Catherine Gilbert MurdockRezensionen

From The Horn: "The story is beautifully served by its presentation — generous page design, thick deckle-edged paper, and gorgeous woodcut-style illustrations that head each chapter. Most remarkable and unusual is the character of Boy, a complex and compelling being whose defining quality is goodness."

I originally read this book in August 13, 2012 and completly forgot about it until I began reading it again a few days ago.

It has a lot of elements that are enjoyable and has that pull that only good books have. I was hooked once again, but its major flaw comes in the ending. It feels rushed and a little forced. I wish the author had spent a little more time fleshing it out in order to make it more believable.

Further explanation includes spoilers....

Prince Florian and Ben being in love for example, while it was obvious the book was leading to that, it would have been nice to have a stronger interaction between the two. The foundation for this love was "mutual dreams" which were never explained. Really, if she had even made them more chummy while Ben was interacting with the Prince as the guise of a boy. If they had become friends or something of the like, the ending would have been more satisfying.

I was a little disappointed as well that no further explanation was provided on the spell book.

I also felt King Roland's proposal to Queen Sophia was a bit over the top. Not every person has to get married at the end of the book.

Comparisons to The Inquisitor's Tale are unavoidable, but truly they are such different books. I prefer the Gidwitz because it had better character development and the creativity knocked my socks off. The Book of Boy is a great yarn that really had me engaged. I raced through it, but once I finished it I felt a bit unsatisfied.

I think mature middle grade readers will enjoy this, especially if they are interested in Catholicism, Christianity, the Middle Ages, and/or mysteries with big plot twists. It is exceptionally well-written.

It's hard to talk about my criticisms of this book without spoilers, so I'll hide the rest of this review.

Why did I feel unsatisfied? I think the bad guys (the greedy steward, the wicked girl) felt a bit tossed in without much effect but to heighten the danger/threat Boy feels. I think they demonstrated the greed for relics and how Boy as an angel was a commodity, so that worked, but it felt a bit shallow. Like the story didn't really them.

I also never cared that much for Secondus and his quest to reunite with his wife and child in heaven. When Secondus touched the tomb and disappeared I was underwhelmed. I could have potentially been in tears at that moment, but instead I was like, meh.

I did really like how the story ended for Boy. How he found his work as an angel. I grew up with this idea that angels are real and walk among us. Boy finding that he will have a happy, satisfying life helping people was a wondrous way to end the story.

I picked this up yesterday and could no put it down. This is a really good story.

Lovely, just lovely... I didn't want it to end.

this was an utter slog for the first 75 pages or so. i don't think i've ever said that about a middle grade book before. i actually was going to stop reading for the first time ever and my son said we should give it just a little longer, and that's when it turned around just a bit for me. i thought the time period (1511 rome) was going to be interesting, and obviously she did a ton of research, but it didn't work. the modern time period worked better for me, at first, and then it just was a jumble and a bumble and none of it worked or made much sense. i guess i learned a little about art maybe? we really, really struggled to finish this one.½

I wanted to love this book more, and for a minute I did....Maybe it was the football? I'm not much for sports fiction. Great characters though, really.

Two unlikely friends—Federico, in sixteenth-century Rome, and Bee, in present-day New Jersey—are linked through an amiable cat, Leonardo Da Vinci’s mysterious wardrobe, and an eerily perfect sketch of Bee. Newbery Honor author Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s Da Vinci’s Cat is a thrilling, time-slip fantasy about rewriting history to save the present. This inventive novel will engross anyone who loved When You Reach Me and A Wrinkle in Time.

Love the attitude of this fiesty character! It's fun that it's set in Wisconsin, too. Great read for any Packers fan!

It was okay. I did like the football angle although the romance was slightly weak, but it is a trilogy. I did like how DJ was able to realize that some people are "stuck in their ways" and don't ever branch out or question why, but she questioned it at a young age, instead of doing what she is expected to do.

Starts off a little on the slow side but now I'm hooked and I immediately borrowed the 2 other books in the series. D.J. is just a really nice, awkward, responsible kid trying to figure things out. And she has such a great voice that the poor grammar is charming and not hair-tearing-out since it's part of the style of the book and makes the story even more effective.

This book covers some pretty heavy subjects, but never felt preachy. This is probably because D.J. is just such a great narrator, but there were also some pretty funny moments to balance it out. I think Win injury was handled well but I'm not disabled, so maybe I'm not the best person to make that judgement. If you like coming-of-age novels, this series will probably be right up your alley.

Beautifully crafted story! Every word the correct word, every step, impression, character, so well crafted. A work of art and a pleasure to be included in the story.

Sarah Zorn tells her story in three parts, all through journal entries. In the first third, Sarah is living in her tiny hometown in Wisconsin, worrying about her best friend, a boy, who is NOT her boyfriend. But then her somewhat loopy grandmother, known to all as Z, shows up with two tickets to Rome, and says she wants Sarah to go with her. Then we make an abrupt leap, and the journal entries are all in Rome, with nobody but her grandmother that we know. I found this disconcerting. However, the first two parts are brought together for the most part in the final portion of the novel, in which Sarah is back home again, and worrying about her not-boyfriend, but even more about her grandmother and all that she learned about family history while she was in Rome.
This book is set in the same world, and involves some of the same characters as are in Murdock's "Dairy Queen" Trilogy; however, it is not part of the series, and can be read independently before or after reading the others - or just by itself (though "Dairy Queen" is the best book of the lot, so if you only read one, make it that one.)

As DJ Schwenk gets into her junior year of high school basketball, she faces two difficult decisions about her life. Will she give a verbal pledge to one of the Big Ten colleges trying to recruit her to play Division I ball for them, or will she aim for a much smaller school? And will she keep dating silly, likable, Beaner... or will she go back to Brian, yet again?
Honestly, if you just picked this book up without reading the first two in the series, I think you'd probably be a bit bored with it. The whole book really does revolve around those two questions.
But if you have read the other two, and you're now reading this one, then it's surely because you just love DJ Schwenk, and you're rooting for her, and going through the struggles with her. And that was me. "Front and Center" is not up there with "Dairy Queen," and doesn't have the emotional impact of "The Off Season," but if you love DJ, you've just got to go on to find out what happens to her next.

As the last of the 3 books in the "Dairy Queen" series, I found it to be nearly a clone of the second book. Although I can easily see the author continuing the series with at least one more book, I think this particular story has lost it's appeal for me. I liked the uniqueness of a girl playing HS boys football in the first book. Without that particular storyline, it's just an ordinary story. Like the others, Front and Center is a fast read. While still enjoyable, and while I would like to see what happens to DJ in 10 years or so, I think I'm going to head in a different direction with my reading for awhile.

2nd book of the "Dairy Queen" trilogy. Not quite as good as the 1st book, but still very good. I decided the author has the main character talking kind of like Junie B Jones, which may be off-putting for some readers. Still a very fast read - one day or less. This book focuses less on DJ playing football which I found disappointing.

Quick read, very good. You are totally rooting for this high school girl to make the boys football team in small town WI even before you've finished the first page. Want to read other books by this author, I think she continues this same story.

A cute little book about time travel and famous artists½

As a lover of cats and art history, I had high hopes for this story. They were not fulfilled. The author clearly has done an enormous amount of research to get the details of early 16th-century Rome right, and then falls victim to the temptation to write them ALL into every page - every dish at several banquets, every item of clothing worn. The writing is often repetitive: she tells us multiple times in a single scene that Michelangelo stinks. She tells us - over and over - that Federico wants a friend. Paradoxically, there are elements of the art and artists and assumptions that *I* (as an adult art history grad) "got" that I'm not sure the intended middle-grade reader would, or would find terribly appealing. When the setting and characters shifted to present-day America, the carpentry just broke down and I bailed.

Clumsy writing, tenuous plot machinery, and charmless characters... just didn't work for me.

This book has only been out for several days and I saw it as a new release at my library. I took a chance on this middle-school level book when I read a few comments about it. It began as a pure delight. Historical fantasy with lots of detail from 1511 Rome with a young boy, Federico, held 'hostage' by the Pope as Raphael and Michelangelo paint the papal quarters and Sistine Chapel. Slightly irreverant and reminiscent of books like 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe' with a wardrobe here invented by Leonardo Da Vinci whose cat goes time travelling. The interactions between Federico and others in 1511 were fun.

However when the story jumps to the present this adventure begins to stumble. The puzzle pieces don't quite fit. Just how old is the old woman? 110 and something? Where has Juno the time cat been for nearly a century? What first began to bother me was all the machinations trying to create a sense of urgency in the present with delayed trains and phone calls and so on. The charm that was with us at the start was rather suddenly gone although there were some clever moments.

But ... when we return to Rome in 1511 the story picks up again, thankfully, and gets quite exciting when Federico gives chase to Michelangelo, riding Bathsheba, the fastest horse in Rome.

This proved to be a very entertaining book. There are some very nice chapter decorations drawn by Paul Zelinsky as a little bonus.

I finished reading the Newbery Honor book Book of Boy by Catherine Gilbert Murdock and I wonder why this was so highly regarded in 2018? I don't think this story is going to age well. It is basically a retelling of a medieval tale and the motivations of the characters is not clear. Modern children are going to have a hard time relating to the belief system of that time and will regard this book as a fantasy rather than medieval morality play. Teachers will have to do too much work to set the stage for the story and in the end it probably won't be worth it. I think this is a Newbery clunker.

"The Off Season" almost feels like two books, because the focus of the book abruptly makes a 90 degree turn about halfway through.
The first part is mainly a continuation of "Dairy Queen." D.J. Schwenk, the girl who plays linebacker on the high school football team, and her romance with Brian, the quarterback of the rival team.
Then, suddenly, halfway into the book, D.J.'s older brother, Win, who play college football, suffers a serious injury during a game. He may never walk again. The entire focus of the book goes to that story. In a literary sense, this bothered me. The injury wasn't foreshadowed, it just came out of the blue and changed the aim of the book. But then I thought, maybe that was the point. Because in real life, when some devastating event like that happens, of course it is always out of the blue. And it totally changes the course of the life of the injured person, but also that person's whole family. So maybe it was just as it should be.
D.J. is a great narrator. A strong, but sympathetic character.

The year is 1350, and Boy lives in a village in France. He has a big bump on his back, and lives under the strictures of the now-dead priest to never reveal himself. But then a pilgrim comes to town and asks for his help getting a relic from a nearby church, starting a quest that will change Boy's life.

Hmmmmm. I don't entirely know how to describe this without giving everything away, but I will say that it seems to be one of those books that always seems to tick the boxes of folks on awards committees and leaves me feeling like something's wanting. Would a child pick this up without prompting from an adult? Probably not... it's a slow start and more about internal development. Also it hovers on the line between historical fiction and fantasy, and I'm not sure it quite lives up to either. The ending didn't really surprise me - there were enough clues along the way - and left me with more questions than answers about Boy and what would happen to him now. I enjoyed it fine as I was reading it, but upon further reflection I don't think it will have much by way of a lasting impression on me.½

15-year-old DJ Schwenk is having a rough time. Her two older brothers have left home for college and never call or write. Her younger brother, Curtis, rarely speaks. Her mother is bogged down trying to work two jobs, and her demanding father has had a hip operation, and can't do the work on the family's dairy farm. That leaves DJ to run the farm - while going to high school, where she's failing English. The last thing she needs is for their great family friend, (who is the coach of her school's rival football team), to ask her of all people to train, Brian, one of his players, on their farm during the summer.
And then her life gets more complicated when she and Brian start to kinda-sorta like each other. Throw into the mix her own secret decision to play on her school's football team, and she's got one complicated life to figure out.
DJ is one of those teen novel protagonists who are super smart and tough as nails in some ways, while still sort of innocent and vulnerable in other ways. I absolutely loved her, and the book both! (Didn't know it was a series until I went to write this review... now I've got more to look forward to.)