Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11526.39 | Kids, Fiction literature | 8 May 2011
8
Ellen and Otis 02 - Otis Spofford
When it comes to stirring up a little excitement in class, Otis Spofford knows just what to do. He can turn a folk dance fiesta into a three-ring circus . . . or an arithmetic lesson into a spitball marathon. Best of all, Otis likes teasing neat, well-behaved Ellen Tebbits—until the day his teasing goes too far. Now Otis is nervous, because Ellen isn't just mad . . . she's planning something!
The narrator of Elizabeth Berg's Open House calls divorce "a series of internal earthquakes ... one after the other." She ought to know. Samantha is abandoned by her husband in the opening pages of this three-handkerchief special, and the resultant tremors keep her off-balance for most of the novel. There are practical problems aplenty, of course, including a shortage of money and an 11-year-old son to raise. But Sam's sense of emotional bereavement is far worse, despite the fact that her husband had been giving her the conjugal cold shoulder for years:
It takes a lot of chutzpah to give your novel the same title as one of the most famous novels in the history of English-language literature, even if the original novel didn't spawn a literary field or two (utopian and dystopian fiction) or become an everyday term for the perfect place to live on Earth. Yet there's a postmodern appropriateness to applying the title Utopia to a novel set in a theme park that uses cutting-edge technology to create Earth's most desirable fantasy place to visit. Like Westworld and Jurassic Park, Lincoln Child's Utopia is a near-future theme-park thriller, and like Michael Crichton, Child delivers an abundance of white-knuckle thrills, chills, and shocks.
Peter Crane, a naval physician, flies out to an oil rig to investigate what appears to be the first appearance of an incredibly virulent disease. But when he gets there, he discovers that the problem is even worse than he was led to believe. The disease is attacking the residents of a deep-water research facility, not the oil workers, and it could be linked to the facility's excavations of an ancient site that might hold the key to the fate of the lost city of Atlantis.
When it comes to merging innovative technology with a bizarre murder mystery, few writers do it better than Child. In Utopia (2002), supercomputers ran roller coasters in a high-tech theme park. Here, a state-of-the-art computer dating system, run by Eden, Incorporated--a Microsoft-size corporation--takes center stage. For a mere $25,000, a single person can find a life partner using Eden's flawless matching system. And it's guaranteed, though not one customer has ever requested a refund. When the match is 100 percent, the lucky pair is dubbed a "supercouple," and the subsequent marriage is the envy of all the world.
