Nation

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Because Mao is in between being a boy and a man, he thinks he has no soul. Mao often thinks that he is like a hermit crab that has left one shell but not found another one yet. Because of this, Mao and other people wonder if demons and other evil spirits will get into Mao's body. This is a book that I found myself calling wonderful from the very beginning and immediately knowing it would be a favorite. It's one I'd recommend to nearly anyone. Be sure to buy a copy when it comes out in October of 2008. Even more survivors have now arrived at the Nation, and Daphne begins hearing the voices of the Grandmothers, who claim to be the neglected but more sensible counterparts to the Grandfathers. They suggest that Daphne explore an ancient, closed-off crypt called the Grandfathers' cave. Mau, Daphne, Ataba, and their companions enter this cave and discover that the Nation is probably the oldest civilization on Earth, whose citizens once made astounding scientific progress with such creations as telescopes, eyeglasses, and even accurate star charts.

I was forewarned by friends and readers. I have read – and loved – a couple of other books by the author. So it’s not like I didn’t know the odds this would be good but this book? It blew my mind away. In its epilogue, Terry Pratchett says: Esta é uma história sobre a descoberta de si próprio, sobre a tolerância, sobre a amizade, sobre a coragem.

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Eventually, the two begin to forge their own civilization and soon have various refuges showing up, looking for shelter who become part of the new nation being formed on the island. This alternate history takes place in a time when the redcoats were plopping down flags on islands without asking the permission of the natives. Most authors fail to give such natives equal or superior intellectual status with their European contemporaries. Instead, such people are painted as savages. Pratchett seeks here to blur the normal lines between civilized and savage and redefine these words. At first glance, it looks like Pratchett has combined the descriptions from Simon Winchester's Krakatoa and the Indonesian tsunami with the central question of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (i.e. why do the Europeans have all the stuff and pacific islanders don't).

There is little time to reflect on these discoveries and developments. Everyone in the Nation knows that soon Mau’s fire will attract cannibalistic raiders, and Daphne believes that another mutineer named Cox is leading them. Mau immediately sets to work preparing to defend the island. He appropriates Sweet Judy’s derelict cannons and has his villagers practice firing them, though they only mime the process because the cannons are too old to actually be fired and there is not enough gunpowder left for practice. Daphne worries that Mau is leading the Nation to its death, but Mau asks her to trust in his leadership. I suppose if Pratchett had the reputation or high profile of Philip Pullman or J. K. Rowling, then there would be a huge cry of how this book should be snatched from the hands of impressable children before they learn how to think for themselves. Maybe there is already such an outcry, but I haven't heard anything. The one thing about Terry Pratchett, as Lawrence Watt-Evans pointed out, is that the only real difference between his adult books and his children books are the age of his protagonists. There is no reason why an adult shouldn't treat this as a book. The writing has a really nice flow and, most importantly, a cozy, heartwarming "voice", like that of a beloved grandpa telling a story. The frequent witticism, pun, funny wordplay, or sarcastic remark are all there as well. There are over 40 books in the Discworld series, of which four are written for children. The first of these, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, won the Carnegie Medal.After exiting the cave, the group is confronted by two of Sweet Judy's villainous mutineers, who abruptly kill a spear-wielding Ataba and briefly abduct Daphne before she devises a cunning escape. In the meantime, the mutineers' leader, Cox, has since joined the cannibals, becoming their self-proclaimed chief and planning to raid the Nation. The new inhabitants of the Nation convince the arriving Cox and the cannibals to follow tradition by having the leaders of each side fight in hand-to-hand mortal combat, so as to avoid large-scale bloodshed. Mau accepts his role as leader of the Nation, and then cleverly outwits and kills Cox in the lagoon, causing the cannibals to flee. I don't recall there being a lot of fanfare and declarations of love for this book when it was published.

The first chapter involves a subplot in which the Gentlemen of Last Resort, a secret society serving the Crown, urgently set out for Port Mercia in the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean to seek the next man in the British line of succession: Henry Fanshaw, the unsuspecting governor of England's oceanic territories. Fanshaw's 13-year-old daughter, Ermintrude, is one of the novel's two protagonists. The other protagonist, Mau, is an aboriginal native of the Nation who is first depicted alone at neighbouring Boys' Island, where he has hand-built a canoe to complete his initiation rite from boyhood into manhood. Ermintrude, meanwhile, is travelling in a leisurely manner aboard a British schooner, the Sweet Judy, when mutineers, led by the ruthless First Mate Cox, are subdued and set adrift at sea, returning to the plot at a later time. He could see that the village had gone. The wave had sliced it off the island. A few stumps marked the place the long house had stood since….. for ever. The wave had torn up the reef. A wave like that would not have even noticed the village." Mau, a native. Ermintrude-Daphne-ghostgirl, a city girl. A tidal wave. Homemade beer from poison (reminiscent of kava). Lots of gods and ancestors. A cursing parrot. Humanity. Hope. Desolation. Telescopes. Pantaloons. As it happens, they are not alone for long. Other survivors start to arrive to take refuge on the island they all call the Nation, and then raiders accompanied by murderous mutineers from the Sweet Judy. Together, Mau and Daphne discover some remarkable things – including how to milk a pig and why spitting in beer is a good thing – and start to forge a new Nation.

Written loosely in a third-person perspective, the novel is set in an alternative history of our world, shortly after Charles Darwin has published On the Origin of Species. [5] A recent Russian influenza pandemic has just killed the British king and his next 137 heirs. Except for the opening chapter, the novel's action entirely occurs in the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean (the fictionalised South Pacific Ocean) on a particular island known by its indigenous inhabitants as "the Nation". Estoy circulando de nuevo al Mundodisco, después de los cuatro libros que leí hace dos años. Este año comencé por Camioneros, seguí por Buenos Presagios y ahora Nación. He estado escuchando a gente que dice que éste es de los mejores libros de Pratchett, si no es que su obra cumbre. Escrita en 2008, cerca del diagnóstico de Alzheimer y probablemente influida por el tema del Tsunami de Asia, esta obra presenta los mismos temas de siempre de Pratchett, pero con una vuelta de tuerca. Nation is an alternative history edition of a marooned Westerner and a native indigenous Great Southern Pelagic Ocean (South Pacific Ocean) island dweller. On the surface it is a relative easy to read older children's book, much in the same vain as his Tiffany Aching Discworld novels. But, as with all of PTerry's works, scratch the surface just a little and you enter a world that is full of adult themes that we, for some reason, have initialised as being Too Grown Up For Kids And Therefore Should Never Be Mentioned In Front Of Them. American Library Association (2010). "Michael L. Printz Winners and Honor Books". Archived from the original on 8 February 2011 . Retrieved 3 February 2011.