometime killer who found his calling in New Mexico's bloody power struggle known as the Lincoln County War. Utley does what countless books, movies, television shows, musical compositions, and paintings have failed to do: he successfully strips off the veneer of legendry to expose the reality of Billy the Kid. Within a year Billy the Kid became the subject of five dime-novel "biographies" as well as Garett's ghost-written account, and that was just the beginning. He was only twenty-one years old when a bullet from Sheriff Pat Garett's six-shooter killed him on July 14, 1881. Newspapers pictured him as a king of outlaws and his highly publicized capture, trial, escape, and end fixed his image in the public mind for all time. Not until his final month did anyone call him Billy the Kid. Whatever his name or alias at the moment-Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, Kid Antrim, Billy Bonney-people always called him the Kid. In the ninth century, “knowledge flowed into Baghdad from every direction.” Scholars were busy translating manuscripts from Greek into Arabic using a new product, paper, while working in Baghdad’s many public libraries. By 500, Alexandria was floundering, and the fate of these texts written on papyrus was uncertain. Galen visited Alexandria but wrote his major works on medicine around 160 C.E. and Ptolemy his Almagest a few centuries later. The first stop on her map of knowledge is the “intellectual heart of the ancient world,” Alexandria, home to a magnificent library and the city where Euclid wrote his Elements around 300 B.C.E. Each had the political stability that allowed scholarship to flourish and scholars, the “stars of the story,” to locate, translate, and transcribe rare works of literature and science. How did they survive? Who recopied and translated them?” To provide some answers, the author meticulously and enthusiastically unwinds the “dense, tangled undergrowth of manuscript history” in seven cities. When Moller ( Oxford in Quotations, 2014, etc.) was a young historian in England, she wondered “what had happened to the books on mathematics, astronomy and medicine from the ancient world. 5/21/2023 0 Comments Looking for Alaska by John GreenGirls will cry and boys will find love, lust, loss and longing in Alaska’s vanilla-and-cigarettes scent. What sings and soars in this gorgeously told tale is Green’s mastery of language and the sweet, rough edges of Pudge’s voice. Her center is a woeful family tragedy, and when Alaska herself is lost, her friends find their own ways out of the labyrinth, in part by pulling a last, hilarious school prank in her name. Their engine and center is Alaska, given to moodiness and crying jags but also full of spirit and energy, owner of a roomful of books she says she’s going to spend her life reading. The Colonel, Takumi, Alaska and a Romanian girl named Lara are an utterly real gaggle of young persons, full of false starts, school pranks, moments of genuine exhilaration in learning and rather too many cigarettes and cheap bottles of wine. Pudge is a skinny (“irony” says his roommate, the Colonel, of the nickname) thoughtful kid who collects and memorizes famous people’s last words. The Alaska of the title is a maddening, fascinating, vivid girl seen through the eyes of Pudge (Miles only to his parents), who meets Alaska at boarding school in Alabama. 5/21/2023 0 Comments Finnegans wake deutschThe German publisher „Suhrkamp“ gave us the permission, to use parts of the book „Finnegans Wake Deutsch“ for a time-period of a year (these translations will be marked by the end-timestamp). The sixth part, named „Text FW deutsch“, offers a few German translations of parts of the novel (Friedhelm Rathjen). But if you like to use some special effects, you need to study ‚html‘, ‚xhtml‘ etc. The standard-editor of „WordPress“ is very simple to use. The fifth part, named „Text FW with comments“, isn’t ready at the moment. Nonetheless, it has been translated, transposed, or transcreated into a surprising variety of languages. The first to fourth part, named „Stuendel Finnegans Wehg Book1 – 4“, offers the German translation of the whole novel (Dr. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake has repeatedly been declared to be entirely untranslatable. We took the name „work in progress“ from the first name of the novel, James Joyce used over more than 15 years (later called „Finnegans Wake“), to make clear, how hard it is for every new reader to keep on reading after the first shockings, trying to understand a few sentences of more than 600 pages ( … better to change the name in ‚reading in progress‘). Please use it like a workbench: here you should find a few helping hands to make reading (? understanding ?) of „Finnegans Wake“ more easier (!!). Her essays have appeared in AGNI, The Story Prize blog, and the University of Iowa, International Writing Program blog. Okparanta has published short stories in publications including Granta, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, Subtropics and The Coffin Factory. She was educated at Pennsylvania State University ( Schreyer Honors College), Rutgers University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Early life Ĭhinelo Okparanta was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and at the age of 10 migrated with her family to the US. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where she was raised until the age of 10, when she emigrated to the United States with her family. Happiness, Like Water (2013) Under the Udala Trees (2015)Ĭhinelo Okparanta ( listen) (born 1981) is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer. 5/21/2023 0 Comments Aria by Nazanine HozarBut as if in a fairy tale, suddenly the girl’s fortunes change: She finds herself in a new home, this time with an emotionally reticent woman who strives to do good works in order to atone for her privilege. In a culture rife with superstition, she is suspicious of the child, whose blue eyes, Zahra believes, “mean… the devil’s in her.” With Behrouz gone for weeks at a time, Zahra vents her anger at Aria, whom she beats and nearly starves. Behrouz, an illiterate truck driver for the army, rescues the baby and impetuously names her Aria, for music that evokes “all the world’s pains and all the world’s loves.” Behrouz takes the infant home to his wife, Zahra, a hardhearted woman who resents her husband and balks at this new imposition and responsibility. While wild dogs scavenge through the trash, a man wandering through the neighborhood hears a muffled cry. The tale begins in 1953, when a desperate new mother abandons her newborn in a garbage-strewn street in Tehran. Making an impressive fiction debut, Hozar creates a vibrant, unsettling portrait of her native Iran from the 1950s to 1981, a period beset by poverty and oppression, chaos and revolution. An orphan grows up during decades of unrest in Iran. Moving the story away from the Camp and New York was the perfect choice for the second book, allowing us to further delve into the worlds Riordan has so cleverly woven together. From here the rest of the story is spent exploring the Sea of Monsters where Riordan weaves Greek mythology into our world seamlessly, building on an already established environment in a fantastical yet completely believable way. After a crazy taxi ride from New York and arriving to find an unstable Camp, the foursome set off for the sea, encountering an aquatic world fit for Poseidon’s son. The story starts off in New York with Percy back living with his mother, getting ready to finish school and return to Camp Half Blood. Meanwhile Luke continues his opposition to the gods and Olympus by hijacking a ship and recruiting evil creatures to join his crusade. This time around Percy teams up with Annabeth, Clarissa and Tyson on a journey across the Sea of Monsters to retrieve the legendary Golden and rescue his best friend Grover from the clutches of an evil Cyclops. The much anticipated follow up to The Lightning Thief sees Percy Jackson once again joining with his friends to fight for not just the safety of Camp Half Blood, but also the safety of the world. Percy Jackson & The Sea of Monsters is the second book in the Percy Jackson & The Olympians series - written by Rick Riordan and published May, 2006. Young Adult Fantasy Book of the Month, December 2011 5/20/2023 0 Comments Top marks for murder bookThis is the best book I have ever read and beware this review is long and will have spoilers as to how they worked out who the murderer was not who they were of course.įirst of all the cover is beautiful and the pink edges are amazing. Robin lives in England with her husband and her pet bearded dragon, Watson. She then went to university, where she studied crime fiction, and then worked at a children's publisher. She spent her teenage years at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, reading a lot of murder mysteries and hoping that she’d get the chance to do some detecting herself (she didn’t). When it occurred to her that she was never going to be able to grow her own spectacular walrus moustache, she decided that Agatha Christie was the more achieveable option. When she was twelve, her father handed her a copy of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and she realised that she wanted to be either Hercule Poirot or Agatha Christie when she grew up. She has been making up stories all her life. Robin was born in California and grew up in an Oxford college, across the road from the house where Alice in Wonderland lived. She is also the author of The Guggenheim Mystery, the sequel to Siobhan Dowd's The London Eye Mystery. Robin's books are: Murder Most Unladylike (Murder is Bad Manners in the USA), Arsenic for Tea (Poison is Not Polite in the USA), First Class Murder, Jolly Foul Play, Mistletoe and Murder, Cream Buns and Crime, A Spoonful of Murder, Death in the Spotlight and Top Marks for Murder. |