Nation

Locations
Call Number: Teen BOCD Fiction, Teen BOCD / Fiction / Action / Pratchett, Terry
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Pittsfield Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Teen BOCD Fiction	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Teen BOCD Fiction	4-week checkout	Due 05-11-2024
Pittsfield Teen A/V 4-week checkout	Teen BOCD / Fiction / Action / Pratchett, Terry	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Unabridged.
Compact discs.
Read by Stephen Briggs.
A vicious storm has ripped away everything that Mau knows, and he now stands as the lone inhabitant of a desert island. However, when her ship flounders, Daphne joins Mau on the island, and the two work towards surviving together. The lessons that follow create a deep bond of understanding between Mau and Daphne, as they synchronously form their own Nation.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Summary / Annotation
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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Great story submitted by ferdoble on August 4, 2011, 5:33pm Fantastic book about the coming together of two peoples in a way that only Pratchett could do. I loved this book. If you like any of Terry's work you'll like this, its especially nice because it gets away from the disk world series where the enfases is often times not on the story but rather with being clever about parallels to the real world (which i also love, but its awesome when he writes a good story to go with it).

not discworld submitted by unknown on August 10, 2013, 10:31pm Nation is an exceptionally good book, rewarding to read; it is aimed at young people, and I think that it would appeal strongly to the best in fourteen-year-olds everywhere; however, even though I haven't been fourteen for many years, I enjoyed it very much and recommend it for all ages.

It has many of the characteristics of Terry Pratchett's work, but it does not fit easily into any category. His humor is there, as is his relish in deflating the balloons that make up the given wisdom of human culture; the allusions that make every book he writes a delight, a puzzle, and an unending source of new discovery at each re-reading are there; none of it is present to the degree that any of it would be in a Discworld book.

A continuing idea running through his work is that of the alternate universes created at each decision point. One picks up a fork; alternatively, one may not have picked up a fork, and by not doing so may have created a different reality, the fork-not-picked-up universe. Nation takes place on an earth where a good many different utensils have been picked up at different times from what we know, but it is still recognizable as a nineteenth century when Britannia ruled the waves.

Although it is an entertaining book, it is not primarily a funny one. The themes it deals with are overwhelming--loss of the entire cultural framework that makes life in society meaningful, death of all that is known, the futility of traditional coping mechanisms in the face of such loss, the need to build a new life from within when all that has been known before was an old life imposed from without. The young hero has lost everything--even the coming-of-age ritual he was to go through the day of the tragedy. The repeated theme of the book is "When much is taken, something is returned." The reality is that the something returned is the result of work and determination, not a free gift; it's easy to give up, difficult to take what little you are given and make what you can of it. The story of the book is the tale of self-discovery after the boundaries have been wiped out, and of the attempt to build a new foundation for a society based on truth. Even through all the humor, there is also an ever-present sadness and grief for what was lost that wrenches the heart. Above all, it is a book to make one think.

I do not know of any other living author who is as cherished by his habitual readers as Terry Pratchett is, as both a writer and a person; nor can I think of any other who so richly deserves the cherishing.

Round World submitted by Jen Chapin-Smith on June 24, 2022, 11:45am Sir Terry Practchett, best know and loved for his Discworld novels, brings us a book set on Round World (Earth), although the author assures us that it is not quite our Earth. The story follows two teens--a young woman from England and a young man who lives on the South Pacific island where her ship crashes during a storm. The pair must learn to survive without the benefits of a larger community.
This fun adventure takes us through several unexpected turns and throws off the racism and sexism of earlier survival novels such as "Robinson Crusoe" but still acknowledges that these problems exists in the 19th century, when the novel is set.