Customer Reviews

Shelter Me

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

 

 

but as a teacher with an extensive classroom library who often recommends titles to students, I feel compelled to say something about this book. It was, quite possibly, the WORST YA novel I have ever read. The writing was incredibly poor, and the girl's language and attitudes entirely anachronistic to the WWII setting. But that is not really the issue-- there is plenty of poorly written YA lit out there. This book was exploitative of it's young female characters to the extreme. I understand that the conventions of the genre require peril, but when everything has an ultra-creepy sexual undertone it becomes a bit much. Also, the ending was not shocking because it was entirely implausible and wholly unresolved. Any book aimed at the YA audience that leaves the majority of it's character (including an infant) in forced sexual slavery better have a good reason. Regrettably, like nearly every other plot development in this book, I have no idea of the point.

It took me three hours in one sitting to finish Shelter Me. Yes, it was that good. This is the second book this week that I've read about a boarding school run be lunatics. Unlike the first novel Shelter Me was well written and had well developed characters.

Shelter Me starts off with a boom (no pun intended) and never really slows down. The whole atmosphere of London during World War II was very authentic. I did not once question the struggles that Maggie when through. I really felt Maggie's despair when her mother forces her to leave home.

The boarding school itself was beyond creepy. There were several times when I was running right along side Maggie in my head. That is how real she felt to me. The nuns in the school was so scary that I wanted to jump into the book and smack them! The side characters were also very fabulous. The whole scene down at the beach was so shocking and sad. I cannot believe I actually felt sorry for the poor guy (trying not to give too much away here!).

Another thing that struck as interesting was how the differences among the social classes were handled. Maggie comes from a lower middle-class background and it at several times shocked by the wealth of other people around her. Even at the boarding school there is a clear difference among the wealthy and poor. The wealthy girls eat better food and have much better sleeping arrangements. Ironically in the end it is a large sum on money that gets Maggie out of her predicament.

The ending! Oh my god! I did not see this ending coming at all. I love being surprised like that. Kudos to Alex McAuluy for shocking the pants off me.

Its a ok book.
It just takes a hard left is all. I can say to much, it would give to much away, but its most likely not what you think its going to be. But for the money and how amazing amason is go for it.

This book came highly recommended, but I was disappointed. Maggie Leigh barely survives a blitz bombing of London, only to have her mother send her off to a lonely Welsh village where she finds that she is to attend a religious boarding school that turns out to be little more than a prison. After an encounter with a fugitive German soldier, she escapes with two friends, picking up a baby and a fleeing rich girl along the way. They hitchhike and jump onto a rolling train, witnessing horrifying events along the way, eventually ending up prisoners again until Maggie is miraculously rescued.

Although the story itself is full of surprising twists and turns, every character except Maggie herself (the protagonist) and one other person turn out to be fervently evil. Maggie manages through luck, perseverance and courage to escape from one dire situation only to land in another, but her deliverance from her darkest, most horrifying dilemma is through a deus ex machina--quite a letdown.

McAulay's prose is bland and occasionally awkward--although the story is set in wartime Britain, a number of anachronistic Americanisms creep in--but he is good at describing a scene and at letting us feel Maggie's feelings, and many of the characters are sharply drawn. There is a fair amount of suspense and the plot does take a few unexpected turns. Most of the book takes place during one long night, adding to the macabre nature of Maggie's adventures.

One should never judge a book by its cover, but the cover art on the paperback edition is quite intriguing.

What did I just read? Really? I need to stop judging books by their covers. I thought the cover of "Shelter Me" by Alex McAulay was beautiful. It immediately caught my eye while browsing through different novels on Amazon, and I purchased it before even reading the description of it. I just knew I wanted it. Also, I have a love/hate relationship with MTV Books, so I wasn't even sure if I would like it.

That being said, this novel was STRANGE. I'm not even sure how to rate it. I mean, I think I loved it. But I'm not sure. I feel like I should rate it a 2/5, but I'm considering rating it a 4/5 or a 5/5, simply because of how strange it was.

The story starts out with a girl, Maggie Leigh on a trip to buy fabric with her 'heathen' aunt. It takes place during World War II, in London. Whilst in a fabric store, the area they are shopping in gets bombed, and though her aunt and Maggie get slightly injured, they have no serious injuries at this time. They, along with many others in the area take shelter in a nearby underground train station, where they plan on waiting out until its "safe" to go home. While there, more bombs are dropped in the area, causing the roof to begin to collapse. Maggie runs out of the station, and begins to run up the stairs, before realizing her aunt is no longer behind her, and the roof collapses. Maggie makes It above ground, not expecting anyone to have survived the collapse.

Five days later, we find Maggie and her mother, a woman of Catholic faith confined to a wheelchair, visiting her Aunt Joan in the hospital, who is in a coma. They're told by the doctors there is a possibility that she may never wake up, and if she does she might be unable to feed or dress herself. After their bumpy return home, Maggie is informed by her mother that she is going to Wales to live with her Aunt and Uncle, and their children for the duration of the war, because it is no longer safe for her. After listening to the idea, Maggie agrees that it makes sense. England is no longer safe.

After various buses and finally a six hour long train ride, Maggie arrives at a train station, with no relatives there to greet her. Then a car pulls up, not driven by her aunt or uncle, but a nun. She is informed that she will be attending St. Garan's of the Cross, though she attempts to tell Sister Bramley that she must be mistaken, she soon realizes that she is being told the truth, and joins the Nun for the ride to her new boarding school.

Once they arrive, Maggie is in for a frightful sight. The Reverend Mother, whom she is told to address as Mother Superior, is a fright, and a nutcase at that. After a grueling moment when she is led to believe her hair will be cut off and her clothing burned, because of her monetary status, she is finally brought up to a bedroom, where 70 other girls are crammed tightly in, leaving no real space for her to sleep, except for the floor where another student, Kate, gives her a blanket.

The next morning, after being forced to confess her sins to Mother Superior, Maggie is told she must pay penance by going down a cliff and bathing in the nude, in the freezing waters. Whilst walking to the cliff, she encounters another student, Eileen, who joins her down to the beach. There they encounter a Nazi soldier, wounded, with a gun, who takes Eileen hostage and tells Maggie she MUST go back to the school and get him milk, and various food items but not tell anyone, or else he'll kill Eileen.

Maggie does as she is told, lying along the way because she fears for her new acquaintance's life. When she returns down the cliff, Eileen and the Nazi soldier are nowhere to be found, and she fears that he took Eileen to do unthinkable things with her. She calls out the younger girl, who soon materializes out of the fog, claiming to have killed the man with his own gun. Unbelievingly she follows Eileen back to the Nazi, who is indeed dying from a gunshot wound to the stomach. He tells them they must look in his crate, it will explain everything.

In the crate they find a baby, which Eileen immediately takes ownership of. They hike back up the cliff and Eileen disappears with the baby, telling Maggie she will take it to the `nice' nun. Once inside, Maggie informs her new friend Kate of the horrors she witnessed, and Kate informs her that the nice nun doesn't exist, and Eileen is insane. For the next few days, they must sit back and wait for Eileen to return, though it doesn't happen.

After an incident in the school's cafeteria, Maggie is locked in the chapel to await punishment, when Kate rescues her and they go off into the woods to find Eileen and hopefully, the baby. The baby, whom Eileen has named Brett after her deceased brother, is still alive and they begin their trek through the woods, when they run into one of the `rich' students, Alison who after much argument joins them on their journey.

After a ride in the car of a shady man, and then another long walk, the girls come across a train, but are too late to ride it. They come up with a plan to hop the next one, though trouble occurs and not everyone makes it. After the train is stopped in order for military troops to confiscate a deserter, who commits suicide, the girls are questioned by the train conductor, though saved by a stranger who insists the girls are her children, and they return to the train, with the woman who refuses to answer any of their questions about who she is.
After following the woman, now known as Colleen back to her extremely run-down boarding house, the girls are placed in separate rooms, and Colleen comes to visit Maggie with a gift of hot chocolate. Maggie soon falls asleep, waking up only when there is a disturbance in the room, during which she blacks out again due to sleeping pills placed in her warm beverage.

Once she awakens, she is informed by Colleen that she is now in a brothel, where she will work for nice clothes, food, and an okay life. During this time, she discovers she was betrayed by her closest friends. But because of her disobedience and blacking out the night before, she is locked in a basement, given no food and water for six days before being released. After she find Mother Superior with Colleen, she discovers a bunch of stuff and then is released to go live happily ever after with her Aunt Joan in India.

Yeah. The ending was kind of rushed. And by kind of, I mean the last 10 pages were like "OKAY WE'RE GOING TO SPRING EVERYTHING ON YOU SO IT DOESN'T REALLY MAKES SENSE BUT IT MAKES THE ENDING SO MUCH BETTER." And by that, I mean I didn't like the ending, because I had to reread the last chapter twice to really know what happened. And I'm still confused. The ending kind of sucked, and ruined what COULD have been an extremely well written book. I think I'll give it a 4/5, only because I hated the ending. The book was strange, but an interesting and surprisingly short read.

When it comes to the school Maggie was sent to, it was reminiscent of the movie Matilda (starring Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman) in its brutishness.

The tie-in between the school, the brothel, and the train they hopped, wasn't convincing.

Shelter Me is a keep-you-on-your-toes-from-beginning-to-end kind of book. There were numerous moments where I was just totally flabbergasted. This is the first book to completely shock me like that!

Maggie is a very determined girl, but her mom believes she's corrupted, so she sends her off to a boarding school in Wales. But strange things are happening at the school, so Maggie and a couple friends leave to travel somewhere else. Being in the middle of a war, it isn't the best idea for girls to be wandering around alone, especially after dark with no money, no food, and no way to defend themselves. They encounter all kinds of problems, some more dangerous than others, and I was on the edge wondering if that would be the end of the road for them.

McAulay really knows how to write a killer novel - with action and never ending suspense!!

I had such high hopes for this book. I read the blurb online and immediately had to have it so it actually saddened me when I didn't like it. Like, at all.

Could my expectations being so high have influenced that? No question. But regardless of that the reality of the matter is the book fell short for a variety of reasons outside of that.

The first being that the story was fairly predictable. I can think of only one element (and giving the author his due it was a very big element) that actually caught me off guard. For the most part, however, I knew what was going to happen before it did. I wasn't even surprised when the end turned out exactly as I anticipated it would from around the second chapter in.

Another aspect that didn't work for me were the characterizations. Outside of the fact that we never really delved deep enough into any of the characters to begin with, the readers were faced with a series of cliched characters that didn't have any overwhelmingly unique qualities from any other story of this nature. Those who were disguised as good but were really bad were not disguised well enough. I figured them out pretty much from the chapter each was introduced in.

Lastly, for such a short book there was so very much happening. The reader zoomed from one plot element to another (none of which I want to give away in case you want to read it and maybe be surprised) in a matter of a chapter or two. In the end, the book did portray the elements outlined in the blurb, but again, my expectations were that it would have focused more on Maggie's journey on a more personal level than the superficial way it did. So perhaps it wasn't the book as much as it was me.

First off, let me say I love Alex McAulay! All of his books so far have been great, page-turning adventures.

That said, I was a little disappointed with this book. The story was pretty good, but I felt like it left out a lot of information and it left me guessing a lot. I was especially unhappy with the ending. It was kind of abrupt and didn't make much sense to me. I was left feeling like he just wanted to finish the book and smashed the ending into one chapter.

All in all, this was a nice read, and had some good thrills. It is worth buying if you enjoy Alex McAulay books.

Maggie Leigh is a teenager growing up in war torn London in 1941. So far, Maggie and her mom have avoided any of the bombing raids over the city. But she is used to the blackout curtains and the warning sirens. It isn't until she ventures into another part of the city with her world-traveled Aunt Joan that the reality sets in. Maggie and her aunt
are shopping in an exotic fabric shop when the unmistakable sound of a low-flying plane is heard overhead. In a matter of moments, the street outside is destroyed, and debris flies into the shop. As the plane passes, Aunt Joan grabs Maggie and runs for the underground station. They've been taught that the underground stations are deep enough to protect from the bombs above.

Unfortunately, the underground isn't as safe as they'd hoped, and the ceiling is about to cave. Protecting Maggie over everything else, Aunt Joan forces Maggie up the stairway. Maggie makes it back out safely, but Aunt Joan is left in a coma. It's from here that Maggie's mother decides that the best and safest place for Maggie to shelter is on the coast at her Uncle Harold's. Maggie doesn't have much say in the matter, and within two days, she finds herself on a train headed towards Carmarthen, with a letter from her mother stashed in her pocket.

It's only when the train arrives late at night at a deserted station that Maggie starts to worry. A lone car pulls up and a nun steps out. Maggie is confused, until Sister Bramley has Maggie retrieve the letter. The letter wasn't for her Uncle Harold, but for herself! Her mother is sending her to St. Garan's for the next three months. It's a convent in the middle of nowhere. Her mother is overly religious and was afraid that Aunt Joan's influence was corrupting Maggie.

Life at St. Garan's starts out miserably, and goes from bad to worse. It's only when she is befriended during the night by Kate that there is any bright spot for Maggie. Kate knows how to work the convent and helps Maggie to survive.

But a horrible event occurs on the beach below the rocky cliffs of St. Garan's. Maggie knows she will be blamed and life will become intolerable. Kate rescues her and the two decide to run away in the middle of the night. The duo turns into a foursome before the night is over, and they do their best to escape from St. Garan's.

It's at this point that I can't give anything else away. It would spoil the rest of the story!! I have to give the author kudos for writing a book that didn't give anything away before it was necessary. I could anticipate Maggie wanting to leave St. Garan's but did not plan on how it would turn out. I was kept turning pages from the initial bombing until the last page.

The story is dark, set in a desperate time in history, but Maggie's spirit and perseverance keeps the novel from becoming too depressing. The situations felt real and the horrors Maggie endured were traumatic, but she was a strong character able to persevere. This is yet another novel by Alex McAulay that I was relieved to end because of the constant suspense, but sad to see end because I was so caught up in the entire story.

Reviewed by: Jaglvr