Book Dads

A great take on Fish by teacher and reviewer Renny Fong:

"Whether read aloud or independently, this book will be hard to put down. Fish dishes it all out: action, suspense, mystery, and plenty of hearty laughs...Fish awakens all of the senses in its details, particularly smell. Mone writes it; you smell it. Your nose wrinkles up as Fish, being the lowest on the totem pole, has to scrub the 'seats of easement' and gets too close to pirate’s breath and feet. Suspense and action are raw, with each chapter leaving you hungry for more."

The rest of the Book Dads review is here.

The Story of Fish

The Pirates are Winning

A fascinating, comprehensive story on the modern pirate problem ran in a recent New York Review of Books. An excerpt:

"Somali pirates will strike anything: one-thousand-foot-long oil tankers; tiny sailboats with three people on board; old-fashioned, crescent-sailed Arab dhows; freighters crammed with emergency food; freighters crammed with weapons; a tanker carrying extremely flammable benzene that American authorities worried could be converted into an enormous, floating bomb. The pirates have even attacked navy ships, apparently by mistake."

Santa on the Kindle

The Truth About Santa, my shocking expose of the technological secrets behind Santa's annual mission, is now available in a Kindle edition. That's kind of cool. To me, anyway.

A Splashing Good Addition

An excerpt from a new review in School Library Journal:

"Mone seamlessly integrates factual information into his tale of friendship, loyalty, and exploration. As Fish travels from farm to city to ship, he discovers his place in the world, and his moral compass helps to ground and direct the story. His decision not to engage in fighting and his efforts to stop the mutiny will provide points for group discussion. Fish makes a splashing good addition to adventure fiction."