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..
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The Crane Wife , , 2002, Juvenile Fiction, 32 pages. A retelling of the traditional Japanese tale about a poor sail maker who gains a beautiful but mysterious wife skilled at weaving magical sails.. I can't begin to describe how terrific this book is. We're in the middle of a spate of novels about football. I've read them all. 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). Engberg, Gillian --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Mal Peet garnered a number of awards in the field of Young Adult Fiction with Keeper ,his debut novel .On the surface this would appear to be much the mixture as before-a key figure in the previous novel - South American sports journalist Paul Faustino -reappears ;the book features a soccer player in a pivotal role and there is a dose of religion and mysticism thrown into the mix as well.All pretty similar to Keeper but this time out the role of soccer is relatively muted and soccer mad boys who relished the vivid evocation of matches in the earlier book will perhaps be disappointed by the absence of any such passages in this book .The Penalty is a darker ,scarier book with more focus on religion and the troubled history of South America than on "then beautiful game"
Faustino becomes involved in the disappearance of a soccer prodigy -the gifted teenageer El Brujito (the little magician)who simply disappears after being substituted in a big game .Faustino's search takes him upriver ,to a remote and virtually inaccessible part of the jungle where he finds a world still largely in thrall to the Old Gods ,those of Africa and with their roots in slavery
Much of the book takes place in flashback with the narrative being provided by a captive African slave and he tells of transportation to Lation America ,the survival of the old ways and also features some quite violent scenes of murder and sexual violation .It is abook over which an air of violence and coruption ,both moral and legal, hangs and I am unsure of its susitability for juvenile audiences on these grounds
It is strongly written and powerful but too dark and distiurbing to be an auatomatic recommendation for soccer loving kids and adults who enjoyed the previous book .I would instead urge it upon those who like South American fiction as it gives an interesting British take on the themes commmon to Latin American novels
The Penalty is a sports novel for young adults by Mal Peet, published by Walker Books in 2006. It is the second (of three to 2011) football stories featuring South American sports journalist Paul Faustino. The teen football prodigy El Brujito ("The Little Magician") disappears without a trace and Faustino is drawn to the mystery. He unfolds the story behind the disappearance.
For the next Faustino football book, Peet won the 2009 Guardian Prize and explained to the sponsoring newspaper about his second career (then aged 62) that he had felt 'football books for children were "pretty much crap"'. Also, "I used to play all the time. I would play football when it was light and read when it was dark. Now I get to play football vicariously."[3]
Fourteen-year-old Ricardo Gomes de Barros is an orphan devoted to the game of soccer. Called “Rico” by his aunt and sister, he lives in squalor in the countryside surrounding San Juan and practices the sport “in a field of uneven ground where a church once stood.” Because of the magical way he handles the ball and plays the game, other soccer players have given him the name “El Brujito” --- the Little Magician.
When Rico practices and then plays, his head is “full of spirits with whom he talks and in whom he confides.” He listens to the voice of Achache, his spirit ancestor. It is from Achache, the Magician and Dancer, that Rico believes he derives his skills. Rico also knows that behind Achache stands Maco, the Judge, who has even greater powers. He believes that Maco can separate him from his soul and turn him into a ghost, and fears that “if Maco judges you offside, there is no appeal.”
After becoming a famous player, Rico misses an easy penalty kick during a crucial game. Afterwards he seems uncharacteristically distracted, and it's not just because of his missed goal. Rico walks out of the stadium and disappears without a trace. For a time, his disappearance becomes front-page news and the topic of great speculation. Has he been kidnapped? Has he been killed? Is he still alive? No one seems to know, and the mystery of the missing soccer star remains unsolved. Eventually the local media and the police lose interest.
Then, while on vacation in San Juan, South America’s star sports reporter, Paul Faustino, is drawn into the young athlete’s disappearance. After Faustino questions Maximo Salez, a reporter who covered the El Brujito story when it first broke, Salez turns up murdered in a gruesome manner. Faustino’s curiosity about the boy’s disappearance and his desire to get to the bottom of the murder of Salez lead him down strange and dangerous paths, where he uncovers dark truths about corruption, the history of slavery and the occult.
THE PENALTY is a haunting tale that weaves events from the past and the present to reveal how poverty, greed and superstitious beliefs can control --- and destroy --- lives. The graphic descriptions of torture and murder make this story unsuitable for younger teens, but it is one that older readers with a taste for the exotic should enjoy.
For some 300 years, from about 1550 to 1850, Salvador had been a major centre of the Brazilian slave trade. Millions of Africans were kidnapped and shipped in chains to Salvador and sold to the Portuguese owners of sugar cane and cotton plantations. The big thing that seized my imagination was the – what to call it? – the heritage, the history, the power, of West African culture that these unspeakably abused people brought with them – in their heads, their memories, for they had nothing else – to South America. In particular, I was fascinated by their religion, those beliefs and rituals we often call – dismissively – ‘voodoo’. It vigorously survives, not only in the harsh and often impoverished countryside where the plantations once flourished, but also in the bustle of modern towns and cities.
When we got home and I restarted work on The Penalty the book took on another dimension. I had a new voice in my head. The voice of an African boy sold into slavery, a boy who acquires, through his long and unstoppable life, enormous power. As a result, The Penalty became a blend of contemporary crime novel and historical fiction.
Like Tamar, the novel has two time-frames. In the present-day setting, A young star of the club Deportivo San Juan disappears, presumed kidnapped. Paul Faustino happens to be in San Juan at the time, on sabbatical from his newspaper in order to research and write his biography of the great goalkeeper El Gato. Despite his professional instincts, Faustino refuses to get involved in the kidnap story; but then he too is kidnapped and taken on a journey into very dark territory. Interwoven with this modern-day crime story there’s the narrative of a much earlier kidnap victim, a boy captured by slave-traders 250 years earlier and transported to South America. Eventually he becomes Paracleto, a pai, or shaman, whose powers reach across time to touch Faustino in ways the journalist doesn’t like at all.
As football prodigy El Brujito disappears in San Juan, journalist Paul Faustino is reluctantly drawn into the mystery of his disappearance. In a novel that is a sequel of sorts to Mal Peet’s award-winning Keeper, the reader is drawn into a world where the bitter history of slavery and mysteries of the occult are still all too alive. Well-written, evocative and enthralling. Penalty is sure to win Peet even more awards. Georgina Hanratty
‘Peet’s novels for older readers (Keeper, Tamar, which won the Carnegie Medal this year; and now The Penalty) share a strong narrative drive and edge-of-the-seat action as an entrée to the big ideas beyond. The Penalty is the second adventure set in Latin America featuring jaded sports writer Paul Faustino, a likeable out-of-his-depth hack turned sleuth. It is a tale of murder, corruption, cruelty, faith and redemption with a light dusting of football. Faustino’s search for a missing teenage soccer star is entwined with the story of a boy who grows up in slavery, survives through his skills as a healer, worships his tribal ancestors and bides his time for nearly three centuries. Impossible to put down once picked up.’ Geraldine Brennan
‘Peet successfully enters the minds of both displaced African slave and cynical reporter and both stories are carried forward at a pace with drama, emotional depth, and dark humour. The climax owes something to Quentin Tarantino and to Hammer Horror. Like Veneration itself, the novel is a strange and fascinating hybrid. I have just two related doubts about it: whether the genres fit convincingly; and whether the conventions of ‘occult’ fiction that are used to bring them together concede too much to the worn out association of voodoo with black magic. This novel will also appeal to older readers.’ Clive Barnes
Mal Peet won the Carnegie Medal this year for Tamar, his outstanding novel about the Resistance in wartime Holland. His latest, The Penalty (Walker £6.99), about the disappearance of a teenage football star in Brazil, weaves together slavery in that country’s brutal colonial past, tribal magic and themes of modern-day corruption as a cynical football journalist goes in search of the boy. The book is notable for its exceptional humanity, stylistic clarity and neat construction. Nicolette Jones http://edufb.net/771.pdf http://edufb.net/727.pdf http://edufb.net/659.pdf http://edufb.net/259.pdf http://edufb.net/585.pdf http://edufb.net/485.pdf http://edufb.net/419.pdf http://edufb.net/646.pdf http://edufb.net/797.pdf http://edufb.net/169.pdf http://edufb.net/727.pdf http://edufb.net/555.pdf http://edufb.net/580.pdf http://edufb.net/361.pdf http://edufb.net/646.pdf http://edufb.net/105.pdf http://edufb.net/691.pdf http://edufb.net/482.pdf