Highlights of this novel include that the woman m.c. is smart, the dog's perspective is really interesting (and very touching), and there are so many creeps around that the suspense is pretty solid throughout. At times, Bettina's reactions and choices are a little unrelatable, but her convictions are also what drive the plot, so this is understandable. Joe is a very good dog. Always eager to please the humans on his team, he regularly outperforms every other dog when it comes to sniffing out contraband items, despite not even coming close to fitting the image of the usual working canine: Without me?” you ask. You have to understand that she’d been home alone for three months, and we didn’t have any family members nearby who could watch the kids. If she was to relax—and she deserved it—I’d have to watch the kids. It was the only way she wouldn’t worry, so she went off to Hawaii with a friend. This was all happening in 1996, and 1996 was a pretty eventful year for me. 1996 was the year my father died. In 1996, I was still worried about my sister’s health, and 1996 was the year The Notebook was published. Needless to say, there was a lot going on that year.

Overall, I really liked this book! It was engaging and interesting. Though it did not seem quite as rich in research as Resistance, it still seemed very accurate. The other characters? Less interesting. They're written well and they're not unlikable.. they just seemed contradictory and I feel like that prevented me from really connecting with any of them.Flying Fergus 6: The Cycle Search and Rescue: by Olympic champion Sir Chris Hoy, written with award-winning author Joanna Nadin

If I were a better person, I might’ve felt guilty...My only regret was that we wouldn’t be here to see it” (167).So far I’ve summarised this book as if it were a kind of love story, but there’s a great deal of darkness here too. The mysterious white-suited figure of Jorgenson looms about the margins of this story; an old white sailor with a somewhat mysterious past, he harbours a kind of hollowness reminiscent of all those men Marlow encountered in the deep colonial outposts of the Congo. Like the Professor in ‘The Secret Agent’, he is a nihilist, with a casual contempt for the everyday value of human life. Rainbow Fish ‘reluctantly’ swam off to join his friends. Can you think of other adverbs to use in this sentence? How does this change the meaning? Street mutt had always wanted to have a human of his own. He has the common dog need to give one human everything but some dogs get humans and some do not." When The Notebook was published, I went on a tour that lasted a little longer than three months and my wife was home alone with our two children, so for Christmas that year, I bought my wife a gift I thought she would love. I got her a trip to Hawaii—without me.

Six hundred and fifty-seven days ago, Meg Kenyon's father left their home in France to fight for the Allies in World War II, and that was the last time Meg saw him. Recently, she heard he was being held prisoner by the Nazis, a terrible sentence from which Meg fears he'll never return. All she has left of him are the codes he placed in a jar for her to decipher, an affectionate game the two of them shared. But the codes are running low, and soon there'll be nothing left of Papa for Meg to hold on to at all. Meg Kenyon may be young, but she is already doing what she can to help the Resistance fighters hiding near her grandmere's farm. When her mother gets hurt and an injured British spy takes refuge in their barn on the same night, Meg is recruited for a dangerous mission. She will lead a family of three out of France to safety and gain her father's release from a prison camp in Germany. This book is nonstop action and filled with difficult decisions. As Nielsen points out in her Author's Notes, the fascination with WW II history is in part due to our wonderings about what we would have done had we been in their shoes. Would we have been able to glean clues from this note that Meg received from her father?

Required Cookies & Technologies

I will say that I was pleased with the ending. Early on, I considered how the author might go about things, and there was only one conclusion that I felt would satisfy me. Fortunately, the author seemed to feel the same way, as that’s the route he took. An American reporter rescues a Mexican street dog that was wounded in a gunfight and when the drug dealers, DEA, and various past owners find out from her stories that the dog is alive, they all come after her and the dog. With her father missing and her mother and grandmother in danger, Meg embarks on a rescue mission with 3 others whom she may or may not be able to trust to a destination that may or may not be the right destination. With only cryptic clues from her father and a shot-down spy, Meg much trek across France to save her family and her companions. And not merely to its setting by Joseph Conrad in the Malay Archipelago, where the shallow waters of the Karimata Strait separate Sumatra to the west from Borneo to the east. Exotic to western readers, the locale renders even more special the romance between a freelance sea captain of a small boat and a British woman traveling with her husband on a yacht that has gone aground on a sandbar off one of the many islands. The locale enables it, in fact. The remoteness of the spot heightens and intensifies the action among the vividly drawn characters. It is a dangerous place, with political conflicts simmering among the islanders native to the region and the potential treasure of a British yacht and its passengers too much for some of the factions to resist.

Rescue' is not just muscular descriptions of the churning sea, or some kind of intrigue or action. In a head-on manner, Conrad resolutely takes on things like lengthy/nuanced conversations; character development; thoughts-inside-characters-heads; etc. After putting it down, you may still feel that it's not that appealing a yarn, but you can't fault him for "skimping". The movie with Dustin Hoffman, where he plays an autistic character. The one where he lives in an institution.

Subscribe to Nicholas’s Mailing List

After she said that, I felt terrible. It wasn’t like that for me. I’m not a mother and though I loved Ryan, I guess I’d just assumed he’d be okay. Needless to say, I apologized to my wife and then I said: In investigating Felix’s past, Bettina discovers that his life is nothing like what she assumed. For one thing, he’s not a Mexican street dog at all. A former DEA drug-sniffing dog, Felix has led a very colorful, dangerous, and profitable life. With Bettina’s story going viral, some interesting people are looking for Felix, making him a target—again. The next day, I bought a small table and chair (the chair had a seatbelt) and I strapped my son into the chair. I opened a picture book, held out a small piece of candy, and pointed to the first word and image. Conrad has also removed a good deal of the excessive verbiage that was in his first draft of The Rescue, making this a better book than the other two works in this loose trilogy. However, while the book is vastly improved as a result, it cannot be counted as one of Conrad’s best works. It is too wordy and abstract when it needs to be pacey and forceful. I don’t know. But we do recommend getting another test, this time on his hearing, so we can be sure nothing is physically wrong with him.”