David A. Aguilar

A moving coming of age story of a boy from Andorra who was born with a not fully developed right arm - a half-arm, a disability what he prefers to call diff-ability. He was blessed with a loving family and a passion for LEGO. He constructed his first prosthetic arm from Legos at the mere age of 9 but he just did it as a fun project, he did not really feel he needed it. He picked up this project again only many years later, while he was repeating the last year of high school and the new prosthetic LEGO arm was much more advanced. He named it MK-1. His father shared it on social media and he became a local celebrity in Andorra, was invited to participate in Lego Education and talk at NASA. He developed more and more advanced models up to MK-5 (at least that's the last one in the book). After the graduation he went on to study bioengineering to help other people like him.

But the book is not as much about building an prosthetic arm from Legos, as about David's life, as the subtitle correctly says. It's about accepting his difference, dealing with all the attention and questions, dealing with the bullies, with all kinds of detonators the life threw his way. At some places it felt a bit like a self-help book written for kids and adolescents, but overall it was not disturbing me much and I would recommend this book to people of all ages.

For me personally, it was also really interesting to visit Andorra by book. It's a very tiny country with a population of a medium size town. I think the translator did a great job by keeping some terms unchanged - it really gave a better sense of the place. I mostly listened to the audiobook and I want to compliment the narrator as well - the way he pronounced those unchanged words, said "Barcelona" and imitated the French accent added to the sense of Andorra, as well.

In the beginning the book seemed a bit like LEGO pieces scattered around - the authors were jumping timelines and stories; but I must admit they managed to put those LEGO pieces together at the end.… (mehr)

This National Geographic Kids guide to the planets looks not only at the planets orbiting our sun but also at other inhabitants of our solar system. Along with the expected Mercury, Venus, Earth, Earth’s Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, young readers learn about meteorites, Ceres and the asteroid belt, the Haumea/Kuiper belt, MakeMake, Eris and dwarfs. There are also sections on comets and the Oort Cloud, the end of our solar system, and other solar systems. An intriguing “Solar System in a Grocery Bag,” planet charts, and a glossary are also included. Full-color photographs, photorealistic computer art, and illustrations accompany the comprehensive narrative.

Highly recommended.… (mehr)