The Fire Within

Author     Chris D'Lacey

Publisher     Scholastic inc.

 This book  is the first out of a trilogy. I had never heard of it until my mom brought the second book home. A couple of days later I was in a Thrift store looking for books when I came across the first one, so I bought it to try it out.

 It is about a young college student, who when looking for a place to stay, found a single mother(Liz)  and daughter(Lucy) with a free room. The mother is a potter to sculpts clay dragons. The girl, likes animals, but especially squirrels, so when David, the young college student agrees to help Lucy find a certain squirrel, it leads him not just to find the squirrel but to find more and more questions about dragons and their fire within.

D'Lacey is very good at describing the scene and he makes the characters sound like they've come out of a English  family home.  I found this book funny and really well written.

By K. (son)

WORD NERD

Take a twelve year old male with a peanut allergy, give him an odd name (Ambrose), an overprotective mother, a father who died before he was born, add a tale of woe with 3 horrid adolescent males in the school and bang, you've got E-T-O-L-B-R-U ... a 7 letter word.  You'll figure it out.

Ambrose is likeable.  His mother isn't.  Ambrose needs to get a life, because mom keeps pulling him away from life.  She's keeping him safe.  So when she removes him from school because she's scared for his life, he has to take matters into his own hands or die of something other than a peanut allergy. 

O-E-D-M-O-B-R

Ambrose taking things into his own hands means he makes a few unlikely friends (ex-con, older landlords, Scrabble club), learns about life (winning and losing), and takes a huge risk in order to keep what he's finally got -- the ability to figure out who he is.

Author:  Susin Nielsen

Publisher:  Tundra Books

Reviewed by Brigitte, mom

Why are we doing this?

The Wiebe Roberts family are all avid readers, so we have decided to start documenting what we've read in the form of reviews. In doing so we hope to help you find a book to have a pleasurable reading experience. We also hope that you write in with comments telling what you thought about a certain book. One of us will post a review as soon as we are done reading a book or series.