Georges (the “s” is silent) and his parents move from their house to an apartment in Brooklyn when his dad loses his job. His mom, a nurse, decides to work a double shift at the hospital. His former best friend is now part of the “in-crowd” a group Georges or “Gorgeous” as most of the people in that group call him. Not only is Georges’s home life falling apart, his school life has also become barely tolerable. After noticing a random poster advertising a Spy Club in the basement of his apartment building, Georges, after encouragement from his dad, decides to take a chance and check it out. There he meets Safer, a boy around his age, and Candy, his younger sister. Just like the works of Georges Seurat, the painter he was named after, Georges learns from Safer how to look at the world bit by bit instead of always looking at the world as a whole. With that knowledge he is able to face his biggest fears and accept what is happening in his life.
Liar & Spy is a story that teaches readers of all ages. It teaches the value of mustering up the courage to stand up to bullies and the fears that threaten to drag you down. It teaches the value of understanding your friends and realizing they are more important to you than you think.
I loved “Shadow of the Wind” and I liked “The Angel’s Game”, so I was pretty excited to find a new book set in the same world. Unfortunately, “Prisoner of Heaven” falls flat in comparison to its predecessors.
There are few, if any, teen books written that focus on the plight of those from the Baltic region during World War II. Thus, this book felt like completely new territory to me. While I’m familiar with the Gulag system used by the Soviets, it had never occurred to me that entire families might have been put to work in them. As it turns out, thousands of men, women and children were taken from their homes and places of work in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. These people were deemed criminals and were packed into trains to be shipped off to the wintery lands of Siberia. This book tells of one family’s plight. Taken from their home in Lithuania, a mother and her two children are put on a train and sent east. They travel an astonishing distance only to be put to work in beet fields. They fall ill, they freeze, they go hungry. And then they’re sent to the Artic Circle and forced to build shelter not only for themselves but for the guards as well. No matter how bad it gets, the family never falters in their faith that one day, they will be able to return home, be reunited with their husband and father (who is sent to a different series of camps/prisons). Their love for each other, their culture and their homeland are something that the Soviets could never break them of.
This officially marks the second time I’ve read this book, as well as the second time I’ve used it for a high school book group. I must say, this is a novel that holds up to rereading and remains one of the best discussion books I’ve ever used. The plot sounds simple: a teenaged girl, Hannah Baker, has committed suicide. Before her death, she recorded a series of tapes to be passed from person to person. There are 7 tapes with 13 of the sides used. A “Baker’s dozen”, so to speak. Each side of each tape pertains to a reason that contributed to Hannah’s decision to end her life. Each reason is a person and each person on the tapes has to hear the tapes or risk copies of the tapes being made public. The story is told through the eyes of a boy named Clay, who cannot, for the life of him, figure out what he did to appear on these tapes. Clay had worshiped Hannah from afar and had worked with her, but has never, to his knowledge, done anything to hurt her. The only way to find out why he’s on the tapes is to listen and what he hears will change his life forever.
