Book Blog #83: Tracker by Gary Paulsen

Title: Tracker
Author: Gary Paulsen
# of Pages: 96 (paperback)
Genre: YA, Realistic Fiction, Adventure
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
Synopsis: For John Borne's family, hunting has nothing to do with sport or manliness. It's a matter of survival. Every fall John and his grandfather go off into the woods to shoot the deer that puts meat on the table over the long Minnesota winter.

But this year John's grandfather is dying, and John must hunt alone. John tracks a doe for two days, but as he closes in on his prey, he realizes he cannot shoot her. For John, the hunt is no longer about killing, but about life.

Review: What did I just read?

I've read two of Paulsen's works before, and I thoroughly enjoyed them, thus why I was so eager to start Tracker. While I was surprised how short the book was, I was expecting a good read.

If I could describe Tracker in one sentence, I would say that Tracker is about a boy who is distraught over his grandfather and has a sick obsession with a deer. There it is. You don't even have to read the book because there really is nothing to it. The ending is abrupt, and the whole plot is pointless. Am I missing something here? Is this a part of a bigger story? Because I think I just wasted an hour of my life.

No, I don't recommend this book.

Book Blog #82: Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya

Title: Nectar in a Sieve
Author: Kamala Markandaya
# of Pages: 186 (paperback)
Genre: Historical Fiction, Cultural, Classics
Rating: ★★★★☆
Synopsis: Married as a child bride to a tenant farmer she had never seen, she worked side by side in the field with her husband to wrest a living from land that was ravaged by droughts, monsoons, and insects. With remarkable fortitude ad courage, she sought to meet the challenge of changing times and to fight poverty and disaster. She saw one of her infants die from starvation, her daughter become a prostitute, and her sons leave the land for jobs that she distrusted. And somehow she survived....This beautiful and eloquent story tells of a simple peasant woman in a primitive village in India whose whole life was a gallant and persistent battle to care for those she loved.
Review: As you might have observed by now, I did not read this by choosing, but I will write a review for it all the same.

Nectar in a Sieve is relatively short but interesting read. The protagonist, Rukmani, marries a man of lower class than she and finds many hardships in her life (as in third-world problems). Therefore, this book is VERY DEPRESSING. The reader is dragged along on this journey of never-ending torture and may be emotionally affected!

My biggest complaint is that the book was a little too short. The plot seemed to be extremely compress, and my sense of time was a bit off. By the end of the book, I still pictured Rukmani as a much younger person than she is at that point. Also, Markandaya could have extended the plot a bit more so that the reader could find out what happens to the characters after the end of the book

For those of you who have not read this book and would usually not read a book of cultural/historical fiction/classic genres, I would highly suggest that you give it a try. It's not a hard read at all; I recommend it!