Customer Reviews

Smiler's Bones

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

 

 

I just finished Smilers Bones and it was great. It was hard to get into because it kept going from present to past without telling you. Also, it was hard to figure out the Eskimo language. But it was really good once you got into the book. It's a story about the explorer Peary and how he brought six Eskimos from Greenland to New York city and put the on display at the Museum of Natural History.They all die but the youngest boy, Minik. It's really the story of his survival. The other part of the book thats good is learning about Eskimo customs. A little bit of a surprise ending. It's also a true story. Read the authors notes at the end of the book. Definitly worth reading.

A marvelous book. Smiler's Bones is exciting and funny, tragic and inspiring. The author dives deeply into this fascinating story of a real boy, expanding it and painting in long-forgotten details of Minik's life, until the reader is left at last with both a vivid sense of life in turn-of-the-century New York and the glaciers of Greenland, as well as an expanded sense of what it means to be alive in any era. At the age of forty, I found it very moving, and I suspect the young reader just beginning to emerge from an obsession with Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew would find it utterly engrossing. Highly recommended.

while this is a wonderful book and is absolutely haunting, it (i believe) cheats the reader out of the ending. the happy ending supplied by the author is inauthentic and detracts from the story.

however, the alternating chapters are heart-wrenching and what this boy went through was absolutely devestating. kids should know about the atrocities of the past, however bad.