Saturday 3 May 2014

Meeting of 3 May 2014

Last weekend of the holidays - so first of all we had to talk about all the adventures we had been having since the last time we met.  Over breakfast at  Olaf's in Mt Eden Bronwyn, Kat and Yvonne went on to discuss the following books.

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain - actually we didn't discuss this too much as two of the three there had not finished reading it!

Beloved for more than a century, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and continues the adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Jim as they travel the Mississippi river valley. Criticized for its colloquial language and use of racial stereotypes and slurs, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn exposes and challenges racist attitudes in the Southern United States at the close of the 19th century.

One Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes

Eleanor Estes’s The Hundred Dresses won a Newbery Honor in 1945 and has never been out of print since. At the heart of the story is Wanda Petronski, a Polish girl in a Connecticut school who is ridiculed by her classmates for wearing the same faded blue dress every day. Wanda claims she has one hundred dresses at home, but everyone knows she doesn’t and bullies her mercilessly. The class feels terrible when Wanda is pulled out of the school, but by that time it’s too late for apologies. Maddie, one of Wanda’s classmates, ultimately decides that she is "never going to stand by and say nothing again."

Go Saddle the Sea by Joan Aiken (Um, two people hadn't read this!)

Despised by his Spanish relatives and ignored by his distant grandfather, twelve-year-old orphan Felix Brooke is lonely and unhappy. So when he's given a parcel with a blood-stained letter from his dead father, it inspires him to track down his long-lost English family. Felix packs his bag, jumps on his trusty mule and heads for the coast and a new life. But his journey across the mountains and over the sea does not prove to be plain sailing - as Felix soon discovers . . .


Something tells me that we were all too busy holidaying to read.  Maybe next meeting will see more books finished.

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