Skip to main content

Texting the Underworld

By

Texting the Underworld
by Ellen Booraem
Dial, 2013.  319 pgs. Fantasy

     Conor O'Neill is a chicken lips about spiders, and is not that fond of other alarms and excursions either. His little sister Glennie, on the other hand, is "a soul-sucking demon warrior."  But it is Conor the Wimp, not Glennie the Bold, who winds up with a banshee in his room. Ashling, as she is known, has come to wail over a death in the O'Neill family, but she doesn't know who it will be and Conor spends much of the rest of the story trying to save maybe his grandfather, maybe his sister, maybe himself. Along the way, Conor dreams of a former life, when his name was Declan and Ashling was his one true love. His grandfather wants to be the one to go, but there is no way to make sure it will be he . . . or is there. When Grump, Conor, Glennie, and Ashling go to the land of the dead to confront The Lady, things take an unexpected turn, and Conor gets a chance to save someone, but with a catch. Booraem's funny fantasy has a serious undercurrent.  What can be the right thing to do in impossible circumstances?  Can one be redeemed by making a sacrifice now to pay for a sorrow in the past?  Texting the Underworld is a complex fantasy, with lots of rules and characters to keep track of, but readers will be rewarded in the end with a satisfying resolution and perhaps a new view of the world.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

Review: Blood in the Water

By
Blood in the Water By Tiffany D. Jackson New York: Scholastic, 2025. Fiction. 255 pages. 12-year-old Kaylani McKinnon can't help but feel like a fish out of water. She's a Brooklyn girl spending her summer on Martha's Vineyard surrounded by wealthy family friends in their mansion. All she really wants is to stay home all summer where she her incarcerated father can easily reach her, and she can keep working to find ways to prove him innocent of fraud and embezzlement. Despite her protests, she finds herself on the island with the snooty granddaughters of her host. Soon after Kaylani's arrival, a popular teen boy is found murdered and she decides to conduct her own investigation. As she tries to discover what happened to Chadwick Cooper, Kaylani finds that not everything on Martha's Vineyard is as perfect as it appears. Thrillers for middle grade readers can be hard to find, but Tiffany D. Jackson succeeds in her first middle grade novel. A quick moving plot, tight d...
Post a Comment
Read more

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry

By DeeDee
National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry Edited by J. Patrick Lewis National Geographic, 2012, 183 p. Poetry In this beautiful poetry collection, the National Children's Poet Laureate, J. Patrick Lewis, has teamed up with the amazing photographers at National Geographic. The result is 200 poems about animals, all illustrated with stunning nature photography.  The poems are well chosen and include rhyming, free verse, and shape poetry. Some of the poems are funny, many are contemplative and all are nicely typeset on top of the full color photographs. One of my favorites is a shape poem about flamingos, with a photograph of a flock of flamingos which seem to be standing the the shape of a flamingo (how did they do that?).  Lewis ends the collection with a brief but interesting section about writing animal poetry.  This selection is sure to turn any animal lover into a poetry lover.
Post a Comment
Read more