When I finished reading "the ark" I just sat on my bed, almost in awe, this story is so real, its a slap in the face for sure. I thought this book was amazing and the Author had pure talent. It's the best book I have ever read.

"The Last of Eden" is a book that takes on all of the things that many books for "children" don't dare too. It is compelling, and overwhelmingly deep, and suprising. The beginning is wonderful, but as we get deeper into these girls who go to a boarding school, we realize that people aren't always as good a friend as we seem. It is hauntingly beautiful, and a wonderful book for ages 10 and up.

This is a wonderful book. It's beautifully written, full of details that put the reader right there, seeing and feeling along with Mark. That's what I appreciated most, being so thoroughly in Mark's head and heart. The difficult ending was perfect, and I felt it down to my toes. My hat is off to Ms. Tolan!

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A 11 YEAR OLD JONAH. HER dad is an fundmentla minster and is agagints halloween. then her uncle who is also a minster comes to town and wants to banne halloween. jonnah likes halloween and is the writer of her schools halloween play can she stand up for what she belives. if if it means going agasints her family.

Save Halloween is so exciting that I never wanted to put it down. It is something that everyone can relate to sometime in their life. It's about a girl named Johnna who could never celebrate Halloween. Her uncle came from Texas and tried to ban Halloween from her town. Will she be able to save Halloween

I just finished reading Who's There?, written by Stephanie Tolan. One thing I liked about it was how the author made Drew and her aunt Jocelyn so understanding to her brother Evan who stopped talking since their parent's death. The first time Jocelyn met Evan instead of making him talk she says, "Grief's an individual thing. Young or old, we cope the best we can. No one can say for anyone else how much time it takes (p.17)." In real life it wouldn't be like that.

I think the theme of this book is that no matter how well you've covered up a crime, you'll end up getting caught any way. In this book Amelia acted all nice and everybody liked her, so she thought no one would think she killed her stepson, but she was still caught. I agree with this theme because I think it's true. You can't do something bad and expect to get away with it. It relates to my life in many different ways. One is that I try not to lie so much because I usually get nervous thinking what will happen when I get caught.

I might recommend this book to someone who enjoys reading ghost stories. It was a pretty good book because it had a nice ending, but the beginning was sort of boring. The author was just listing facts about Drew and Evan. Overall the book was good because there weren't many hard words and it was easy to follow along with the story.

i think Who's there is a wonderful childrens book. When i read Who's there I laughed, cryed, smiled and many other things. Who's there should be nominated for a caldicot award!

This was the best ghost story I have read so far and I love them. I like finding out the history and why the ghost is there haunting. I like the way it got cold and smelled like roses every time the ghost was around in this book. I recommend it definetly.

The book was very exhilarating. I liked all the characters and how they acted to life and challenges. I didn't really like how they skipped eight years towards the end of the book. "Welcome to the Ark" would have been better if they wouldn't have arranged it the way they did. It made you feel like you were really there and you could also make the connections with them. Reading the book went really fast because they were not in chapters like normal books they were in journal entries, e-mails, therapy sessions, and chat rooms. I really liked "Welcome to the Ark" because the characters were so realistic unlike other novels. I recommend reading this novel because it shows how most peoples life are fine and how other childrens lives are dealt with pain and suffering that they dont know how to control themselves. It's a real reality check about how kids in rehab function just like normal kids but at the same time,how they don't understand most things in life. We are recommending this book to people who like to read about interesting things that children can accomplish in life.

I first read this book when I was in the 6th grade. When I first started reading the book I was very confused, afterall I was only about 11 years old,and the book was rather difficult to understand, but I instantly fell in love with it. I became so indulged, it was as if I was in the character's shoes, it was so awesome. I would spend hours on end reading this book and I feel it was more than worth the time. Never had I read a book that had such an impact on me, that opened my eyes, keep in mind how young I was and, though I was more mature than your average 6th grader, how little I knew. I never forgot about this book, & for 3 years I've been looking for it thinking it was entitled "The Ark", tonight I found it & am overcomed with joy. I can't really explain this book or why it had such an impact on me, you just have to read it yourself to find out, but all I can say is that it is beyond awesome.

In our class we are reading Welcome To The Ark. In my group everybody loves the book. It's easy to read, and easy to follow. It's an exciting adventure of four prodigies who are fighting the terrors of the outside world together. Welcome to the Ark is inspiring to me because it shows no matter how alone you feel, there is always someone like you that you can connect with. It was really easy to relate to the problems they face. We would reccomend this book to anyone.

Too much psychobabble with little practical help that hasn't been offered a thousand times before. The book should focus more on the opportunities the giftedness creates for the child both in education and in living a richer life. Developing the "hungry mind" is key, and not letting the child's curiosity be stifled by a lowest-common-denominator public schooling system. A much better book was "Bringing Out the Best: A Resource Guide for Parents of Young Gifted Children."

This is one of the best books on gifted children I have read. I think it is particularly valuable because it focuses less on schooling concerns and more on dealing with the specific issues these children deal with. There are chapters on stress management, motivation, peers, and feelings, to name a few, and each chapter gives tips on how parents can help kids with these issues. This is a great book, and I find myself referring to it often!

I truly enjoyed this book because of the primer nature of the text. Written to appeal to an intelligent lay person, the book addresses a vast array of parenting issues--not just those specific for gifted children. The soft-cover is a good beginning for your research on the concept of "giftedness" in your child and perhaps even yourself. Well worth it and the price is much better than I paid at a Webb talk. An engaging speaker, the text is conversational and straightforward.

In "Welcome to the Ark", Elijah was the least developed of the four characters. Miranda was the easiest to empathize with, the clear center of the novel. Doug was clearly hurt, but he expressed it. Taryn had her poems and her deep connections with everyone and everything to show her feelings of loss. Elijah, a superbly intelligent boy diagnosed as autistic, was the string tying them together, but his characterization itself wasn't much thicker than one. He was the raven, both the protector and the protected, and the silent child who grew a voice in his head, on the computer, and eventually quietly out loud.

In "Flight of the Raven", much of Elijah's characterization suffers from being in the focus rather than the background. His character is interesting when based on interactions, but in this book, he's one of three things: the hunted, the hunter, or the symbol. He and Kenny play a game of cat-and-mouse that seems out of character for Elijah- especially for an Elijah who certainly remembers how to "tame" the violence, as he expressed. He might not have been sure if it would work, but none of the kids in WttA with the possible exception of Doug would have refused to try after the events in the book. Elijah, especially, tended to think before acting. His desire to "get back" at Kenny is normal, but his constant hesitations due to his own size seem to contradict the history in WttA, with Taryn calling birds and all four causing Timmy to break his own foot. The ending of this book makes no sense in the context of WttA, which provided so many ways around violence before he used violence as the means to an admittedly non-violent end. The way he used violence was also mind-boggling; his transformation wasn't precipitated by any hard facts, but he was willing to try that over something tried and true. It rang false for the mind of such a logical character.

Elijah and the raven have always been intertwined, but in this book it becomes much more heavy-handed. In WttA, it was his symbol, and it was in the dreams. As Taryn had said, "the raven still flies". In this book, everyone accepts the bird as a sign, Cassie sees it as an omen, and Kenny hunts ravens to make his point to Elijah. Ravens save Elijah. The book leaves Elijah seeming almost Taryn-like, but his views against peace (saving himself and Cassie and Amber over the lives of others) are decidedly not.

Speaking of Amber, her "Ark-ness" isn't in any way explained. Both Amber and Kenny are intelligent, but Amber shows no sign of Ark. The only signs we're given are heavy-handed, at least compared to the subtlety in WttA. In WttA there were glimmers between Miranda and Taryn or Miranda and Doug, before they communicated about their shared dreams, before Taryn "told" her how the tree felt. Here, Elijah feels connection from almost the beginning. He heals Amber before he knows her. An argument could be made that he opened up after the Ark experience, but the same could be made that upon leaving them he immediately went back to his old ways (getting "inside" the marble, Tondishi, avoidance, etc.) as soon as he left. Amber, however, has never been open to Arkness before. Ark kids were anti-violence, anti-world; she reveled in it and took her father's words at face value.

The near-assault of Amber, while compelling, seemed harsh in a book aimed at children. I don't know if the youngest readers would understand how close it seemed to a rape, and the older readers will probably wonder why it wasn't more of a focal point. Amber was okay with murder when she felt her assaulter would be properly punished, but that isn't a solution. WttA succeeded because the solutions, although not feasible in a literal sense, make sense in symbolic terms. A child could become friends with others who are different and improve the world, albeit not by psychically bonding. Accepting a bombing isn't an answer.

The bioweapons seemed both heavy-handed and scarily prescient. I wish there had been more of a hint of something wrong with Landis, besides Elijah's "bad feeling" about him. It made a possibly good plot weakened. In addition, Elijah left Mack and Kenny in charge as the lesser of evils, and it's disconcerting to think of a "good guy" seeing things that way. No, 140 million people won't die, but they aren't solving problems except with bombs whose death tolls "don't matter". As I was IMing a friend about the book, I kept finding things that rang eerily in the aftermath of even worse New York terrorism. The smallpox issues, which hit me both because of the recent news issues and because of the Cross-X high school debate topic on it, were exceptionally, frighteningly, and flawlessly accurate as far as my research has gone, but the concepts of the "solution" seemed to again go against Elijah and what he chose. He empathized with Amber over dead rabbits and dead parents, much like he did previously when he chose vegetarianism. I suppose the reader could assume that he chose to "turn off" part of the Ark part of his mind the way Doug and Miranda did, but he clearly used it with Amber throughout the novel. It makes sense for Elijah to develop his mind more, away from the stabilizing and repressing atmospheres the other three were in, but it doesn't seem logical for him to develop in this way.

Overall, despite these criticisms, I enjoyed the book. I liked references to the Ark, and the story kept within the context of the ending of WttA. Elijah is still a compelling character, although less so. But unlike WttA, this won't be a book I'll be rereading often. It provides some closure for Elijah, but didn't fit in with what I wanted to believe about all of the characters. It had all of the ingredients for a wonderful book, but they didn't mix together for a really good read.

This book is a sequel to Welcome to the Ark, which I really
enjoyed because of the sensitive portrayal of extremely gifted
children. As a sequel, this book follows Elijah, who recently
escaped from the mental hospital in which he was being held and
is picked up in the forest by a group of terrorists who are
bent on disrupting and eventually destroying the repressive
government of the United States.

Elijah, who is for a long time mute and who is usually outside
of the happenings in the compound, eventually makes friends with
Amber, the daughter of the head of the group. Amber is uneasy
about certain aspects of the goals of the group, but she can't
articulate the reasons for her growing sense that something is
wrong.

Both of the major characters have to eventually face the realities
of the world with regard to their personal commitments to each
other and to the mission of the group, when Amber is the target of
an attempted assault and the terrorism of the group goes further
than they can fathom.

The eeriness of this tale comes from the "bombing of the towers"
and the attempt to infect the whole world with small pox.

As with Welcome to the Ark, though, the ending of this story goes
just a bit too far into fantasy for my taste. Most of each of the
books is realistic and so possible that you would almost think
that the characters are real. But then, at the very end, the
books get mystical and veer off into fantasy. Yes, there may be
powers that these kids have that can't be explained by modern
science, but that almost seems like a cop out, given the very real
world problems they are confronting.

Still, I am eager for the next in the series.

I loved the book! It is highly prophetic, as we see now, after 9/11. It presents moral, ethical, and philosophical questions to the readers that require deep soul-searching...

In surviving the apple whites a creepy guy, Jake, is sent to this home school instead of juvi hall. But to him its prison. Same with E.D. A daughter of the Apple Whites. Jake is your average bad boy whos in denial of the real world. Then theres Destiny: the cute little kid whos ALWAYS in everybody's way and always bugging Jake. The adults are pretty much all the same. And theres a goat thrown in there with the whole motly crew. and a dog. And of course a suposedly "Beutiful" dancer. And a parrot that curses. Talk about random. The auther can do WAY better than this. It takes no time at all to get into this book, but still...no ones that slow. The book takes it's time catching on to the main idea of the story. Books are supposed to grasp your attention and make the reader WANT to read on, not put the reader to sleep! You can go on ahead and read this book, but its pointless! There is no real plot and its almost predictable. Its just random and stupid with 1 or 2 funny parts thrown in. I was only attracted to this book because of the cover, but after a few chapters i had to stop reading it. A total and complete waste of time.

Jake Semple, has been a school problem and is finally placed in the Creative Academy owned by the Applewhites who allow much flexibility and choice in the matter of study and curriculum, and they are also as "different" in "different" ways as is Jake. In time Jake's life begins to change for the better as he interacts with the family and their "quirky" ways. Young people will find areas of empathy and understanding as they relate to the characters in their many humorous and varied situations.
Even reluctant readers will find this book enjoyable!
Evelyn Horan - teacher/counselor/author
Jeannie, A Texas Frontier Girl Books One -Three

In the book Surviving the Applewhites by Stephanie S. Tolan, a bad city kid, Jake Semple, has been kicked out of every school he's been to. He was taken to a school called the Creative Academy, where you study what you want to, when you want to. A family called the Applewhites owns the school and they both are crazy, chaotic, and creative. During his stay, Jake learns new things and his life starts to change. He becomes part of a production of The Sound of Music along with other Applewhites. Through this school Jake finds deep inside himself who he really is, without being a bad boy.
We personally thought the book Surviving the Applewhites was a great book. We really liked it because it was funny, especially when a four year old named Destiny tried to dye and spike his hair. Many times we could relate to the characters because their interests and personalities were a lot like our own. It was very fun to read because of these things. We would recommend it to sixth - eighth graders or anyone who wants to read a really great book.

WOW! Bad book. I gave this book one star because it felt good to end the pain. If you want lots of cult facts this isnt the book for you. If you want a not very enjoyable read....READ THIS! What was the author thinking when she wrote this. It wasnt cool it wasnt funny it was bad.!

This book, A Good Courage, was very,very good. Stephanie S. Tolan has written extremely well about the life of Ty in the Kingdom of Yahweh. She is probably very knowledgeable about religion and has potrayed what religion can not be... slavery...of kids. If anything, this book had a few complex ideas, and only 10 and above can read this book. That is the only reason I did not rate it 5 stars. This book, again was very, very good, and I would recommend it to children over 10.

Personalay I enjoyed this book to me it was very touching. The young boy, Ty, is nice and wants the best for his mom. Even if it means spending the rest of his life in a kingdom where shing and child play is a sinful. Children who are sick must still work in the fields or for the girls doing the kingdom's landray. Ty finds himself in a tough sution and won't give up. This story gave me the fealing of many scared childern's
bravy to surive in this world to wich their parents brougth them.
I think you should read this wonderful book and learn of childern's fatith t live.
(Kids in 7th grade, like me will love this story!!!!!:)!!!!!!!)
My real name is jumping julie the kangaroo from pluto!!!!!!