Download the Penalty, Mal Peet, Candlewick Press, 2009
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The Penalty, Mal Peet, Candlewick Press, 2009, 0763643394, 9780763643393, 262 pages. "Any reader who starts this astounding novel will be hard-pressed to put it down. Stunning, original, and compelling." вЂ― Kirkus Reviews (starred review) As the city of San Juan pulses to summer’s sluggish beat, its teenage soccer prodigy, El Brujito, the Little Magician, vanishes without a trace вЂ― right after he misses a penalty kick and loses a big game for his team. Sports reporter Paul Faustino is reluctantly drawn into the mystery of the athlete’s disappearance, and as a story of corruption and murder unfolds, must confront the bitter history of slavery and the power of the occult. This gripping novel from the author of KEEPER and TAMAR is not to be missed.. DOWNLOAD http://bit.ly/HPyUY3 Lost Time , Susan Maupin Schmid, 2008, Juvenile Fiction, 169 pages. 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This is the best. If you want to know just how much bolder and more accomplished current British "children's" fiction is than British "adult" fiction, I suggest you read a few chapters of David Peace's po-faced Beckett-lite account of Brian Clough's tenure at Leeds - The Damned United - and then turn to this glorious, cartwheeling, magical, frightening story. I promise you it'll be like watching Brazil after watching, well, Leeds. Penalty is Mal Peet's second novel about the sports reporter detective Paul Faustino. This time Faustino is investigating the disappearance of a teenage superstar, El Brujito. Faustino is a grumpy, middle-aged bloke with a quick brain and a laconic manner. In other words, he's quite like a lot of other fictional detectives. What's different is the scope and boldness of Peet's storytelling. Imagine if halfway through the latest Henning Mankell, you came across a lengthy and dramatic recreation of a Viking raid. Or if the vital clue in the new Ian Rankin involved a vivid vision of the Highland clearances. That's how Penalty works. It opens in the mind of a boy somewhere in Brazil, commentating on his own ball skills as he practises alone - an instantly familiar scene . It then abruptly cuts to the story of a slaving expedition 200 years earlier. Then it comes back to the thriller plot. And somehow it flows. Peet can play brilliantly bendy long balls and make it look easy. A few years ago, I was in Brazil looking into the story of a man who had been an important folk hero during the Kubichek years. Embarrassingly, the man claimed to have been possessed by the spirit of a German doctor from world war one called Doctor Fritz. In drawings Fritz looked like Mr Magoo. I was going to drop that bit quietly from the story. On arrival in Brazil, however, I could barely find anyone who remembered or cared about my folk hero. He was all but forgotten. Doctor Fritz, however, was still busily manifesting. I met his assistant, who put me in the diary, and a few days later I interviewed him over weirdly coloured milky drinks in the favela meeting hall he shared with the local samba school. In Penalty, Peet has captured perfectly the atmosphere of a country where real people can disappear without trace but spirits are easily contactable and have PAs who run their diaries for them. This book continues a theme that he explored in his Carnegie-winning book Tamar. The past never goes away. The bill always has to be paid. It's a subject that has preoccupied children's writers for generations - from Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill to Alan Garner's The Owl Service and The Stone Book. But it's not Penalty's place in this great tradition that will sell it to teenage boys, so much as its handling of football. The story starts when El Brujito, having missed a penalty, is hastily subsituted. After the game, he vanishes. Is it an emotional reaction to his sudden loss of form, or has he been kidnapped? It's an opening that has all the volatility and drama of Zizou's exit from the World Cup. But Penalty is not as directly about football as Peet's other Faustino novel - Keeper - was. Instead Peet uses the fact that footballers are known to be superstitious - and that great footballers can appear to be supernatural - to explore ideas of faith, luck and corruption. But in doing that he has somehow caught more of the magic and atmosphere of football than other, more straightforwardly descriptive writers. It's good, by the way, to see that he's finally got a half-decent cover. The original cover of Tamar looked like a well-used nappy. And the original cover of Keeper made it look as though it had been published by a vanity press. I hope that the more lavish presentation (and the fancy Paul Faustino website) means that Walker Books have cottoned on to what a treasure he is. As the city of San Juan pulses to summer’s sluggish beat, its teenage soccer prodigy, El Brujito, the Little Magician, vanishes without a trace — right after he misses a penalty kick and loses a big game for his team. Sports reporter Paul Faustino is reluctantly drawn into the mystery of the athlete’s disappearance, and as a story of corruption and murder unfolds, must confront the bitter history of slavery and the power of the occult. This gripping novel from the author of KEEPER and TAMAR is not to be missed. This companion novel to Keeper (2005) picks up the story of South American sports journalist Paul Faustino, who is drawn into a wild, esoteric mystery after a young soccer prodigy disappears. Although Peet's decision to set the story in a generalized fictional South American country may spark controversy, once again, he tells a fascinating, complex tale that incorporates sports, the occult, and South American history and culture. "For me time is folded, like cloth," says one character, and the same is true of Peet's experimental narrative, which leaps between Faustino's contemporary viewpoint and the historical voice of an African man who survived the Middle Passage and the graphic brutality of slave life. Jerky transitions between story lines and some clichéd language distract from the frequent lyricism, vivid magic, and rich, unsettling themes. The surface mystery will intrigue readers, but it's the deeper questions about religious belief, salvation, and how best to confront the past's shocking inhumanity that will linger. For another novel that blends twentieth-century life with African history and voodoo, suggest Susan Vaught's Stormwitch (2005).