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A review by expendablemudge
By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain by Joe Hill
3.0
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: Little Gail London and her friend Joel Quarrel are out on a cold and lonely morning at the end of summer, when they make the find of the century: a dead plesiosaur, the size of a two-ton truck, washed up on the sand. With the fog swirling about them, they make their plans, fight to defend their discovery, and face for the first time the enormity of mortality itself… all unaware of what else might be out there in the silver water of Lake Champlain.
My Review: Childhood's end. Abusive and/or neglectful adults versus damaged children. A completely unexpected and seemingly impossible discovery sets each against all, and no one comes out unchanged.
Sound familiar? It should. It's an evergreen plot for a reason. It explores no new territory, mostly because it doesn't need to. This iteration of the evergreen is told in the voice and from the viewpoint of three kids trapped in a world of hungover parents. Their mutual discovery of the dinosaur, apparently dead, causes little Gail to look inside for what she wants to have in this life. What she decides has a poignance that Hill reveals but doesn't linger over. Not for nothing is Hill the son of novelists!
Thirty well-spent minutes.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
The Publisher Says: Little Gail London and her friend Joel Quarrel are out on a cold and lonely morning at the end of summer, when they make the find of the century: a dead plesiosaur, the size of a two-ton truck, washed up on the sand. With the fog swirling about them, they make their plans, fight to defend their discovery, and face for the first time the enormity of mortality itself… all unaware of what else might be out there in the silver water of Lake Champlain.
My Review: Childhood's end. Abusive and/or neglectful adults versus damaged children. A completely unexpected and seemingly impossible discovery sets each against all, and no one comes out unchanged.
Sound familiar? It should. It's an evergreen plot for a reason. It explores no new territory, mostly because it doesn't need to. This iteration of the evergreen is told in the voice and from the viewpoint of three kids trapped in a world of hungover parents. Their mutual discovery of the dinosaur, apparently dead, causes little Gail to look inside for what she wants to have in this life. What she decides has a poignance that Hill reveals but doesn't linger over. Not for nothing is Hill the son of novelists!
Thirty well-spent minutes.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.