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Overview / 简介: |
| Fourteen-year-old Derek Stone lives in New Orleans, is a little bit overweight, and…oh, yeah, he's on the run from the dead! The fast-paced, haunted adventures of a likable hero. |
From Organization / 国外机构评价: |
| Grade 5–8—Fourteen-year-old Derek survives a horrific train wreck, but his father and older brother Ronny are killed. When Ronny shows up a month after his death, with no explanation, their uncle, who is taking care of Derek and the estate, accepts him immediately. But it's soon apparent to Derek that Ronny is not who he seems to be. Investigating the fact that there was a similar disaster 70 years ago at the same place involving a train full of murderers and thieves introduces Derek to the idea of translation, or dead souls possessing the bodies of the more recent victims. The book's title refers to one of the large cemeteries in New Orleans. The first title (Scholastic, 2009) in the series by Tony Abbott ends with a cliffhanger. Nick Podehl does a good job with Derek's first person narration, lending an immediacy and urgency to the story. What secrets lie ahead in the City of the Dead? Though it occasionally veers off into territory where suspension of disbelief becomes a heavy burden, this should be a good match for reluctant readers.—Charli Osborne, Oxford Public Library, MI |
Foreign Customer Review / 国外客户评价: |
| Rating: five stars.
This book reads like a cross between Flatliners and the Crow but is written for a younger audience. It is dark and haunting and yet compelling to read and leaves the reader desiring the next book in the series. It is a ghost story set in a southern gothic milieu, in and around the New Orleans French Quarter. Our protagonist Derek Stone is a young man, who prefers fact to fiction and things that can be proved and quantified. His life is literally turned upside down when on a trip with his father and brother they are in a train wreck. Derek survives and is beginning to deal with the death of his brother and father when a month after the accident his brother is found. But something doesn't seem right about his brother.
Derek soon realizes that the world is not as orderly as he believed, and that the dead do not always stay dead. The dead are coming back and most of them seem to be after him. He is not sure how it happened or why, but he realizes that he is at the center of something very important, something that could matter to all who are still living. And yet we wonder: can a young man with so much stacked against him solve the puzzle in time?
Tony Abbot has written over 70 books for readers both young and young at heart. Most known for his Secrets of Droon series and his bestselling novels Kringle and Firegirl, this book was an interesting read; it raises questions, about the afterlife, souls and death. Abbot manages to capture our imagination and the book is so well-written it will compel you to read the rest of the series. It would be interesting to see how it did in general fiction with the four volumes published as a single book for adults. I believe it would garner a large fan base in that market also. |
About the Author / 作者介绍: |
| To begin with, I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and lived in a small house on top of a hill. Together, my mother, a school teacher, and my father, a returning World War II paratrooper pursuing his college studies, brought tons of books into our small house on Cliffview Road. I guess you could say that these books were my first introduction to the world of literature. My father was always writing, so the sound of the typewriter was like the background music of my early childhood.
When I was eight, we relocated, by car, to Connecticut where I finished elementary school and high school. I went to college at the University of Connecticut, majoring first in music (too hard), psychology (too many theories), and finally English (yes! lot and lots of books!). I graduated UConn with a bachelors degree in English Literature. After that, I traveled to Europe for quite a while, drank a lot of coffee, and wrote notebooks full of strange poetry. When I returned, I found work in a variety of bookstores and finally a library where I met my wife to be.
It was when I began reading bedtime stories to my children that the spark of writing I had had for so many years finally turned to children's books. After many failures, my first published book, Danger Guys, was written while taking a writing class with renowned children's author, Patricia Reilly Giff. That first book, and the series that it began, became the cornerstone of my writing career and has become something of a cult favorite, by virtue of its being difficult to find. Since then, I've written over seventy-five books for readers ages 6 to 14, including the cult favorit popular fantasy saga, The Secrets of Droon.
Over 8 million of my books have been sold worldwide, and my series and novels combined have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Korean, French, Japanese, Polish, Turkish, and Russian. Danger Guys was named a Children's Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection, and the American Booksellers Association voted The Secrets of Droon among the "Top 10 List of Books to Read while Waiting for the Next Harry Potter." The series was also a Main Selection of the Children's Book-of-the-Month Club, and is on many school and library reading lists.
In 2007, my novel Firegirl won the Golden Kite Award for Fiction presented by the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. It is the only award given by children's writers to children's writers, a peer award I remain honored at having received. It was also a selection of the Junior Library Guild.
In the Spring of 2008, my second novel for Little, Brown Books for Young Readers appeared. The Postcard is a comedy/mystery about a boy who finds a clue on an old postcard while cleaning his recently deceased grandmother's Florida house, and who has no choice but to follow the mystery wherever it leads. Among other things, The Postcard is my love song to Florida's Gulf Coast, where my grandparents lived, and to old Florida, its architecture, roadside attractions, and Wild-West origins. It is, not least, my homage to the great hardboiled tradition of Hammett and Chandler, translated to a Florida setting. The Postcard won the 2009 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Juvenile Mystery.
In 2009, The Haunting of Derek Stone, a series of four books for older readers, appeared from Scholastic Inc. Titles include: City of the Dead, Bayou Dogs, The Red House, and The Ghost Road.
My literary and cultural interests include the films of Preston Sturges, the Road pictures of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, and the Marx Brothers, and the writings of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, P.G. Wodehouse, Jules Verne, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, The Arabian Nights, Beowulf, James Thurber, Philip Roth, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner. I'm currently a member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, the Yale Center for British Art, and other esteemed organizations. With my wonderful wife, two delightful and brilliant daughters, and the best dog imaginable, I live and work happily in Connecticut. |
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