THE PRINCE OF THE STEEL PIER — Review

Thought for the Day:

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” 
~ Winston Churchill ~

Gifts for My Writer Friends:

It is always a good idea to get new ideas about building characters. HERE on A Writer’s Path, Georgio Konstandi has a good post on Creating that “Killer” Character.

If you’ve ever read a book about the craft of writing or taken a course, you probably know how important the inciting incident is. HERE is a good article on Writers in the Storm by Lynette M. Burrows called Ignite Your Reader’s Imagination with the Inciting Incident.

C. S. Lakin always has interesting content for writers. HERE she gives us 6 Questions to Get to the Heart of Your Story. This is well worth your time.

In one of my classes, we have been working on figurative language with a section on metaphors. Then a friend sent me a bunch of metaphors taken from essays written by teenagers. (These are from the UK, so you might spot some Britishisms.) There are a lot of them, so I will only share half and save the rest for another day I don’t have much to write about. Enjoy!

The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get for not eating for a while.
Oh, Jason, take me! She panted, her breasts heaving like a student on a pound-a-pint night.
He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a landmine or something.
Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.“
The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a lamppost.
It was a working-class tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with their power tools.
He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a dustcart reversing.
She was as easy as the Daily Star crossword.
She grew on him like she was a colony of E.coli and he was room-temperature British Beef.
She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

I don’t know how I didn’t get my review of THE PRINCE OF THE STEEL PIER by Stacy Nockowitz up before this. Sometimes books migrate to the bottom of books-I-have-read pile or I pass them along or something, and I forget to get the review up. I read about this book, I believe, on Greg Pattridge’s blog and then was lucky enough to find it on the review list for the Portland Book Review. I knew from the review I had read, I would like it, and I really did. And, as I too often say, it’s never too late to review a book. Here is the review I wrote for PBR.

Joey loves spending the summer in Atlantic City with his family. They stay with their grandparents, helping Uncle Sol run their grandparents’ hotel. The guests are older Jewish people who’ve been coming for years, but Atlantic City is changing. Gambling was legalized, casinos are moving in, and some unsavory characters are around. Joey gets noticed for his skee ball prowess by those characters, and it makes him feel powerful hanging with them, even working for the top guy chaperoning his very pretty daughter. But things get very dark. The only ones Joey can count on are his family, but he may have put them in terrible danger.

Stacy Nockowitz has written a very compelling story with rich, complex characters and tension throughout. The setting is one most young people won’t be familiar with, but it is an interesting time and place that will keep them engaged. There is also the foundation of the family’s deep and abiding Jewish faith, which young Joey is questioning, something quite common for kids that age. Joey feels left out with two older brothers who are close and a younger brother who is a star. This is a terrific book that should not be missed.

Please don’t forget to check for other Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday posts at Greg Pattridge’s blog HERE.