WILD WAVE — Review & Giveaway

Thought for the Day:

“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.” 
~ Tim O’Brien ~

Gifts for My Writer Friends:

Show, don’t tell, but with a twist. HERE Jan Fields at the Institute of Children’s Literature has an excellent article on Sensing It: Bringing Show Don’t Tell to Your Nonfiction. So much more non-fiction is being written for kids these days. This is a nice twist.

I don’t read enough craft books for my writing, and I know I should read more. HERE is a good list by Nicole Gulotta with The 15 Best Books About Writing. I’ve only read a couple of these! I have work to do.

HERE is a great post by C. S. Lakin on Common POV Violations and How to Catch them. This is one of the best POV posts I have seen in a long time.

The post-op boot has been booted! It’s gone. It feels so good to have some freedom. I promised my daughter I wouldn’t drive while I was wearing the boot, and I kept that promise. Now I am out and about some, doing a few errands, but still keeping my foot up a lot of the time until the doctor tells me the bone is completely healed. I’m not having any real pain, but my foot gets achy if I’m up too much, so I’m taking it a bit easier than usual. I mentioned not long ago that I was reading a new adult series — the Will Trent books by Karin Slaughter — and that I would report back. If you are looking for a good mystery series, it is a good one. I just finished book four and can’t wait to get to the next one, but I have some review books ahead of it. In other news, I did, of course, watch the debate. Wow. That was amazing. I loved that Taylor Swift asked her young followers to do their own research and make their own decisions, but that they should vote, and that Vote.org got over 400,000 visits in a couple days. It’s so important for young people to get involved in the process. Swift is the right kind of influencer, in my opinion. Too bad she is getting so much flak for it. We should all go to Vote.org and check our registrations. There are some shenanigans going on in some states.

Last week I offered a gently-read hardback of Tree. Table Book. by Lois Lowry to one of you. This week’s winner is Donna Gwinnell Lambo-Weidner. Congratulations to you, Donna! I will get your book out to you soon. If you don’t know Donna, she is a children’s writer from Northern California whose debut picture book, THERE ARE NO DRAGONS, came out last spring. You can learn more about her and read her blog at her site HERE.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know I have a thing for survivor stories, and one of my favorite survivor-story authors is Rodman Philbrick, whose name, I am convinced, was created by the same person who came up with names for Archibald Leach and Roy Scherer Jr. But I digress. WILD WAVE is the third in Philbrook’s Wild Series. I reviewed WILDFIRE and WILD RIVER earlier on my blog. If you click on the titles, it will take you to those reviews. I liked WILD WAVE just as much as the others. The man knows how to write a survivor story. Here is the review I wrote for the San Francisco Book Review.

Nick is visiting an animal sanctuary overlooking Cape Courage for a school assignment. The tour is led by Jess Hardy, a girl from Nick’s school. She loves her job, and the tour is fun and interesting. The animals start freaking out, the earth shakes and rolls, and the animals break free. Nick and Jess see the bay has emptied, and they realize a tsunami is coming.

They run for higher ground, into pine woods, and climb a huge fallen tree, barely escaping the wave. They try to walk out of the ruined woods and find an older couple whose boat was brought to the middle of the woods by the wave. The man is injured, the woman is running out of her medication, and it is up to the kids to walk out and find help.

Rodman Philbrick is a master of middle-grade survival novels. He puts believable young characters in seemingly impossible situations and challenges them to survive, throwing more and more obstacles in their way as they muddle through, learning as they go. The situations are things that could really happen, the dialogue is snappy and realistic, and the stakes are sky-high. Do not miss this book!

I have a gently-read ARC of this book to give to one of you. All you need to do is be a follower (it’s free and easy — see the top, right corner of the post) with a US Address, and leave a comment. If you share the link to this post on social media, please let me know in your comment, and you will get an extra chance. And please don’t forget to check for other Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday posts at Greg Pattridge’s blog HERE.