The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane
3/5
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About this ebook
When an accident leaves teenage cousins Meline and Jocelyn parentless, they come to live with their unknown and eccentric Uncle Marten on his private island. They soon discover that the island has a history as tragic as their own: it was once an air force training camp, led by a mad commander whose crazed plan to train pilots to fly airplanes without instruments sent eleven pilots to their deaths. Jocelyn, Meline, and Uncle Marten are soon joined on this island of wrecked planes and wrecked men by an elderly Austrian housekeeper, a very mysterious butler, a cat, and a dog. But to Jocelyn and Meline, being in a strange new place around strange new people only underscores the fact that the world they once knew has ended.
Told in the alternating voices of four characters dealing with grief in different ways, Polly Horvath's new novel is a rich and complicated story about loss and the possibility— and impossibility—of beginning again.
The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane is a 2008 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
Polly Horvath
Polly Horvath has written many books for children and young adults, among them Everything on a Waffle, The Canning Season, and One Year in Coal Harbour. She has won numerous awards including a National Book Award, Newbery Honor, Toronto Dominion Award, International White Raven, and Canadian Library Association's Young Adult Book of the Year. She has also been short-listed for Germany's most prestigious literature award, the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis, as well as the Writer's Trust Vicky Metcalfe Award for her body of work and many others. Her books have been New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestsellers and Rosie O'Donnell and Oprah picks. She is translated into over 25 languages and her books are taught in children's literature curricula in North America and internationally. She lives in British Columbia.
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Reviews for The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane
5 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Parents of two cousins are killed in a train wreck, and the teenaged girls are sent to live with an eccentric and reclusive uncle on an island in British Columbia. All are at a loss as to what to do with one another and with their grief. A housekeeper/cook, a caricature of the Yiddish grandmother, is hired to take care of things the uncle cannot manage. She is also dealing with the loss of her husband and sons. She hires a butler who ends up taking care of everyone and everything. No one deals with grief in a healthy way.The uncle has retreated to the island, one girl retreats inside herself, the other tries to build a machine to fly away from her grief. The housekeeper medicates with "cough medicine." Bleak, gray wet, rainy, and unhappy, switching point of view with each chapter, this book is a major downer. Chirstmas is a disaster, with the reason for having more than one Jesus for the manger a welcomed bit of comic relief. The silent cousin disappears inside herself, aided by the housekeeper's "cough medicine," the uncle thwarts the runaway, the housekeeper dies, turns out the butler is actuually a priest ineffectually trying to help all of these walking wounded. Everything is tied up neatly in the last chapter and the last two pages are just weird - a glossary of Yiddish terms. This is definately not "Everything on Waffle."
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I didn't finish this, largely because I was reading for the purpose of compiling a booklist and this didn't turn out to fit well. Even if I were reading this just for pleasure I'm not sure I would have finished -- her characters are, as always, unbeatable. Horvath is great at getting in the minds of her children and teen characters. That said, the plot plodded along and gave the reader no incentive to continue. Although I felt I knew the characters, I wasn't drawn to them and I didn't care about them enough to trudge on.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This is the story of two orphaned cousins who go to live on a remote island with a strange uncle, a woman hired mistakenly as a cook, and an unnecessary butler. The atmosphere on the island is indeed creepy, but the characters and the story are disappointing. The story is told from various points of view, and not only was the jumping from voice to voice annoying, but the adult characters are full of irritating verbal tics. While there were some wonderfully amusing lines ("Well, there are those who think the answer lies in undiscovered knowledge and those who think it lies in cake.",) all of the characters left me cold. And it is a rare day I can't muster up sympathy for an orphan.The only thing that kept me reading was the plot, it promised to be delightfully twisty. But it failed to deliver here as well. While the roots of many mysteries were hinted at, everything is hurriedly tied up in the last chapter, where it appears the plot got bored and wandered off. The last few pages were just ridiculous.