MN Author Will Weaver to visit RHS

Award winning Minnesota Author, Will Weaver

will be visiting Rosemount High School on Friday afternoon, April 16 during periods 6 and 7. His program will be held in the Performing Arts Center, so there should be plenty of room for several classes.

Will Weaver writes fiction for adults and young adults. He was born in northern Minnesota in 1950 and grew up on a dairy farm. His novels and short stories have earned the praises of reviewers from coast-to-coast for their unflinching realism. Each novel in his Billy Baggs series (Striking Out, Farm Team, and Hard Ball) was honored as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association.

His novel Memory Boy (2001) is used widely in schools across the United States. Following the novel, Claws (2001), his novel Full Service (coming of age in the Vietnam era) won starred reviews and was also listed as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Defect (about being different) was a winner of the 2008 Minnesota Book Award, is the story of a young man with a miraculous birth abnormality.

A Prolific Writer

Saturday Night Dirt, a novel focused on stock car racing, was released in April, 2008. A sequel, Super Stock Rookie, was released in April 2009. And a third in the trilogy, Checkered Flag Cheater, is due ouit this month. A sequel to Memory Boy should be out in late 2010.

Weaver describes his presentation as an integrated program on reading and the process of writing. He states, “My presentation comes at reading, literacy and the value of books from a “stealth” direction: through the attention-getter of a race car, and then to my novels for young adults, and then Q & A about how a writer writes, and so on."

Be sure to visit his website for more information....

http://www.willweaverbooks.com/pages/youngadult.php

The Last Campaign by Thurston Clarke

I had just turned 18 a week before Robert F. Kennedy was shot. I remember my father coming down to wake up my older brother and myself, and breaking the news that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. It was somewhat devastating then, but being 18, I wasn't really into politics.

More than 40 years later, much more involved and informed, and reading this book by Thurston Clarke hasn't made it any easier. Clarke provides an insight into Bobby Kennedy, the man and the politician, that could only be obtained from the people that knew and campaigned with RFK in the last 82 days of his life. Anyone who would like to gain greater insight and a better understanding of this charismatic leader should pick this book up.

After JFK's assassination, Robert Kennedy--Jack's political warrior--almost lost hope. He was devastated by his brother's murder, and by the nation's inabilities to solve its problems of race, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. Bobby sensed the country's pain, and when he announced that he was running for president, the country united behind his hopes. Over the action-packed days of his campaign, Americans were inspired by Kennedy's promise of a better time. And after an assassin's bullet stopped this last great stirring public figure of the 1960s, crowds in the thousands lined up along the country's railroad tracks to say goodbye to Bobby as his funeral train made its way from New York to Washington D.C.

Historian Clarke provides an absorbing historical narrative that goes right to the heart of America's deepest despairs and tells us more than we had understood before about this complicated man and the heightened personal, racial, political, and national dramas of his times.

The Angel's Game

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I was really looking forward to reading this novel by Spanish writer, Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I really enjoyed his first novel, translated into English, entitled "Shadow of the Wind". Shadow of the Wind is a beautifully written story about a young boy and the mystery that surrounds a book he chooses, or it may be the other way around, from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. However this is a much darker and sinister story.

The Angel's Game once again incorporates a secret visit to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for David Martin, the main character. This is an intricately plotted novel, with parallels to Great Expectations (the book by Dickens does play a role in the story) and Faust by Goethe. David, who starts out as cub reporter for a Barcelona newspaper, and is recruited by the editor, because he has a talent for telling tales, to write serial stories for the paper, entitled ''The Mysteries of Barcelona''. David moves on from the newspaper work and begins to write cheap "B" grade tales for a local publisher under a pseudonym. This success enables him to buy an abandoned tower house he was always interested in. His life begins to unravel, from the pressure of pumping out the cheap, sensationalized novels and the mysteries that surround his new home.

David is given the opportunity to break out of his literary rut, when a French publisher, Andreas Corelli, offers him a significant sum to write just one novel. This Faustian bargain that David enters into, unfortunately, further leads to his unraveling. The literary project in which Corelli has enlisted David winds up involving him in all manner of deceptions and outright crimes, including a fair number of violent deaths (NY Times Book Review).

Zafon at times is a beautiful writer and quite a storyteller. His prose, at times, flows like poetry. I thoroughly enjoyed Shadow of the Wind. However, while the Angel's Game started out with that same mystical and mysterious tone, it seemed to spiral out of control like a promising horror film that ultimately turns into just another slasher film. But I will say, his closing chapter pulled me back from that dark abyss that David Martin was in, and brought tears to my eyes. Zafon weaves such a spell that you will stay with David and ultimately find yourself caring for what happens to him.