By Kym Brunner
Buy new: $0.00
Customer Rating:
First tagged by Kym Brunner "Kid Lit Writer and Book Lover"
Customer tags: romance suspense, kym brunner, loyalty, flip the bird, animal rights, hunting, falconry, falconer apprentice, raptor rehabilitation, hawk, abna 2011 quarterfinalist, contemporary fiction
Review & Description
There are only two things in this world that fifteen-year-old Mercer Buddie wants––a girlfriend and proving to his master falconer father that he’s not as big of a dumbass as he thinks. Both quests are proving to require vast amounts of luck––something Mercer has always had in limited quantities. According to Mercer’s Law, the more he wants it, the bigger the obstacles.Mercer has a mere three weeks to transform his juvenile Red-tailed Hawk, Flip, into an ace assassin, but Flip is so resistant to training that his father declares it to be the world’s first incompetent hawk. But Mercer won’t give up, recognizing that he and Flip are birds of a feather, duds together.When Mercer meets Lucy, a new girl at school, he falls hard for her gorgeous looks and sassy personality. As star-crossed fate would have it, Mercer discovers that Lucy and her family belong to HALT, a fanatical animal rights organization that believe caged animals are a form of cruelty. Mercer soon realizes that, if he wants to keep seeing Lucy, he’ll need to keep his love of falconry and his family’s raptor rehabilitation center a secret from her. Likewise, he’ll need to keep Lucy’s involvement with HALT from his family.When Mercer’s parents go out of town and leave him in charge, his negligence enables the members of HALT to break into his father’s bird rehab center and free all the birds of prey, disabled and healthy alike. Mercer’s heart is broken when he discovers that Flip, along with the other two hunting birds, is nowhere to be found.Will Mercer launch a mission to rescue the birds and prove his loyalty to his family, or will he try to keep the girl of his dreams by letting the wild creatures fly free?I have to tell you that I am completely charmed by your excerpt. For starters, you’re writing about a really unusual hobby, and the little bit that I read was fascinating. Mercer is a great first-person narrator. He has a really appealing and amusing voice, and is definitely someone I wouldn’t mind spending a few hundred pages with. I thought the relationships with his father and brother were unusually realistically depicted and very believable. The dialogue is well-written and age appropriate. Exposition was also handled gracefully, with details being revealed organically throughout the text, as opposed to a big info dump. Finally, this manuscript is nice and clean, with almost no errors or typos. Oh, and the title of the novel is completely clever and adorable!The characters are vibrant and likeable. I felt immediately connected to them and engaged in what they were doing. Their inteactions were real and warm, somethingthing that makes you want to commit to their story. I really liked the name MErcer for a main character. I do worry about some "cliche" natures sneaking in, like desperate young boys can't talk to girls and says stupid things while his perfect older brother has it all.. Read more
No comments:
Post a Comment