Rating: 
Summary: A book of wonder and fear
Review: I am so glad I have the opportunity to finally write about thisbook. The White Mountains scared the pants off me and gave menightmares about being chased by a giant tripod and being capped, but that is part of why I loved it and couldn't wait to get up and start reading more. Its appeal is going to be for boys around eleven and up. Kids around that age will strongly identify with Will Parker the main character. Reading The White Mountains is an experience that makes a child feel important to the world when he is only twelve. The book is thrilling not terrifyingly scary. It just isn't possible for a boy to read the first book without wanting to read the sequel City of Gold and Lead, so you might as well order it too. Pool of Fire is the follow up but I wasn't nearly as absorbed in it. I recently placed the first two on a list of my all time favorite books. Not just favorite children's books.
Rating:
Summary: This is a very good book!
Review: I had to find a book at our school library for a readingassignment. I hate doing this, because I never find anythinggood. While I was looking for a book, I pulled out "The White Mountains". I looked at the cover and thought it was a cheap rip-off of "War of the Worlds"... But you can't tell a book by its cover! Time ran out, so I picked up that book, and we checked out our books and started to read. I was hooked! I got in trouble several times for reading in class. I kept reading and reading, and when I finally finished, I almost cried! But the next day I went to school I found out it was the first book of a series. I got the next one, "The City of Gold and Lead" and I'm still hooked! Now I've started the 3rd book, "The Pool of Fire." I love it too. I'm not totally sure why I like it... It's just... GOOD! Buy the series! You will love it! I'd give it 6 stars, and I recommend it to all ages.
Rating:
Summary: Not for Boys Only!
Review: Several of the reviewers suggest that this book is best appreciated by preadolescent boys. I have to add that I read this book (and its sequels, The City of Gold and Lead and The Pool of Fire) thirty years ago as a ten-year-old girl and LOVED it. I am not "into" science fiction; the other books I loved as a child were A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Anne of Green Gables, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder series. I might have enjoyed it even more if it had a strong female character, but it's fabulous nonetheless. Get this book for your daughter; you may find out that she enjoys it as much as any boy!
Rating: 
Summary: Just for kids
Review: Sometime in the next century, civilization on Earth will be set back to a pre-industrial era, a consequence of an earlier invasion by the Tripods. In this first entry of a three-book epic, we follow Will, Henry and Jean-Paul as they make their way to a redoubt where free-men conspire to seize Earth back from the huge three-legged machines. Not apparently evil, the myserious invaders seem to allow everybody else to live peacefully, with only a single catch: at a critical age, they are "capped" - their head implanted with a weird metal thing that (we're to assume) changes their minds for them. Not immediately rebellious, Will & Henry are urged to escape after a chance meeting with Ozymandias - one of countless demented "vagrants" who roam the countryside because of imperfect capping. Not really a vagrant, Ozymandias gives the boys a map and a compass (alien concepts to them) with instructions on how to reach freedom...if they want it.
Though I read an excerpt of "Mountain" in grade school years ago, and even caught a strip of the series that ran in the Boy Scouts magazine. However, it was the Fremantle TV series that ran about 20 years ago that grabbed my attention. After a series that stretched out into about 25 half-hour episodes, the books themselves were a bit of a disappointment. While I knew that they'd been written with pre-teens in mind, I had guessed that it was written on two levels - much as the show had been. Unfortunately, it's a book you can finish in about a day, undermining the epic scale you'd expect from a story about either the subjugation of the earth, or a walk from England to the Alps.
Rating: 
Summary: The White Mountains
Review: Fun Fact: "The White Mountains" was turned into a regular comic strip and published in the Boy Scout magazine, "Boy's Life" in the early 1980s. One of the earliest futuristic dystopian tales for children, the story is a harrowing one. The race of man has been conquered by beings known only as the Tripods. These gigantic three footed structures rule the earth, controlling the minds of the human race through "capping". Once capped, a person is exactly the same, but bound to the will of the Tripod masters. Will, his cousin Henry, and a French boy named Jean-Paul (but translated into the boys' speech as Beanpole), set out to find a place where men live free, without the caps or tripods. The white mountains.Now, in my description of this story I've relied on a the old fashioned method of speech that speaks about "the race of man" and "where men live free". Why not the race of people... or where people live free? Well, to be frank, this book is a bit lacking in the woman department. Originally published in 1967, it is a victim of its times. Women exist here as mothers and as docile servants of the Tripods. In the story, those humans who have been capped sometimes respond violently to the process. As a result, they end up insane and "Vagrants". Usually this happens to people who are strong of will and resist the capping. The author himself notes that, "it happened occasionally with girls, although much more rarely". Sorry ladies. Resistance must be a manly trait. As for the girl Will befriends halfway through the book, she is described as having a "soothing gentleness" and is considered a remarkable woman for it. This concept of women is more than a little backwards. Even the photograph of a woman Will finds in an abandoned Paris is imagined in his head as playing the piano (as accomplished women would be wont to do). The book is now being considered, I might add, by Steven Spielberg (unsurprisingly when you consider that the man is not usually prone to strong female characters in his own films). Aside from the old-fashioned nature of the XX chromosomed, the book has many fine features. There's a delightful tension running between the three boys as they make their journey. Will often finds himself jealous of the camaraderie between his two companions, and will lapse into spitefulness as a result. The story is well thought out and the dramatic high points very invigorating. The ending, unfortunately, is very sudden. Not to ruin it for you, but in a sudden "TA-DAH!" like sequence, the boys find themselves walking towards the white mountains one moment and suddenly IN the mountains the next. The abrupt ending feels like nothing so much as an indiscriminate stopping point created with the sole purpose of leading the viewer towards the sequel. And a map would have been a nice addition to the story. A map that showed the boys' progress from England to the mountains past France. I was very attached to this book while reading it, and in spite of all the problems I have with it, I recommend it highly. Just bear in mind that unlike some of the other fantasy books of this ilk, "The While Mountains" has aged a little more poorly than its fellows.
Rating:
Summary: OK
Review: A masterpiece --I thoroughly enjoyed this book when I was nine and now my eight year-old son is beginning to explore it. Masterful use of setting, dialogue, and rich visual descriptions that at first suggest a quiet English village of the seventeenth, perhaps the early eighteenth century. Then along come the clues: ruined metal buildings, mysterious half-corroded signs, whispered gossip of the craftsmanship of "Men in the Days Before The Tripods." Then the hero's cousin (and best friend) is happily "capped" in a rite of adulthood by a weird and mysterious leviathan straight out of an H.G. Wells novel, and the broader scope pulls into focus. Christopher's trilogy is exciting, suspenseful, and throws around a lot of mysteries that any preteen reader should be able to reason out without too much difficulty. There is some innocent romance, but no sex. The violence is mostly implied, though there is a disturbing "field surgery" scene towards the end, as well as a nail-biting hunt and a decisive final battle. The heros' actual arrival in the Swiss Alps is somewhat anticlimactic --it sheds no new light on Earth's predicament, but merely brings Will, Henry, and "Beanpole's" quest to an end. Best moments include the boys' sojourn through "The City of the Ancients," the devastated ruins of what was once Paris. The descriptions from Will's insular point-of-view are a delight to puzzle out, particularly when the boys encounter ordinary everyday twentieth-century objects and try to figure out what they are (i.e., "Shmand-Fair"). The discovery of a cache of explosive "iron eggs" in a subway tunnel paints a broader scope of the initial invasion: it appears there was at least some active resistance before the aliens worked out a way to assume control of human minds. Buy this for your 8-9-10-11 year-old boy and have some fun reading it to one another. And don't neglect either of the sequels: they bring the story full circle!
|
