Daniel M. reviewed on + 8 more book reviews
** spoiler alert ** I was very 'into' this book ... I kept wanting to read the next chapter, which suggests to me that it was certainly well written. I'm not always an easy mark.
Hero, the lead character's name, struck me as a very normal, intelligent, young girl -- self-obsessed with her own little misery at being the new kid and with an odd name, but young enough to take advice from parents and teachers. Danny, the older, cool boy who seems to take a liking to Hero, also comes across as quite real. A bit of an enigma, he's popular but doesn't try to be. He's got some troubles, which he shares with Hero, but not with his posse of friends. Those troubles (an absent mom and a police chief father who tends to give him too much leeway) strike the reader as very real.
The mystery in the book, the search for a hidden object and what that object might imply, becomes a little heavy-handed. Hero and Danny find the object almost without difficulty, despite the police searching the place from top to bottom on more than one occassion. How convenient.
One thing that I didn't like ...
**WARNING >>> SPOILER ALERT >>>**
...was the author's suggesting, rather strongly, that William Shakespeare didn't write the plays attributed to him, but rather another historical figure of the era.
I know this is a popular theme, and many scholarly books have been written about this, but it annoys me more than a little bit that we plant this suggestion in the minds of our youth, whom we still want to have read Shakespeare.
As to the Shakespeare controversy itself, I've never held to the theory that the man couldn't have written those plays because he was so poorly educated and came from such a poor background. That theory doesn't sit well with me. Genius can come about in many forms and out of nowhere. If Albert Einstein hadn't lived in an era when things were so well documented, we might certainly believe that he couldn't possibly have come up with the brilliant theories that he did. He was a poor immigrant who failed at math in his elementary school years. How could he possibly have such brilliant theories later in life? So too with Shakespeare.
Fortunately, the author does write a note at the end of the book about the Shakespeare theories, which is nice, but when the author asks, directly "What do I think?" she cops out and answers to both, one as historian and one as novelist.
I say let's take the Shakespeare 'reality theories' out of the elementary and middle schools and focus on the writing by that author known as Shakespeare.
Hero, the lead character's name, struck me as a very normal, intelligent, young girl -- self-obsessed with her own little misery at being the new kid and with an odd name, but young enough to take advice from parents and teachers. Danny, the older, cool boy who seems to take a liking to Hero, also comes across as quite real. A bit of an enigma, he's popular but doesn't try to be. He's got some troubles, which he shares with Hero, but not with his posse of friends. Those troubles (an absent mom and a police chief father who tends to give him too much leeway) strike the reader as very real.
The mystery in the book, the search for a hidden object and what that object might imply, becomes a little heavy-handed. Hero and Danny find the object almost without difficulty, despite the police searching the place from top to bottom on more than one occassion. How convenient.
One thing that I didn't like ...
**WARNING >>> SPOILER ALERT >>>**
...was the author's suggesting, rather strongly, that William Shakespeare didn't write the plays attributed to him, but rather another historical figure of the era.
I know this is a popular theme, and many scholarly books have been written about this, but it annoys me more than a little bit that we plant this suggestion in the minds of our youth, whom we still want to have read Shakespeare.
As to the Shakespeare controversy itself, I've never held to the theory that the man couldn't have written those plays because he was so poorly educated and came from such a poor background. That theory doesn't sit well with me. Genius can come about in many forms and out of nowhere. If Albert Einstein hadn't lived in an era when things were so well documented, we might certainly believe that he couldn't possibly have come up with the brilliant theories that he did. He was a poor immigrant who failed at math in his elementary school years. How could he possibly have such brilliant theories later in life? So too with Shakespeare.
Fortunately, the author does write a note at the end of the book about the Shakespeare theories, which is nice, but when the author asks, directly "What do I think?" she cops out and answers to both, one as historian and one as novelist.
I say let's take the Shakespeare 'reality theories' out of the elementary and middle schools and focus on the writing by that author known as Shakespeare.
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