Blur boy and girl
Fans of Jerry Spinelli s Maniac Magee and Louis Sachar s Holes will enjoy this story about a boy and the ancient secrets that hide deep in the heart of the Florida everglades near a place called Muck City. Blur boy and girl live When Charlie moves to the small town of Taper Florida he discovers a different world Pinned between the everglades and the swampy banks of Lake Okeechobee the small town produces sugar cane and the fastest runners in the country Kids chase muck rabbits in the fields while the cane is being burned and harvested Dodging flames and blades and breathing smoke they run down the rabbits for three dollars a skin And when they can do that running a football is easy But there are things in the swamp roaming the cane at night that cannot be explained and they seem connected to sprawling mounds older than the swamps Together with his step second cousin Cotton Mack the fastest boy on the muck Charlie hunts secrets in the glades and on the muck flats where the cane grows secrets as old as the soft earth secrets that haunted tripped and trapped the original native tribes ensnared conquistadors and buried runaway slaves Secrets only the muck knows Boys of Blur
Back in the early 90s Eugene H Peterson was my pastor for about five minutes I was in the last group of folks to join Christ Our King Presbyterian Church before he left I don t think correlation indicates causation Gene s son once told him You only have one sermon an observation that Gene didn t take as a compliment Sometime later the son moved away to another state and started looking for a new church there After visiting one congregation for a while he switched to another Why As he told his dad That guy hadn t found his sermon. Boys of blood and bone Nate Wilson has found his and preaches it yet again in Boys of Blur And here perhaps clearly than in his other books so far we see that it s also his father s sermon and his grandfather s sermon which is appropriate for a book with a strong father and son theme. Luisterboek boy My favorite bit was where Cotton tells Charlie to read a certain edition of Beowulf Since I worked on that edition it s almost sorta kinda like I m a little bit in the book None of which is likely to be remotely helpful to anyone who wants to know about the book but I never did claim to be a good book review writer Hardcover By rights I should love this Smart complex middle grade fiction that defies genre classification And yet football. Boys of tommen blurb I ve always disliked football I didn t realize how much that bled over into say fiction about football until I read Boys of Blur It s not so much the football itself well it kind of is the way football is used as a barometer for adulthood or success or being a good person It rubs me the wrong way It s an accurate reflection of life but that s probably why it bothers me so much. Christian boys brigade Actually it s not just the football I disliked I certainly can t call that a flaw it s a personal bias The defies genre part though that was mostly vague and confusing It was simply there in the middle of an otherwise gritty contemporary work and it seemed out of place and at odds with the tone of the rest of the story It wasn t until the end that I realized the novel was based on Beowulf at which point I noticed how obvious that should ve been and I can t say I m a fan of the parallel It made the fantasy elements feel shoehorned in and all the so because they weren t grounded in anything Because it felt like the fantasy elements were just a chapter in the boys lives experienced and learned from and then no longer a part of their world and that highlighted how awkward they were Despite that though there s a lot of very good stuff in this book Fabulous fabulous family stuff Great adult presence and relationships Friendship and courage and loyalty and how the decisions you make affect the person you become What it means to grow up and be an adult I still say football isn t a barometer of that though Hardcover So a few weeks ago I made this comment I just don t like middle grade books. What genre is boys of blur I think someone Up There heard me and put this book in my path Because BOYS OF BLUR is one of the best books I ve read this year and quite possibly the best MG book I ve read ever I make the comment all the time that there is a class of YA Fiction that I call sophisticated Sure there are plenty of fluffy and fun YA books but there seems to be this class of books that is expertly crafted gorgeous and un put downable It s these books that add to my conviction that the best writers around are writing YA Look at Maggie Stiefvater s The Scorpio Races Kristin Cashore s Bitterblue anything by Melina Marchetta just to name a few as soon as I hit post I will regret not adding 20 others So here s this thing I think I had an epiphany BOYS OF BLUR was every bit as sophisticated inventive lyrical supreme unforgettable as these YA books I love so much But it went one step further It s only 200 pages long And this my reading friends BLEW MY MIND That you can take the character development the perfected storyline the tight editing and the FEELINGS of a fabulous YA novel and pare it down to 200 pages it s like magic It IS magic It requires the reader to suspend their belief even which requires the writer to make it work And in books like BOYS OF BLUR it does work And I don t think the best of the best of the best adult books can even come close to the sophistication of a book like this And I don t think the most prolific literature academics could wrap their head around a book like this I think it takes the uninhibited unrestricted and ingenious mind of a child to comprehend it fully or maybe I should say it takes that mind to know you don t HAVE to comprehend it fully I don t have a clue about what to call the type of author that can write a book that speaks to that child mind I am ashamed to admit my previous feelings about MG books Granted I always lauded their benefits I just never personally enjoyed them Now I feel a whole new world has opened up to me and I can t wait to dive in to this ultra sophisticated class of MG fiction Will I find it in other books I think so Though they have a mighty high standard to live up to Hardcover Another good oneWilson always delivers and this was no exception I m always amazed by the vivid imagination and fantastical worlds he creates So enjoyable Hardcover I m disappointed but this is still like a 3. Blur wallpaper boy This book is Utter Magic in the sense that it s hazy with the smoke of the burning sugar cane fields that it s Beowulf but with fast kids and small town football in the Florida swamp. Blur boy and girl The small town football is one of my favorite things about it but also probably the source of my greatest disappointment I wanted the book to belonger That s all Longer Slower To move like the sun in the hot August sky over the muck To linger like a midweek summer afternoon in a small Southern town The action the Beowulf was incredible but it would all have felt weighty to me if the book had taken some time establishing its setting I wasn t bored with the antics of incorrigible homeschooled Cotton or the football star with something mysterious about him presence of Sugar or the blurry sense of boys running after rabbits in the cane or the bond between Charlie and his stepfather and his mother and his stepsister or the petty irritation of the stuck in the past cops or the background threat of Charlie s dad. Boys blue boots And I really like Sugar Hardcover I like a kid s book with ambition It s all well and good to write one about magic candy shops or goofy uncles or simpering unicorns or what have you The world is big and there s room for every possible conceivable type of book for our children you can imagine But then you have the children s book authors that aim higher Let s say one wants to write about zombies Well that s easy enough Zombies battling kids is pretty straightforward stuff But imagine the chutzpah it would take to take that seemingly innocuous little element and then to add in oh I dunno BEOWULF N. Boys blue sweater D Wilson is one of those guys I ve been watching for a very long time The kind of guy who started off his career by combining a contemporary tale of underground survival with The Odyssey Leepike Ridge In his latest novel Boys of Blur Wilson steps everything up a notch You ve got your aforementioned zombies as well as a paean to small town football an economy based on sugar cane harvesting spousal abuse and rabbit runs It sounds like a dare honestly I dare you to combine these seemingly disparate elements into a contemporary classic The end result is a book that shoots high misses on occasion but ultimately comes across as a smart and action packed tale of redemption There is muck then sugarcane then swamps then Taper The town of Taper to be precise where 12 year old Charlie Reynolds has come with his mother stepfather and little sister to witness the burial of the local high school football coach It s a town filled with secrets and relatives he never knew he had like homeschooled Sugar his distant cousin with whom he shares an instant bond Together the two discover a wild man of the swamps accompanied by two panthers and a sword The reason for the sword becomes infinitely clear when Charlie becomes aware of The Gren A zombie like hoard bent on the town s obliteration and then THE WORLD it s up to one young boy to seek out the source of the corruption and take her yes her down I had to actually look up my Beowulf after reading this The reason The opening Wilson doesn t go in for the old rules that state that you should begin your book with some kind of gripping slam bang action scene His first page It reads like an ode Like a minstrel has stepped out of the wings to give praise to the gods and to set the scene for you Only in this case it s just the narrator telling you what s what When the sugarcane s burning and the rabbits are running look for the boys who are quicker than flame Read that line aloud for a second Just taste and savor what it s saying It sounds familiar doesn t it Like you ve read it somewhere else before particularly that look for the part Then there s that last line Out here in the flats when the sugarcane s burning and the rabbits are running there can be only quick There s quick and there s dead So I looked up the beginning of Beowulf just to see if by any chance Wilson had cribbed some of this from his source material Not as such The original text is a bit concerned with great tribal kings past and all that jazz That doesn t make Wilson s book any less compelling though There s a rhythm to the opening that sucks you in immediately It s not afraid to be beautiful It begs to be heard from a tongue And while I m on the topic of beautiful language Wilson sure knows how to turn a phrase If he has any ultimately defining characteristic as a writer it is his complete and utter lack of fear regarding descriptions He delves into them Swims deep into them Can you blame him Though a resident of Idaho here he evokes a Florida that puts Carl Hiaasen to shame Examples of some of his particularly good lines As for the church bell it crashed through the floorboards and settled into the soft ground below It s still down there under the patched floor ringing silence in the muck Charlie looked at the sky held up by nothing than the column of smoke he d noticed during the service Charlie stopped at the end beside a boy with a baby face on a body the size and shape of someone s front door And I m particularly fond of this line about new siblings When Molly had come she had turned Charlie into a brother adding deep loves and loyalties to who he was without asking his permission first The book moves at a rapid clip but not at the expense of the characters For one thing it s nice not to have to read about a passive hero From early in the book we know certain things about Charlie that are to serve him well in the future As the story says thanks to experiences with his abusive father he could bottle fear He d been doing it his whole life This gives Wilson s hero a learned skill that will aid him in the rest of the story And when there are choices to be made he makes them He isn t some child being taken from place to place He decides what he should and should not do in any given moment and acts Sometimes it s the right choice and sometimes it s wrong but it is at least HIS choice each time The sugarcane fields themselves are explained a bit late in the narrative On page 64 or so we finally get an explanation about why the boys are running through burning fields to catch rabbits For a moment I was reminded of Cynthia Kadohata s attempts to explain threshing in her otherwise scintillating book The Thing About Luck Wilson has the advantage of having an outsider in his tale so it s perfectly all right for Charlie to ask why the only way to successfully harvest cane is to burn it Fastest way to strip the leaves Stalks is so wet they don t burn Mind you this could have worked a little earlier in the story since much of the book requires us to take on faith why the rabbit runs occur It s also an unapologetically masculine story as well All about swords and fighting and football and dangerous runs into burning sugarcane fields The football is particularly fascinating In an age when concussions are becoming big news and people are beginning to turn against the nation s most violent sport it s unique to say the least to read a middle grade book where small town football is a way of life Small town football almost NEVER makes it into books for kids partly because baseball makes for a better narrative by its very definition Football s difficult to explain Its terms and turns of phrase haven t made it into the language of the cultural zeitgeist to the same extent For an author to not only acknowledge its existence but also give it a thumbs up is almost unheard of Yet Boys of Blur could not exist without football Charlie s father went pro as did his stepfather The book begins by burying a coach and there are long seated animosities in the town behind old high school football rivals For many small towns life without football would be untenable And Boys of Blur acknowledges that to a certain extent. Boys blue school shorts The women that do appear are few and far between but they are there One should take care to note that it s Wilson s source material that lacking in the ladies except for the big bad of course And he did go out of his way to add a couple additional females to the line up It s not as if Charlie himself doesn t notice the lack of ladies as well anyway At one point he ponders the Gren and wonders why there aren t any girls The possible explanation he s given is that much as a selfish man is envious of his sons so would a selfish woman find her own daughters to be competition Take that as you may We veer close to Caliban country here but Wilson already has one classic text to draw from Shakespeare can wait. Boys blue sweatshirt Charlie s mother would be one other example of a woman introduced to this story that gets a fair amount of page time On paper you d assume she was just a victim a woman who continues to fear her ex husband But in reality Wilson gives her much credit She s the woman who dared to get out of an untenable situation for the sake of her child A woman who managed to find another husband who wasn t a carbon copy of the first and who has done everything in her power to protect her children in the wake of her ex husband s threats And most interesting Wilson will keep cutting back to her in the narrative He doesn t have to There s a reason most children s fantasy novels star orphans Include the parents and there s a lot of emotional baggage to attend to But Wilson s never liked the notion of orphans much so when his story cuts back to Natalie Mack and what she s up to it s a choice you go along with In Wilson s books parents aren t enemies but allies It goes against the grain of the usual narratives wakes you up and makes for better books. Blur selfie boy Where do heroes find their courage and resolve In previous books Wilson had already gone underground and into deep dark places In Boys of Blur he explores the dual worlds of cane and swamp alike Most epic narratives of the children s fantasy sort are long bloated affairs They feel like they can t tell their tales in anything less than 300 pages and even then they end up being the first in a series Wilson s slick sleek editing puts the bloat to shame Clocking in at a handsome 208 pages it s not going to be understood by every child reader It doesn t try for that either Really it can only be read by the right reader The one that s outgrown Harry Potter and Percy Jackson The one who isn t scared off by The Golden Compass and who will inform the librarian that they can t possibly impress him or her because they ve read everything This is a book to stretch the muscles in that child s brains To make them appreciate the language of a tale as much as the action And yes there are big smelly zombies that go about killing people so win win right Some may say the book ends too quickly Some will wonder why there isn t a sequel But many will be impressed by what Wilson s willing to shoot for here Like the boys in the cane this book speeds out of the gate quick on its feet willing to skip and hop and jump as fast as possible to get you where you need to go If you ve read too much of the same old same old this is one children s book that s like no other you know out there Gripping. The blue boy 1994 For ages 10 and up Hardcover I burned through this book reading it the day it arrived I ve enjoyed every book Nate Wilson has written so I knew I was in for treat Boys of Blur exceeded my high expectations A fantastic story with brilliant writing Hardcover So I just finished an under 200 page book filled with swamp muck high school football dead bodies an abusive father human appendages nailed to walls and an awful stench that makes you hate everyone and everything and the only word in my head after finishing the last page was Beautiful Only N. Luisterboek boy D Wilson can do that Hardcover Boys of Blur now there s a word is well written in parts give it that but the well written parts cannot salvage the whole It is in fact a mish mash that some readers will be perplexed by Is it a realistic novel It certainly begins as one Boy Charlie moves to a Florida town with Mom who has married a new man while the old one s still about As said town Taper is step dad s Mack hometown he is cued up to become the new football coach replacing the recently passed Coach Wisdom. Boys of bluehill chords OK I m on board with it But then the novel veers voodoo or something Charlie falls in with a kid named Cotton and they run through burning sugar cane and they meet some weird dude in a helmet and sword think Ghost of DeSoto maybe who wears dead rabbits and keeps panthers for pets. Boys blue sweater Still with me Grades 3 to 7 Next we get a grave robbing a full size tree appearing overnight in said grave some creature from the deep that stinks so much it s nicknamed Stanks but is really named Gren DeSoto turns out to be a human I think named Lio and he s doing battle against this ancient curse groan not again and meanwhile the Sheriff and his buddy have it in for Mack because they played for a rival football team and step dad is smoking cigarettes and glaring at the motel where Mom is staying and Charlie gets injured and some Swamp Witch wife of the dead coach applies maggots to his wounds and. Boys blurry pics Confused yet Crying My kingdom for a consistent genre yet It s as if the book cannot make up its mind and so lurches this way and unfortunately that But still Wilson does drop some good writing in there It s just unable to gel in the heat and the melodrama maybe Genre busting That might be a word for it But I sincerely doubt many of my students would stick with it Time will tell though Hardcover This book blurs My heart is still sprinting N D Wilson s new story of boys brothers swamps stink muck and monsters grips from the get go and never lets up Ever It is scary fast I sat down to read it and a few hours later done A little dizzy but done Some of Nate s best prose yet is crammed into this breathlessly exciting mystery adventure that openly and happily shoplifts all the best stuff out of Beowulf and is so far definitely the easiest of his to translate into a movie compact plot freakishly unique setting and super creepy villains think prime material for M Night Shyamalan From start to finish it s a remarkably neat tale with everything death resurrection happy ending in the right spot but not the way you re expecting and definitely not so easily that you aren t sick to your stomach with fear that Nate will forget he s a postmillennialist Fists clenched pulse hopping I couldn t slow down and the only problem with that is that I was done so quickly and now the book is over Time to rereada little slower Reread in September 2015 Hardcover
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Boys of tommen blurb 75 star book rounded down because rounding down is my policy I have intentions to appreciate things when I reread and raise my rating and stuff:
Boys blue shirt I m disappointed but you have to understand that in the context that this is an N D Wilson book N D Wilson books get 5 and 4.
Blur - 'girls & boys' 5 rounded down star ratings N D Wilson books are Utter Magic and Speak My Language.
Christian boys brigade I would have liked the mystery to have gone on longer I guess,
Boys of tommen blurb It was still very satisfying Still very beautifully written In that N D Wilson way strong verbs and crazy metaphors that somehowwork instead of being ridiculous.It s a good sermon
