Anyway, the first one is called The Anybodies, the second is The Nobodies, and the third which I will finish in the next 2.5 hours is called The Somebodies. Can N.E. Bode tell me where the author got the pseudonym for her author name from? Yuk yuk yuk. I'll get some sleep later, I promise. Her real name is Julianna Baggott and she has written other books under that name, like The Prince of Fenway Park which I happen to be in the middle of.
I read The Anybodies years ago; in fact, I got it from a Scholastic book order. I absolutely loved it for it's silliness, mystery, and mention of many other books. The house where the grandma lives is made out of books and she tests her boarders for book knowledge. The main character, Fern, gets tested in my favorite chapter, Part Three, Chapter 4: The Test. I reread that one all the time. The book is similar to the Dr. Cuthbert Soup books, but I'm quite partial to the bookishness in this book.
One day I found out that there were sequels to this amazing book! Sequels, plural! Now, I am the type that likes to read the books in order and reread the first one to remember everything I can. (By book five in Harry Potter I stopped doing that, but it was hard). So I didn't read the sequels for quite awhile, probably years. Then came this challenge and I decided it would be a great time to get all three books together and be able to read them.
So obviously I recommend The Anybodies. Then I readThe Nobodies, which I read in nearly one straight sitting. I didn't want to put it down. It was really good. The author likes to add this bit about her creative writing teacher being after her and that gets very old after awhile, but she seems to get it and shortens her ranting to one sentence only here and there. The magic in this book is wonderful and unexpected and not like anything you've seen before. Also, the illustrations and covers by Peter Ferguson are awesome. He's great at drawing what I am picturing without even knowing I'm picturing that!
Now I'm on The Somebodies which is good but has a weird beginning, so even though I read 100 pages of it straight, I did have to take a break from it. When I finish this post I will get back to it. Unfortunately a different person did the cover, so they don't all look like they go together, but Ferguson did still do the illustrations inside the book.
The characters have personalities, the books can be funny, you really care for the characters, and the writing in the first two made me read them straight through because they hold your attention so well. Definitely a series I would highly recommend, or even just the first one for something quirky, mysterious, and bookish.
This is a good time to read a series (ish) and not forget what happened in the first books. I can read more slowly, but since I try to read every book before ordering it for my school library (or in the case of series, before I put the book on the shelves), I have learned to read fairly quickly. I can retain enough to write short review and remember enough long term to know what sort of student will read it but NOT character names and rarely how the book ends. This is actually useful when students want me to write their book reports for them. Hope your fund raising goes well.
ReplyDeleteOkay, that makes sense. I don't read that fast and I still don't retain character names or much of the plot, but that's still impressive. So you get to tell your students, sorry, I can't even tell you who is in the book or what happened? Nice.
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