eARC Review of The Natural Genius of Ants

 

Harvard’s father is a doctor and he made a mistake and a baby died and now he isn’t a doctor any more. Not because he was fired but because he can’t get over the mistake. It’s affecting the whole family so Marshall decides to take his two boys to a small town he grew up in called Kettle Hole. Harvard’s mom can’t come because of her work but thinks it’s a great think for Marshall to do.

While there Harvard meets Neveah who is the daughter of one of Marshall’s old friends. They are actually renting out her house as they need the money. Her mother recently died of cancer and they have a lot of bills and so her father is renting his house out to make money. They are living in the barn that her father converted into a living quarters.

While there their father decides they should build an ant farm because he use to have one as a kid. When the ants arrive that Harvard’s father orders they are dead. He doesn’t want his father to deal with more death so him and Neveah decide to replace them with regular house ants they find.

It’s basically a story about learning to deal with mistakes, that things sometimes take time but you have to move on. The reader learns a lot about ants and how the ants work together to do everything, even taking care of the queen’s eggs.

Harvard learns that he can’t fix his father even though he tries with hiding the dead ants, talking to someone else who has went through a tragedy, but those don’t really help as much as he hoped. He makes a great friend and even helps Neveah and her father.

It’s a sweet story about how a family spent their summer and over all it was a good one. My one problem was Harvards attitude sometimes and the fact that he keep asking if a word was one word or two. For example, his hailstorm one word or two (hail storm), this happened throughout the book and became very annoying.  Other than that I thought it was a sweet book. 4 stars

Early Review of Spineless

Spineless is set in late nineteenth century south Florida. Algie has asthma and since his father died of tuberculosis his mother is afraid that Algie might get it, so she packs them up and they head to Florida to a health resort. Algie wants to be a naturalist and loves being outside and learning about new animals.

Though his mother babies him a bit his older brother gets their mother to let him have some fun and he is able to run around where he runs into two girls about his age who are also interested in the study of animals, etc. At first Frankie isn’t sure she wants him around but she warms up to him and Lulu accepted him rightaway. Their father owns the restort and so they pretty much have full run of everything (which probably isn’t the best thing).

One day while they were out exploring the swamp lands, Algie gets lost from the two girls and almost gets ate by a gater but something saved him. That something happened to be a very large species of animal that nobody knew about. Right now the ocean is having problem with Red Tide and it’s been killing a lot of the ocean life and this species is hiding out from everything.

They decide they shouldn’t tell anyone about this especially because there is a famous naturalist, who Algie use to look up too till he found out who he really was, was there and they were afraid for the animal. This is a lot harder than they thought because more than one person is interesting in finding out what they are doing.

Spineless is kind of a historical light adventure book about the environment and protecting it. I liked Algie and the two girls they were a lot of fun. I just thought it was kind of unrealistic that Algie escapes a shark and gater, and several other things without to much happening to him especially his asthma. I know Florida was suppose to be better for his asthma but there was some times I would have thought he would be laid up in bed but it always ended up okay.

Overall, I enjoyed Spineless and thought it was an entertaining read.

I received this book from the publisher for an honest review.

Starting a new blog

 I have a paid blog but I have decided to down grade because it's an expense I don't really need as I am not making any money from blogging about books. I have a youtube channel that I use more than my blog so it just seemed like a better thing for me to do and I can get rid of an extra expense a month.

I was formerly Books, Movies, Reviews. Oh my! on wordpress. I decided to just use my youtube name here so it could all be the same. Hope to start reviewing on this platform soon, so stay tuned!