Maggot Moon
by Sally Gardner
Length: 288 pages
Format: Hardback
Price: checked out from library
Author Website: http://www.sallygardner.net/
Basic Premise: Standish Treadwell is just an ordinary boy living an ordinary life in Zone Seven. Ordinary things, like the unexplained disappearances of his friends and family members and the murder of a student by a teacher on school grounds, happen every day. It's when Standish decides that they are no longer ordinary that things begin to change.
My Take: 2 out of 10 (scale here)
It's official - I HATED this book. I usually try to let books ruminate for 24 hours, but I feel just as negative about this book now as I did last night when I finished it. The thing that bugged me most about this book was the fact that at NO POINT in the story did I have any "frick-fracking" (as the protagonist was prone to say) clue what was going on. It read like historical fiction, and with the obviously oppressed citizenry, I thought Germany, Hitler, Nazis. Then, when it was clear that wasn't right, I thought futuristic - the moon. Maybe they were on the moon and the "homeland" to which they kept referring was the Earth. Then I felt like I must be a moron, because what was going on HAD to have been well-documented, and I'm the daughter of a history teacher AND a college-educated person. I had to look it up when I finished reading - turns out it, according to the website it was "an alternate Britain." Thanks for that, lady. It was gruesome, gut-wrenching, and fairly confusing. The author like to jump around and I definitely felt seasick. To add to the dark tone of this book, there was a morbid cartoon at the bottom of each page. It began as a rat coming out of a rat-hole, finding a bottle of poison, drinking the poison, dying, and then being devoured by maggots.
Eww.
I would never recommend this to a student, or to anyone, for that matter. It's been a long time since I've read a bad book, and this one definitely qualifies. At least I can cross it off my list.
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