Tag Archives: Louis Sachar

#BookReview ‘The Cardturner’ by Louis Sachar #YA #family

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The Cardturner by Louis Sachar is a book about bridge. The card game. And it’s also about relationships. Alton, a seventeen-year-old is tasked by his mother of ‘keeping in’ with his rich blind uncle Lester Trapp by driving him to bridge club in the hope that Trapp will remember their family in his will. What starts as an arduous weekly task becomes a new hobby for Alton as he is caught up by the game of bridge, his uncle and the mysteries of his life. Louis SacharIt is a story about friendship between the generations, all brought together by the game of bridge. Alton doesn’t care about his uncle’s will, he just wants to play bridge better. And get to know his cousin Toni better too. Alton is his uncle’s cardturner, he sits beside him at the bridge table and plays the cards his uncle tells him to.
I am not a card player and I have to say I skipped some bits, but Louis Sachar allows you to do this: he bookends ‘bridge technique’ sections with a line drawing of a whale so you know you are safe to skip a bit and won’t miss the plot. For this reason, this novel is more suitable for older teens than the younger teens who like Holes.
Like Sachar’s Holes, it is a charming book. It shows that your assumptions about things you do not know can be way wrong; Alton soon finds out that bridge is not a game played just by old people. He also discovers that old people can be cool, that they were young once and had their own romances and challenges. Just when Alton starts to understand Trapp, to appreciate him, and to get better at bridge, the plot takes a twist which forces Alton and Toni to make a choice.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

Read my review of HOLES, also by Louis Sachar.

If you like this, try:-
‘Divergent’ by Veronica Roth #1DIVERGENT
‘La Belle Sauvage’ by Philip Pullman #1THE BOOK OF DUST
‘The Queen of the Tearling’ by Erika Johansen #1TEARLING

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE CARDTURNER by Louis Sachar via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-11l

#BookReview ‘Holes’ by Louis Sachar #YA #mystery

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Holes by Louis Sachar has been sitting on my shelf forever but I picked it up this week when I exhausted my Kindle’s battery. How lovely to hold an actual book again. I know this is a book for tweens, but I’d heard such good things about it that I wanted to see for myself. Louis Sachar I loved the premise: that Stanley is wrongly found guilty of stealing a pair of trainers and is sent to a juvenile correction camp where the punishment is to dig a hole a day. Five feet deep and five feet wide. Every day. It is supposed to be character-building, but Stanley thinks there is another agenda. “There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. There once was a very large lake here, the largest lake in Texas. That was over a hundred years ago. Now it is just a dry, flat wasteland.”
It is a story about finding out who you are, standing up to bullies and finding your bravery. “Out on the lake, rattlesnakes and scorpions find shade under rocks and in the holes dug by the campers.”
Woven in with the day-to-day tale of hole-digging is the background to Stanley’s unlucky family; unluckiness blamed on his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather. Stanley is a kind of every-boy, who helps a boy worse off than himself and ends up challenging the system.  And Sachar ties up the loose-ends brilliantly.
Not just for kids.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

Read my review of THE CARDTURNER, also by Louis Sachar.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Ship’ by Antonia Honeywell
‘The Choir’ by Joanna Trollope
‘The Mystery of Three Quarters’ by Sophie Hannah #3Poirot

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview HOLES by Louis Sachar http://wp.me/p5gEM4-K1 via @SandraDanby