A skillful intertwining of two stories, one set in 1955 during the polio epidemic, and one, a story-within-a-story set in a fantasy world. Laurie begins the fantasy story to entertain her polio-stricken friends, who are hospitalized and breathing with the help of iron lungs. As the story expands ...
If you like reading about explorations that are true stories and have sad endings, then you should read this book. It is called The Winter Pony by Iain Lawrence. But do not read this book if you love horses. I love horses and I was in shock at the end of this book.This book is told from the persp...
In the quiet of Hog's Hollow, each member of the River family pursues a dream. Old Man River sets out to build a fallout shelter in case the war in Vietnam "brings the end of everything;" his wife Flo, who collects Gone with the Wind dolls, attempts to pen her own Southern saga; Beau, their older...
Sometimes a nation's economy is so poor it relies on thievery. Somalia is notorious for piracy to bring money to its people. Iain Lawrence takes a look at a different sort of piracy, that of wrecking ships to loot them. Using false lights, the people who live on the island of Pendennis lure lost ...
While the first book had hints of Dickens in it, in a most subtle way I see hints of Hugo's Les Misérables in this book. Not the story per se, but the Ideas propelling it. Like Fate & injustice. I was already thinking this and then near the end when Mullock tells his story & it includes being s...
Lawrence’s novel shows readers a darker side to 19th century London that persists of villains, smugglers, and backstabbers in a boy – eats – boy world. The main character Tom Tin although not accustomed to this lifestyle finds himself thrown in when his father is wrongfully accused and locked in ...
Erika LawrenceLawrence, Iain. (1999). The Smugglers. New York, NY: Random House Inc.AdventurePrintSelection Process: Something About the Author. Detroit: Gale ResearchReviewThe Smuggler’s is the second novel within a series of books about sixteen-year old John Spencer’s adventure within the ship ...
12 July 2004 B FOR BUSTER by Iain Lawrence, Random House/Delacorte, June 2004, ISBN: 0-385-73086-1; ISBN Library: 0-385-90108-9"In an upstairs room in BlackpoolBy the side of a northern seaThe army had my fatherAnd my mother was having meMilitary madness was killing my countrySolitary sadness co...
This book is about a 14-year old albino boy named Harold. He frequently calls himself "the ghost". Harold was sitting at the Rattle Snake River when he met an Indian named Thunder Wakes Him, and who told him about a circus that was in town. He told Harold the circus was travelling to Oregon. Whil...
This review is part of my Poppies & Prose feature. You can find out more about it here. “Below me were my wooden soldiers. The nutcracker men were hidden in the dark shadows of the tree and the wall, but the moonlight gleamed on my Frenchmen and my Tommies…The guns in France pounded away with th...
SHE looks over his shoulder, down at the book. The page that he’s reading is mottled with seawater stains. In places the letters are smudged by a spatter of drops that might have been spindrift or rain.She finds it strange to think of her son writing this. He was always so tidy and neat, but the ...
Beezley extended his arms, and Weedle and Penny went to his side like monkeys to an organ grinder. Boggis didn’t join them, and little Midge just turned away and wandered off. He sat by the mainmast, not quite facing us. “You can steer where you like, Mr. Beezley,” he said. “But it won’t do you n...
I squinted into layers of shadows that shifted in the fiery glow from the windows. I could see nothing but could imagine anything, and in the dark mass that moved along close to the deck, I formed the shoulders and the battered head of the man I had left covered in cockroaches. I saw his arm stre...
This time, when I look up, I see a tiny cloud of mist hovering over the sea. A whale is passing. In my hands, Kaetil the Raven Hunter is open to the same page that Frank read aloud in the cabin. I remember being surprised—even annoyed—that he knew about Valkyries and warlords. I didn’t like to th...