Saturday, March 12, 2005

Flamingnet February Enewsletter

Flamingnet Book Reviews Enewsletter

Topics:
1. New and Advance Book Reviews
2. Other Recent Book Reviews
3. New Word Challenge Section
4. Flamingnet Content Rating
5. Become A Flamingnet Student Reviewer
5. How To Unsubscribe To Our Newsletter

1. New and Advance Books Recently Reviewed On Flamingnet
DELIVER US FROM NORMAL Kate Klise
What is normal, anyway? Kate Klise's book Deliver Us from Normal is an intriguing, adolescent view on what normal is and why it is
so important to children and teenagers.
http://www.flamingnet.com/enewsletter/205.cfm?enb=132Fdaw

ANACAEONA Edwidge Danticat
Quisqueya is the name of the land currently called Haiti, and the time now is 1490. Anacaona is a young lady, and heir with her brother Behechio to the throne of Xaragua, a section of Quisqueya. Anacaona gets her hair cut off, a Native American ritual sending her into adulthood. Now that she is in adulthood, she can marry. Caonabo', the chief of the land of Maguana, which is a different section of Quisqueya, is looking for a wife, and he chooses Anacaona.
http://www.flamingnet.com/enewsletter/205.cfm?enb=232Fdaw

HOW TO BECOME A PIRATE Cressida Cowell
Poor Hiccup. He wants to be as good a Viking pirate as his father, Stoick the Vast, but his absolutely average size makes Pirate Training Lessons harder than he thought. But with the help of his best friend Fishlegs and his loyal, if sometimes sulky, pet dragon Toothless, Hiccup is destined for great swordfights, meetings with mysterious strangers, and hilarious treasure- seeking adventures as he learns "How to Be a Pirate."
http://www.flamingnet.com/enewsletter/205.cfm?enb=332Fdaw

HUNTER JoyCowley
Jordan and her brothers, Baxter and Robbie, are flying on a small plane, and they crash. Baxter has suffered some wounds in his arm. They all are hungry. They know they are miles away from civilization, so they have to survive on their own. Yet, they are not completely on their own.
http://www.flamingnet.com/enewsletter/205.cfm?enb=432Fdaw

MILLICENT'S GIFT Ann Rinaldi
Millicent is a fourteen-year-old girl with an incredible power. Millicent can do magic, and when she is fifteen she will have a wish that will absolutely have to come true. Of course, what should the wish be? Millicent comes to an extreme conflict. Should she use her wish for friendship, brotherhood, or for something she would want?
http://www.flamingnet.com/enewsletter/205.cfm?enb=532Fdaw


2. Other Recent Book Reviews
A MANGO-SHAPED SPACE Wendy Mass
Mia has a perfectly harmless yet rare condition where sights and sounds have a color in her head. Whenever she hears a noise, a color streaks across her vision. She has had trouble in school trying to figure out how numbers can be added together to get another number. To Mia the corresponding number they add up to does not match the color that the original numbers were. As long as she has known about it she has kept it a secret, until now.
http://www.flamingnet.com/enewsletter/205.cfm?enb=632Fdaw

CHILDREN OF THE LAMP P. B. Kerr
John and Philippa are twelve-year old twins that live in New York with a seemingly perfect mother and a short businessman father. It all starts with a trip to the dentist where John and Philippa find that they have to have their wisdom teeth removed. While they are under anesthesia, their djinn-uncle Nimrod puts himself into their dreams and tells them to meet him in London. The kids mysteriously convince their mother and when they ask their father, he seems scared to say no. When they meet their Uncle Nimrod, their mother's brother, they find out that their mothers side of the family is djinn. This means that they have magical powers.
http://www.flamingnet.com/enewsletter/205.cfm?enb=732Fdaw

GODS AND GENERALS Jeff Shaara
This prequel to The Killer Angels begins before the start of the Civil War; it goes all the way through the first part of the war and stops at the beginning of Gettysburg. It mainly follows four men, Robert E. Lee, Winfield Scott Hancock, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. The reader learns about their personal lives and the lives they led as soldiers. Jeff Shaara turns these men's years as soldiers into a beautifully told story that educates as well as entertains.
http://www.flamingnet.com/enewsletter/205.cfm?enb=832Fdaw

LORD OF THE KILL Theodore Taylor
Ben's parents have left on a trip to India to do a story about Bengal tiger poachers. Ben's father is a conservationist that has made many people mad with his actions to stop the illegal killing of tigers. They leave Ben, their 18-year- old son in charge of the family's Los Coyotes Big Cat Preserve. Ben handles the responsibility well, and the job is easy, until someone breaks into the preserve.
http://www.flamingnet.com/enewsletter/205.cfm?enb=932Fdaw

SUPERNATURALIST Eoin Colfer
The book takes place in the future. It starts when Cosmo Hill, formerly an inmate in the Clarissa Frayne Institute for Parentally Challenged Boys, escapes to a group that calls themselves Supernaturalists. The group now has four members, Cosmo, Mona, Ditto, and Stefan. What they all have in common is the ability to see a creature that they have named Parasites. They are supposedly sucking the last bits of life that injured people have left in them. The Supernaturalists fight these creatures by rushing to places where people have just been injured to ward of the Parasites with their electric rods. Soon, though, a person will give them information that will challenge what they are fighting for.
http://www.flamingnet.com/enewsletter/205.cfm?enb=1032Fdaw


3. New Word Challenge Section
On our home page,
www.flamingnet.com, we have added a new link to a Word Challenge on our sister site, Laurensland.com. We have a database of over 6000 vocabulary words, many that appear on standardized tests. Students are presented a defintion and given four choices. For members of Laurensland.com there are two other vocabulary sections that include more difficult words with definition and context clues.


4. Flamingnet Content Rating (FCR)
Flamingnet feels that it is beneficial for readers, and those selecting and recommending books to preteens, teens and young adults, to have some idea about the sexual, drug and violent content of the books they are considering. Flamingnet Book Reviews, besides reviewing books, also rates books on content. Our content rating helps people determine the appropriateness of a particular book for a particular reader or group of readers. Our content rating system does not deal with the reading level of the book, just the content of the book. The vast majority of the books on our site are rated a FCR of 1, however, there are a few books on site that have a FCR of 2 or 3.


5. Become A Flamingnet Student Reviewers
We would like to thank those of you who have suggested students to us who are interested in becoming a Flaminget Student Reviewer. We still have a few more openings if there are others who have interested students who you feel would enjoy reviewing new and advance books for Flamingnet. Besides getting to see their review published on the Internet, in most cases the students can keep the book that they reviewed. For every five books they review, we send them a $15.00 gift certificate to Amazon.com. There is a link on the home page of our web site where interested students can fill out an application to become a Flamingnet Student Reviewer.

6. To Unsubscribe
We promise not to send this too often or make it too wordy. We are dedicated to informing you about preteen, teen, and young adult books that you may want to know about. We would be disappointed if you choose to unsubscribe to this e-newsletter but if you would like us to remove you from our mailing list, simply email us back and ask to be unsubscribed.

Thank you!
Gary and Seth
webmasters@flamingnet.com
www.flamingnet.com