Customer Reviews

Leo@fergusrules.com

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Tangherlini's story of a young Italian American Pillipina is engaging, hilarious, dark, entrancing, maddening, wonderful, and really, really well written. I particularly loved the mall rats and the Cardboard Box emporium. I can easily see this becoming a classic--something you'd read in high school (several times), remember like you remember Catcher in the Rye or Phantom Tollbooth (or both), and then come back to later in life, only to realize that, yes, it really is that good.

'leo@fergusrules.com' is one of those rare books that should have more teenagers reading on their own without having to rely on television as their means of entertainment. Leonora; a filopino-italian-american teenager lives with her grandmother in Manila, where she spends all of her free time out of school on a computer-gaming network called 'Apeiron' A friend from school, Bri, is lost on the network and it is up to Leonora (accompanied by an obese monk) to save him. They meet odd encounters on the way, and if you were ever an awkward teenager (or are now) you've probably had dreams similar to this.

...and they all -- and we -- have a great time.

Arne Tangherlini's book defies, no doubt by design, any simple categorization. For the adventurous and reflective reader,young in age or only in spirit, its protean character will be its appeal.

What draws us in first is the sheer JOY IN LANGUAGE, the delight in the art of composition, which, as in the Italian classic which it remembers and recalls, is seductive even when depicting scenes of the most fantastical horror or, as in more contemporary literature, when painting moods of the utmost banality. As in poetry worthy of the name and in the best and most exhilarating of prose, every word and phrase here, one feels, has been chosen and crafted for a reason.

Tangherlini's palette is vast, his range of reference catholic (in the sense of aspiring to the universal). Precisely for this reason, the book is accessible on many levels, as a novel of teen-age angst in the cyberage or as a most adult meditation on the "post-modern" world, cyber- and extracyber-.

Unlike most of the labyrinthine virtual realities which many of us live part of our lives in every day, that which Tangherlini builds is not an escape from the world but a window on to it, in all its squalor and splendor.

We leave Leo's i-world more attuned to the one going on around us.

This novel is breathtakingly inventive and well written. Do not classify it as a young adult book-- the cyber storyline will capture the imagination of adults. A must read for anyone who loved Narnia!

Leo@fergusrules.com is a wonderfully rich and absorbing fable,sharply defined with an edge of modern technology. It's rare that a book can satisfy both my imagination and my intelligence to such a great degree. Arne Tangherlini's heroine, Leo, appealed to me in every way. She's fiery, defiant, brilliant and hilarious all at the same time, and her heart is as huge and beautiful as the tapestry of scenes through which you follow her on her journey. Don't miss this book.

I love this book. I've read it three times already and, each time, I end up appreciating more of the subtle details that I'd overlooked during the previous readings. The storyline is fairly straight-forward: A young asian-american girl, considered surly by her teachers and ugly by her peers due to her large nose, escapes her humdrum everyday life by going onto this online, virtual reality game. The girl, Leo, has pretty much mastered the game itself, except she ends up being drawn into a chaotic "back door" of the game, into a new world that's entirely too personal, in an effort to save her friend. This is the basic plot of the book.

It isn't the plot, however, that makes this book amazing. Inside the new world, Leo encounters scenario after scenario of bizarre characters and fantastical situations. Whether trapped in a piggish clown school, talking to suicide-victims in the form of plants, or facing President McKinley's violent invasion of her grandmother's village, each scenario is breathtakingly detailed by the author with his writing.

One reviewer complained about how the plot seemed to stop moving once Leo starting facing the various scenarios of the virtual world, but for me, it's the utter weirdness that made this book work so well. The plot didn't matter to me so much as the imagination of the author. Much like Alice in Wonderland, Leo@FergusRules.com is a book where you just gotta lay back and enjoy the weirdness.

This book is brilliantly witty-the first page I laughed twice-and the first chapter sticks in one's mind for its beautiful imagery (Leo describing her relationship with Bri) and Leo's sharp and amusing asides. The ending is surprising in its abruptness-it leaves the reader feeling slightly cheated, but this is a memorable story, well worth the read, and I'll be surprised if you don't go back with Leo to Apeiron often.

Funny that almost to the day of the author's death, a young Pilippina and her boyfriend seem to have launched the Love Bug virus. Are Leo and/or Brie to blame? The virus can only be something from Dløn. God I love this book and the bizarre ways it intersects with reality.

This is an excellent joyride through the at times disjointed and wonderfully absurd spaces that can only exist in the imagination and, curiously enough, the cyberworld. It is, as Stecconi suggests, a true picaresque, but a picaresque with attitude. Although Poulsen wants plot-perhaps only plot-what Tangherlini does here is far more intriguing, and quite a bit more complex than the typical plot driven novel that some readers want spoon fed to them. Clearly not for the unsophisticated yahoo, Leo is part punk, part idealist, while her bumbling monastic counterpart is part cartoon character, part detective, part sage, part dogmatist. It is funny-albeit predictable-that the people who most detest this book are the ones that Leo avers in her ongoing critique of contemporary educational theory, revisionist historians, and the leveling of discourse pressaged by the internet. What seems lost on some readers is the fabulous postmodern intertextuality that forms the basis for so much of this work but which, at the same time, is questioned unflinchingly by the protagonist herself. Leo@fergusrules.com truly is, as Hutcheon opines, an example of the "installing and subverting" that is a hallmark of the postmodern. And yet.

I had high hopes for this book, but it did not deliver. A shame, because it could have been wonderful - it's got a terrific heroine and a good concept: smart, savvy kid enters strange cyberworld to save her friend. Unfortunately, after she enters the cyberworld, the plot doesn't evolve any further. She finds herself in situation after situation after situation, each one more fantastic (or perhaps I should say ridiculous or meaningless) than the last. She escapes, or more often is rescued, from each and you think, "OK, now the plot will move forward," but no, she just enters another weird situation (I would explain one, but they're so absurd it would take too long to give you a proper idea). After a while, this gets pretty boring. But you read to the end, hoping against hope that she'll finally find and rescue her friend, and then ... you're disappointed. The book just kind of peters out at the end. It cops out. Apparently, a lot of it was just in her head. I'm sorry, but I really don't understand why some people think this is a good book. Yes, you can talk about the language, the allusions, the character, the exoticism, but folks, WE NEED A PLOT!