He's got the basement blues! "Don't do this! Watch out for that!" Marco's mom thinks the whole world is a danger zone. She won't even let Marco play softball. But Marco just wants to have fun. So he sneaks off to a game. And that's when it happens. He gets hit in the head with a baseball bat. Now things are getting really fuzzy. Really scary. Because when Marco gets home he gets the strangest call. From someone who says he lives in Marco's basement...
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11526.37 | Fiction literature | 3 October 2011
2
The Journeyer
Marco Polo was nicknamed "Marco of the millions" because his Venetian countrymen took the grandiose stories of his travels to be exaggerated, if not outright lies. As he lay dying, his priest, family, and friends offered him a last chance to confess his mendacity, and Marco, it is said, replied "I have not told the half of what I saw and did."
It is a tale of a boy named Marco who is ridiculed for fishing in a small, polluted pool. In typical Seussian fashion, when confronted with the limitations of his situation, the young boy imagines ways in which he could catch any number of any kind of fish in the small pool. The simple story features many Seussian themes, including the imaginative boy and his fantastic fancied fish. However, it is far more repetitive than his later works. The illustrations are shaded colored pencil rather than the later pen and ink which defined his style. Marco's mind goes from the logical to the ridiculous and Dr. Seuss provides fanciful images of fish as a child would imagine them by their name alone.
Marco is in a pickle. His father has instructed him to keep his eyes peeled for interesting sights on the way to and from school, but all Marco has seen is a boring old horse and wagon. Imagine if he had something more to report, say, a zebra pulling the wagon... Pulitzer-prize winning Dr. Seuss needs no introduction. His ode to the imagination of a child is as fresh and exquisitely outlandish today as it was when first published in 1937. This is a classic that will never fade with age. (Ages 3 to 8)
Eight years ago, Abby Knight babysat for a problem teen named Elizabeth. Today, Elizabeth’s back, with a new name (Libby) and a whole new life (stolen)—namely, one that already belongs to Abby. Libby’s even trying to steal Abby’s boyfriend, Marco. But imitation really becomes the sincerest form of trouble when Abby finds herself the accused dupe in a bizarre murder plot.
