A padded room with a view from Saturday
Jan. 7th, 2010 10:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serynI read The View From Saturday by E.L. Konigsburg. It's a Newberry Award winner.
I am wholly unclear on A) why this won an award, B) why that was the title, and C) what the fuck happened.
The story starts in and revolves around a retirement community in Florida. Through the happenstance of Deus ex Machina three children from a town in New England happen to have grandparents living in that very same place.
They have some adventures and each child takes it in turn to tell his or her story of their individual Florida trips.
(The fourth kid is from India and doesn't have relatives in Florida so he doesn't get a story.)
Then they are, again god-from-a-magic-box, all in the same homeroom in middle school. Where they, for absolutely no apparent reason, are chosen to be on the school's academic bowl team because their teacher is in a wheelchair.
Really. That's what I understood. Most of that is in the blurb on the dust jacket. The blurb says the team won the state bowl championship. It's bizarre how completely irrelevant the book makes this accomplishment.
I found the disjointed rambling memoir style as each child travelogued to be completely unrelated to the point of the story. It takes up more than half the book and is often incomprehensible. The "here and now" portion is their handicapped teacher being completely clueless about her own decision making process.
It was, frankly, a worthless book. The competition must have been really light the year this incoherent trash won.
[book 2 of 2010]
I am wholly unclear on A) why this won an award, B) why that was the title, and C) what the fuck happened.
The story starts in and revolves around a retirement community in Florida. Through the happenstance of Deus ex Machina three children from a town in New England happen to have grandparents living in that very same place.
They have some adventures and each child takes it in turn to tell his or her story of their individual Florida trips.
(The fourth kid is from India and doesn't have relatives in Florida so he doesn't get a story.)
Then they are, again god-from-a-magic-box, all in the same homeroom in middle school. Where they, for absolutely no apparent reason, are chosen to be on the school's academic bowl team because their teacher is in a wheelchair.
Really. That's what I understood. Most of that is in the blurb on the dust jacket. The blurb says the team won the state bowl championship. It's bizarre how completely irrelevant the book makes this accomplishment.
I found the disjointed rambling memoir style as each child travelogued to be completely unrelated to the point of the story. It takes up more than half the book and is often incomprehensible. The "here and now" portion is their handicapped teacher being completely clueless about her own decision making process.
It was, frankly, a worthless book. The competition must have been really light the year this incoherent trash won.
[book 2 of 2010]
