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English Plus Language Blog Search Primary MenuReviews Entrance Exams Grammar Vocabulary Uncategorized English Plus Software Search for: Reviews Slugfest – Review April 30, 2024 jbair Leave a comment Gordon Korman. Slugfest. Balzer + Bray, 2024. For a shorter review see: Slugfest by Gordon Korman My rating: 4 of 5 stars Slugfest is another Gordon Korman funfest. Like many of his novels such as Ungifted, it is a fish out of water story, and much of the humor stems from that. Summer school at Robinette Middle School is for the people who have problems with their subject. A new state law requires that all students pass eighth grade physical education to enter high school in the fall. The students who did not pass gym class, then, have to take phys ed for summer school. if they want to go on to high school. Now, this does include some of the usual suspects: Kaden, the brainy, but uncoordinated victim of teasing; Arabella, who proudly has skipped gym for three years; the Fidelio twins, Stuart and Sarah, who spent so much time fighting each other in class that they lost credit for not participating; and practical joker Jesse, who flunked after a prank of his flooded the locker room. The middle schoolers call the summer PE students the slugs: stereotyped as slow and lazy and lacking strength. But the class also includes two athletes. Cleo broke her foot in a skiing accident and missed too many gym classes while she was in rehab. Because of the seriousness of her injury, she has sworn off sports. And then there is Arnold Yashenko. Yash” was a star quarterback for the high school junior varsity team. If anything, he did more athletics than most of his classmates, but in order to make it to football practice at the high school, he was allowed to miss his last period class. Guess what his last period class was? There is a great sense of injustice or unfairness among the slugs, especially with the new state requirement. Arabella signs up for an extra credit summer class in journalism. The teacher is a local television reporter who became famous in the town for exposing a car wash that cut corners. Arabella wants to somehow expose unfairness in the summer school program. And she thinks she may have the goods on Mrs. Finnerty, the retired second grade and home economics teacher who is doing the summer gym class. Her problem is that everyone likes Mrs. Finnerty. Yes, she does have them do elementary school games like duck-duck-goose sometimes, but she is really sweet and every day she brings delicious desserts. Even Arabella likes her, she just does not think taking the class is fair. Meanwhile, prankster Jesse has developed some fake news regarding toilets. For his journalism project, he wants to see if his social media posting gets any traction. Things get complicated for Yash. Sure, he does fine in the gym class, but while he is taking summer school, the rest of next fall’s J.V. football team is practicing. Even though he played for the coach last fall, the coach refuses to let him come late to practice. He learns that there is a new kid in town who is every bit as good a quarterback as he is. That newcomer already has a nickname, Nitro Nate. Even Yash’s two best friends on the team become more distant as Nate’s speed and skills impress the whole team. As with so many of Korman’s stories, the mixed ensemble cast provides a lot of humor and conflict. At the same time, the kids each in their own way try to make the best of a bad situation. But it takes time. And they have a lot to teach each other. Slugfest is a lot of fun. What will Arabella do about her research on Nate and Mrs. Finnerty? Will Jesse’s big prank work this time and give him credit in the journalism class? Watch how Yash learns to play the twins off each other to get them to play football. And Kaden really is a poor athlete, but he can instruct Yash on the best trajectory for a football pass. And there is a big climax that affects everyone. It may not be the same as a truckload of Vuvuzelas floating down the river as in The Unteachables, but it is fun with a purpose. Gordon Korman has crazily creative mind. Reviews A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War – Review April 23, 2024 jbair Leave a comment Joseph Loconte. A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War. Nelson, 2015. For a condensed review of this see A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18 by Joseph Loconte My rating: 5 of 5 stars Readers might be able to guess what A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War is about from the title. Yes, fantasy writers J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis both survived the First World War. This book not only recounts their war record, but it shows how their war experiences affected and colored their storytelling. Because both authors wrote powerful stories, this book itself is one powerful book. The author cites many reputable historians in describing the general experiences and effects of the war. At the same time it focuses on the two men. Lewis, a few years younger than Tolkien, did not reach draft age until 1916, but that was the same year Tolkien joined up. Both men became junior officers, and both men served on the lines for about a year each when they were sent home: Tolkien suffered a severe illness while Lewis was badly injured. The Armistice was signed before either man had fully recovered. But both men lost many or most of their friends. Lewis was very thankful that his older brother Warren (Warnie”) survived. The main thrust of A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War, however, is literary. Loconte observes that most war veterans such as Remarque, Hemingway, Graves, or the early Dos Passos had all become disillusioned. They saw such horrors of war that any Victorian optimism or scientific evolution could no longer be seriously believed. This reviewer cannot help think of the fractured Lord’s Prayer in Hemingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”: Our nada who art in nada…” etc. Tolkien and Lewis were different. Just yesterday I was listening to a podcast from a fantasy writer. He said that the main difference between fantasy and science fiction is that science fiction often is amoral while fantasy notes that good and evil exist. The few fantasies such as the Game of Thrones series which are exceptions to this prove the rule because Martin will never be able to bring the tales to a close. Loconte notes two key differences in Lewis and Tolkien from most of their contemporaries. The first is that they wrote from a Christian worldview. Lewis’s conversion came later as an adult. He had already written some things that were more typical of his generation. The author quotes Virginia Woolf when she heard that T. S. Eliot had converted and been baptized. She wrote: I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there is something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God. (125) Whew! Talk about strong language! Loconte says that such was the tide of elite opinion in much of postwar Europe.” How countercultural were such things among the elite, the literati. Both Lewis and Tolkien were Oxford professors; Eliot, a celebrated poet. All three found something in the waste land” of the postwar West. The second is that they believed in the noble potential of people. No, neither Frodo nor Ransom were flawless. Frodo, after all, did not voluntarily toss the ring into the pit of Mt. Doom. Ransom thought there was little he could do about the N.I.C.E. The stories may have been fantasy or science fiction, but the motivations of the characters were things we could all relate to. Middle-earth is not, Tolkien insisted, an imaginary world, but rather our world—with its ancient truths and sorrows—set in a remote past. Indeed, any legends cast in the form of a supposed primitive history of this world, he said, must reckon with the tragic reality of human frailty....