Skip to main content

The Facttracker

By

THE FACTTRACKER; Jason Carter Eaton; New York: HarperCollins, 2008; 260p if you include the Pop Quiz. Juvenile Fiction.
"Everyone loves a good explosion" says an imaginary character at the beginning of this delightful book. An explosion follows, but one must read the rest of the story for the complete explosion. The facttracker of the title lives in Traakerfaxx, where the community's business is to dispense facts. The facts came from the factory where the facttracker worked. In this town lived the just small enough boy who didn't know much about himself because his bundle of facts had fallen from the partly finished factory and swept away his parents as it rolled down the hill and far away. As the just small enough boy searches for his life story, the facttracker's dreadful twin brother Ersatz shows up with the Seed of Truth, sets up shop in the Liebrary and fills the town with falsehoods. Soon the townspeople are selling Untruths instead of Facts, sending them out of town by means of a battalion of snails--the Phony Express. The Facttracker is laugh out loud funny, but also has much to say about the relationship between truth and falsehood, understanding and self-deception. (Parents may wish to know that the name of deity is used in a few instances as an exclamation of surprise.)




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: Alice with a Why

By
Alice with a Why By Anna James New York: Penguin, 2026. Fiction. 240 pgs. In 1919, in the aftermath of the first World War, Alyce is living with her grandmother in the English countryside. Her grandmother, also named Alice, tells Alyce (with a y) stories from her childhood adventures in a wonderful land filled with white rabbits and mad hatters. Alyce doesn't really believe the silly stories, she just misses her father who was killed in the war. One day, Alyce receives a mysterious invitation to tea, and subsequently falls into a pond where she is transported to Wonderland. Her grandmother, of course, is that Alice. Alyce is prompted by the Mad Hatter, Dormouse, and March Hare to seek out the Time Being and put an end to the war between the Sun King and the Queen of the Moon. Thus begins Alyce's adventure through Wonderland. I have a certain soft spot for the original story of Alice in Wonderland. It is one of my particular favorites and I often have a hard time reading new int...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall

By
A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall By Jasmine Warga New York: Harper, 2024. Fiction. 211 pages. A painting has been stolen from the Penelope L. Brooks Museum and sixth-grader Rami Ahmed is worried he's the main suspect. His mother works at the museum as the lead custodian and Rami spends a lot of time hanging out at the museum while she works. On the day the painting went missing, the only people there were the security guard Ed, the cleaning crew, and Rami. Then, a mysterious girl appears in the museum. She floats around from room to room and only Rami can see her -- and she looks exactly like the girl from the missing painting. To prove his innocence and help figure out who the floating girl is, Rami partners up with an aspiring sleuth at school named Veda and the two dive into unexpected situations as they try to solve the mystery. This is a cozy mystery that is focused mostly on characters and ambiance and only a little on the mystery itself. Don't read this book if yo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more