Genre: Novels

A novel is a long prose narrative that usually describes fictional characters and events in the form of a sequential story. It rests on the consensus that the novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose, followed by the novella, novelette and the short story. However, there is no consensus as to the minimal required length. In part because of this wide variation, the boundary between a novella and a novel may be arbitrary and difficult to determine.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America specifies a word length of over 40,000 words for a novel, while National Novel Writing Month requires its novels to be at least 50,000 words.

Serpent

LauraLeave a Comment on Serpent
Serpent
,

, Book # 1
Pocket Star
June 1, 1999
ebook
480
English
April 4, 2018 June 2, 2018

The author of sixteen consecutive New York Times bestsellers unleashes a hero for the next millennium in an electrifying new series of unrelenting action and edge-of-your-seat thrills. Clive Cussler introduces us to Kurt Austin, the courageous leader of the NUMA exploration team.

When Kurt Austin, the leader of a courageous National Underwater & Marine Agency exploration team, rescues beautiful marine archaeologist Nina Kirov off the coast of Morocco, he becomes the next target of Texas industrialist Don Halcon. A madman bent on carving a new nation out of the southwestern United States and Mexico, Halcon’s scheme hinges on Nina’s recent discovery involving Christopher Columbus, and a priceless pre-Columbian antiquity buried in the battered remains of the sunken Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria. Only Kurt Austin and his crack NUMA team stand between Halcon and the Andrea Doria’s silent steel hull—and if their deadly mission fails, Halcon will ride to power on a wave of death and destruction.

About the book

I chose this book for the Popsugar challenge, for the prompt “a book with an animal in the title” since I had destined the one chosen previously to another prompt, but I must say I didn’t liked this too much.

The story is too long, the times that the NUMA is in danger is ridiculous, the bad guy had the potential to be a really bad guy but the final fight didn’t satisfied me.

There are so many questions left unanswered! How did the NUMA know where to go to solve the mystery? I did not understand how the went from the stone to Guatemala O_o Sometimes the writers draw the map of a land so we, readers, can also have a vision of the place, but there isn’t one here and I honestly did not understand anything of the description they have made of the map. And how did “the bad guy” know where to look if he did not see the stone?

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Heart

LauraLeave a Comment on Heart
Heart
Cuore
, ,

Fredonia Books (NL)
1886
Paperback
274
Italian
Isabel Florence Hapgood
March 18, 2018 March 21, 2018

Written following the Italian war for independence by a sub-lieutenant who had fought in the siege of Rome in 1870, Heart is the fictional diary of a boy's third year in a Turin municipal school. It was written to foster juvenile appreciation of the newfound Italian national unity, which the author had fought for in the recent war. The book is often highly emotional, even sentimental, but gives a vivid picture of urban Italian life at that time. A master, introducing a new pupil, tells the class, "Remember well what I am going to say. That this fact might come to pass--that a Calabrian boy might find himself at home in Turin, and that a boy of Turin might be in his own home in Calabria, our country has struggled for fifty years, and thirty thousand Italians have died." The novel became internationally popular, and has been translated into over twenty-five languages, and is part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. Edmondo de Amicis (1846-1908) established a reputation as a writer in various genres after his experience as a soldier.

About the book

This is a book that when I was a child everyone told me “read it”, “it’s a beautiful book for kids” and now that I read it, I wonder how is it that a book so “out of the Italian language” being for children? I need to say that I read this book just because, for the Challenge of Popsugar, I had to read “a book from my childhood that I wanted to read and I never read”, otherwise, as I said on Goodreads where I added all the books that I own, I would have never read it.

First of all, the book was written in the nineteenth century so obviously the Italian is not the Italian of today, so I wonder how a child/boy who has just started his journey in the Italian language can fully understand what is written. Not all the book is like that but if it is not fluent for me because of ancient Italian, how can it be for a boy? How can a child like this book? Now I know why I never read it when I was young, as soon as I started it I gave up.

Continue reading “Heart”