Jaci Rivera has plans for her sophomore year: go to regionals with the track team, make the honor roll, and eat too much pizza with her best friends, Callie and Sara. Her biggest concern is Amanda, the pushy girl who moved in a few months ago.
What she doesn't plan for is catching a robber red-handed, or being kidnapped. The desperate thief drags her and her friends 2,000 miles across the Canadian border. They escape from his lair, only to find that he has spies and agents watching their path home, waiting to intercept them and take them back.
Then Jaci finds something out about her family. Something which irrevocably connects her to their kidnapper, and makes her question their chances of escape.
I will share a Tuesday Teaser from Perilous on Tuesday.
3 comments:
I haven't read HP in years. I think of rereading it, but haven't gotten to it yet.
After some 1100 reviews, I was loath to add my contribution, thinking it would be like bringing coals to Newcastle. Having read some of the reviews, however, I am somewhat heartened to read that not every review is a five-star love letter either to The Hallows, to author Rowling or to the series as a whole.
As to the observation Rowling needed a stricter editor for this final (some say, bloated) novel in the Harry Potter saga, it's debatable. However, I take strong exception to one review that labeled Dumbledore a "fraud" with the demand that Dumbledore "be the same as he was throughout the series," or words to that effect.
The key aspect that comes from "HP and the Deathly Hallows" is the human fallibility of all the characters. I suppose it's easy to forget -- considering readers are submerged into the wizarding world -- that Harry and all the other characters (save the fantastic giants, centaurs, and such) are still HUMAN, magical but human. As such, Dumbledore, Harry, even Professor Snape are prone to human weakness, petty jealousies, and even acts of extraordinary courage. Readers are treated to the fact that a young, callow Dumbledore was elitist, selfish, and power-hungry. A young Snape seems to have loved only one woman -- the woman he couldn't have -- all his life. Who'd have suspected that the dour Snape had such a romantic nature?
Yet the adult Dumbledore is so easy to love, to trust. The adult Snape is so easy to hate, to hold in suspicion. In "Deathly Hallows" Rowling points out that all is never as it seems on the surface - a lesson we might apply in our real daily lives.
For this reader, the charm of the novel is finally revealing the feet of clay that all the principal characters possess. More than a tale of wizardry and the eternal battle of good vs. evil, Rowling has painted vivid portraits of the vagaries of human nature, by turns magnanimous then niggardly, cowardly then courageous.
Tina, you'll have a treat waiting for you when you read them again. :-)
Emit, thank you for your very thoughtful comments. I agree with much of what you said.
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