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Title details for The Game of Sunken Places by M. T. Anderson - Available

The Game of Sunken Places

#1 in series

by M. T. Anderson
Marc Cashman
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
When Brian and Gregory receive an invitation to stay at a distant relative’s strange mansion . . . well, they should know better than to go. Trips to distant relatives’ strange mansions rarely go well. And this mansion is even stranger than most. Uncle Max doesn’t really know what century he’s in. The butler boils socks. And the attic houses the Game of Sunken Places.
Is the Game of Sunken Places an ordinary board game? Hardly! The Game of Sunken Places looks like a board game. And most of the time it acts like a board game. But from the moment Brian and Gregory start playing, they are caught up in an adventure that goes far beyond the board. Soon the boys are dealing with attitudinal trolls, warring kingdoms, and some very starchy britches.
Luckily, Brian and Gregory have wit, deadpan observation, and a keen sense of adventure on their side. In this fantastic, fun, and funny novel, M. T. Anderson takes both his characters and his readers to a small, obscure corner of Vermont that they’ll never, ever forget.

  • Creators

  • Series

    Norumbegan Quartet

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    December 13, 2005

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780739360927
      • File size: 198543 KB
      • Duration: 06:53:37

  • Languages

    • English

  • Levels

    • ATOS Level: 4.6
    • Lexile® Measure: 670
    • Interest Level: 4-8(MG)
    • Text Difficulty: 5-9

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Take equal parts of JUMANJI and A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS; add in trolls, elves, automatons, and lost civilizations; remove all humor; and you get something like M.T. Anderson's offbeat adventure. Two boys from Boston take a trip to Vermont to stay with Uncle Max. They arrive at the strange mansion to find a Victorian lifestyle and an old wooden game board that leads them to ceremonial mounds, strange creatures, and an ancient battle between warring kingdoms. The story is purposefully off-kilter, with Marc Cashman's dry, precise, and percussive style complementing Anderson's writing. Anderson and Cashman are both skilled at their crafts, overall, the result is an unsettling and unsatisfying challenge. S.E.S. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from July 12, 2004
      Anderson serves up a fantasy thriller that neatly combines the techno-savvy of his Feed,
      the horror themes of Thirsty
      and the sharp humor of Burger Wuss
      . Thirteen-year-olds Gregory Buchanan and Brian Thatz have accepted an invitation to stay with Gregory's Uncle Max in Vermont over their school's two-week October break. Gregory does not know Max well (he is actually the adoptive father of Max's now-adult cousin, Prudence) but warns Brian that he's "probably insane. He lives in kind of a different world from the rest of us. You know? The kind of world where electricity is a lot of invisible spiders." True to horror-story convention, locals urge the boys to turn back as they approach his estate. Max is indeed ominous, and their reception bizarre (why do the servants incinerate the boys' clothing?). Right away, the boys find a board game (from which the novel takes its title) that seems to depict Max's estate—but soon new places begin appearing on the board. Gregory and Max learn they are participants in a high-stakes Game run by the so-called Speculant; with characters like an axe-wielding troll and an infuriated elf, portentous place names (the Ceremonial Mound, the Hill of Shadow) hard-to-discover rules and riddles, the Game proceeds like an elaborate computer fantasy adventure. Anderson keeps the tension high even as he cuts it with colorful prose and an insightful motif involving the boys' friendship. Dexterously juggling a seemingly impossible profusion of elements, the author builds to a climactic series of surprises that, exploding like fireworks, will almost certainly dazzle readers. Ages 9-12.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Levels

  • ATOS Level:4.6
  • Lexile® Measure:670
  • Interest Level:4-8(MG)
  • Text Difficulty:5-9

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