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On the Blue Comet
Escrito por Rosemary Wells
Narrado por Malcolm Hillgartner
Ações de livro
Comece a ouvir- Editora:
- Brilliance Audio
- Lançado em:
- Sep 28, 2010
- ISBN:
- 9781441889508
- Formato:
- Audiolivro
Descrição
Oscar Ogilvie is living with his dad in a house at the end of Lucifer Street, in Cairo, Illinois, when world events change his life forever. The great stock market crash has rippled across the country, and the bank takes over their home-along with all their cherished model trains. Oscar's dad is forced to head west in search of work, and Oscar must move in with his no-nonsense Aunt Carmen. Only a mysterious drifter who stops by each day for food after school helps alleviate Oscar's loneliness-until Oscar witnesses a crime so stunning that it catapults him into a miraculous, time-hopping train journey.
Filled with suspense and peppered with witty encounters with Hollywood stars and other bigwigs of history, this captivating novel by Rosemary Wells resonates with imagination, humor, and the magic of a timeless adventure story.
Ações de livro
Comece a ouvirDados do livro
On the Blue Comet
Escrito por Rosemary Wells
Narrado por Malcolm Hillgartner
Descrição
Oscar Ogilvie is living with his dad in a house at the end of Lucifer Street, in Cairo, Illinois, when world events change his life forever. The great stock market crash has rippled across the country, and the bank takes over their home-along with all their cherished model trains. Oscar's dad is forced to head west in search of work, and Oscar must move in with his no-nonsense Aunt Carmen. Only a mysterious drifter who stops by each day for food after school helps alleviate Oscar's loneliness-until Oscar witnesses a crime so stunning that it catapults him into a miraculous, time-hopping train journey.
Filled with suspense and peppered with witty encounters with Hollywood stars and other bigwigs of history, this captivating novel by Rosemary Wells resonates with imagination, humor, and the magic of a timeless adventure story.
- Editora:
- Brilliance Audio
- Lançado em:
- Sep 28, 2010
- ISBN:
- 9781441889508
- Formato:
- Audiolivro
Sobre o autor
Relacionado a On the Blue Comet
Avaliações
SPOILERS!!
The story veers into fantasy. The boy, Oscar, goes from being a self-sufficient boy who takes it upon himself to cook for a hungry stranger, to a helpless waif over whom the rest of the plot washes like ocean waves. The mechanism for the sudden ability to travel by toy train is poorly explained. Is it something the mysterious Mr. Applegate engineers? ( pun intended) Is it a magic word? Is it built in to the trains themselves, and triggered in a moment of great need? Maybe. But another character who manages this trick has neither the help of a mysterious stranger nor the a magic word nor the urgency of young Oscar.
The author has littered the story with historical characters. Most readers in the target age group for this book have never heard of most of them, and so the little winky winky scene with Oscar encountering a golly-gee all-American young actor named Dutch will completely go over their heads. ("You're not a politician, are you?" I asked Dutch. "Not in a pig's ear!" said Dutch.)
I couldn't even figure out a consistent political view, if the author intended one in a book hero-worshipping Ronald Reagan. All the fat cat pre-Depression Wall Street businessmen are greedy, but Wells also features a sneering, stuck-up teenage John F. Kennedy.
The cloyingly sweet descriptions of Dutch made me roll my eyes. He was "clearly a young man of character" and "just having him on the train made me feel safe all over." The book is full of such snap judgements: Oscar instantly trusts Ronald Reagan based on a handshake; another character lets complete strangers into the mansion in her care because one of them "has such an honest face." Oscar instantly trusts a stranger at the door because he's clean-shaven and is carrying a thick book. Well, good, this all saves having to read any character development...
Then there's the appearance of the mysterious Chinese lady, Miss Chow, who refers to herself in the third person and speaks in an astonishingly breathless, stereotyped way: "Miss Chow hears everything!" Thanks goodness she has a mysterious hypnotic stone that will let Oscar remember all the details of a robbery locked away in his memory! "Chinese method going back two thousand years!"
The most annoying thing was what this book lacked. Our hero manages to travel forward and backward in time in his quest to be reunited with his father. He manages to change the personal history of a recently acquired friend. But seriously, it never occurs to him to try to stop the accident that killed his mother?