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Narrated by Mark (or "Exclamation Mark"), he gives us the tell-all tales about his friends and their antics. They befriend newcomer Jonah, who takes on the Convict's ultimate nemesis, teacher Mr. Cromwell, a.k.a. the Bomb. ("Cromwell at camp is like Darth Vader at your birthday party.")
This a frenetic and fun book, documenting the misadventures of outback camplife (complete with mud fights, exploring, an end-of-camp pageant and of course, wombats!
Definately worth a read!
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It takes a complicated subject, how honey is produced, and makes it simple enough for 5 year olds to understand; and the handcut collage artwork is something five year olds can handle in an art unit on collage. More, please, Ms. Wallace!
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This book won the "Picture Book of the Year" awarded by the Children's Book Council of Australia in 1997. It's easy to see why.
The beautiful water color illustrations accurately portray the area around the scenic seaside village of Lorne, located west of Melbourne Australia.
Elizabeth Honey is responsible for the pictures as well as the words in "Not a Nibble". It's rare to see great authorship and artistic talent so effectively combined. Her story although centred on our little hero Susie, will also have great appeal for boys. After all, the story pivots around that globally popular pastime of fishing.
To the non-Australian reader some of the fish names may seem strange. Overcoming that, is Elizabeth's portrayal of one of childhood's most enjoyable pastimes. The appeal of dangling a line off the end of a pier, must be a universal pleasure.
Susie together with Mum and Dad and three brothers have a seven-day camping holiday at Lorne. Susie is the most determined to catch a fish but she has the least luck. In fact she catches nothing! Getting teased by her brothers doesn't help. But Susie gets a special reward for her patience. While staring out to sea, almost ready to give up, she is the first to see a mother Southern Right Whale and her newborn calf.
This is a very rewarding book and will appeal to boys and girls of all ages.
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The main attraction is the characters. They are wounded, flawed and inescapably human. I found them utterly believable- even if their situations were anything but! My family has foster kids, and trust me, SEP characterizations of adults dealing with childhood abandonment issues is dead on. And while Romance is a genre synononmous with escapism, I think this book effectively combines both real life problems, with the fairytale quality that SEP is known for. It's not enough for these characters to find love. They need redemption too.
Boy, do we have to work hard for that happy ending...but I found it all the sweeter for the effort.
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There is quite a difference between the novel where nothing happens at all and the minimal novel, where small things happen, but due to the lack of bigger things happening around them, the small things take on a significance they would not otherwise normally have. There are far too many examples of the former type to list; Elizabeth Graver's fine novel The Honey Thief is an excellent example of the latter.
Sick of New York City, widowed paralegal Miriam Baruch takes her eleven-year-old daughter Eva out to Finger Lakes country for a bit of rest, relaxation, and rehab; Eva has developed a rather nasty habit of stealing things. Eva develops a relationship with a local beekeeper (that her mother doesn't know about) while her mother is off developing relationships of her own. As the book unfolds, we alternate scenes of present-day life for Eva with her mother's recollections about the decline and untimely death of Eva's father.
Despite the way it sounds, this doesn't set off the dysfunctional-family-novel alarm bells. Being a single parent having trouble coping doesn't necessarily put you into dysfunction territory (far more dysfunctional are those novels where a couple of idiots stay together "for the kids" and end up doing said kids more harm than good; I don't think I need to provide examples here, you've all read a few, no doubt). I'd hate to think readers were feeling reluctant to pick this up because it smacks of the Oprahesque. At its heart, it's a novel about just getting along in life. Questions aren't answered, loose ends abound, people are just plain messy, and the whole thing feels perfectly natural.
You'd think that in the thirty years since the slice-of-life novel came into vogue, it would have gotten boring. Thankfully, this is not the case. There are far more than eight million stories in the naked city, and some of them are told by writers as good as Graver. May their numbers increase. ****
The Honey Thief has beautiful language; it has a rather lyrical feel to it. I have fallen in love with this book; there are few novels about family dilemmas that touch me this way. With compelling characters and exquisite language, The Honey Thief is as sweet and as rich as, well, honey. I highly recommend this title.
As if simply passing into adolescence from childhood isn't difficult enough, Eva is coping with the fact that her dad - whom she remembers as the perfect father, but only in briefly-imaged wisps of memory - died when she was only six. Her mother has told her from the time of his death that he suffered a heart attack - which is one of those amazingly widespread half-lies with which we as human beings become all too familiar as we pass through this life. Eva accepts the story on the surface - but something within her tells her that there is more here than is being revealed to her.
Eva and her mother live in New York City at the beginning of the story - a single mom striving valiantly to raise a daughter in a less-than-ideal environment. Her mom's best friend is an Indian woman named Ratha who lives in the apartment on the floor below - and Ratha and Mahesh's daughter Charu is Eva's closest pal. As Eva begins to approach adolescence, she begins to evince troubling behavior - the shoplifting mentioned above, plus a tendency to argue more and more aggressively with Miriam. After several episodes of being caught stealing, Miriam is at her wits' end - and the decision is made that a change of environment might be the best thing for both of them. Pouring over an atlas one evening, they settle on the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York - and they pull up what roots they have acquired and make the move.
Eva is bored stiff living in the country. She knows no other children her age, and the woman hired by her mom to baby-sit her (the fact of which angers Eva even further) is more inclined to sit in a chair and snore the afternoon away than to spend any quality time with her young charge. Eva begins to explore the area on a second-hand bike that her mom buys for her - and she makes an interesting discovery. Cycling down a dusty country road one day, she comes across a card table set up with several jaws of honey - along with a home-made sign indicating a price, and a small lockbox with a slot for payment. Tempted to steal the honey, she holds back at first - then her curiosity gets the better of her, and she sneaks onto the property behind the card table, and discovers a row of beehives.
Eva soon meets Burl, the owner of the property and the hives - one of the gentlest (if flawed - he IS human, after all) characters I've run across in some time. Burl is annoyed at first that his privacy has been breached - but he soon warms to this strange, strong-willed young girl. He senses something about her - he senses her pain, he senses her strength, and he senses her need for a friend.
The unlikely and uncommon friendship that develops between these two is both poignant and sweet - it reminds me a bit of the friendship between young Clara Winter and Georg Kominsky in Alison McGhee's unforgettable novel SHADOW BABY. It's a completely believable, generation-spanning bond that they share - and it's a joy to behold.
Through the course of THE HONEY THIEF, Elizabeth Graver leads the reader through the trials, sorrows and joys of these characters' lives - and down the sometimes rough road of memory. She does so with grace, and with a total respect for these characters - and she shows an understanding for the human spirit, and the pain it can endure, that will touch the readers' hearts.
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