Booktalking Colorado - Full Booktalk Record

Booktalking Colorado Full Record:

	Title:	The Ancient One
	Author:	Barron, T.A.
	Date Published:	1992
	Genre:	Fantasy
	Grade Level:	6 - 8
	Booktalker:	Bonnie Phinney

Booktalk:
First, God created Rain. Then Drizzle. Then Mist, then Fog. And then…: More Rain. Anyway, that’s Kate’s adaptation of the story of creation, Oregon style. Her sneakers were wet enough that they squelched like sponges as she walked. She could feel the warmish water sloshing between her toes. No use even trying to stay dry anymore. Water was everywhere. And to think that at this very moment, she could have been curled up by the fireplace, stroking the shaggy gray cat, Atha. She could have been listening to the stories her aunt Melanie would tell her about Lost Crater. "Lost Crater is like no other place on the planet...stranger than you can imagine," Her aunt had told her. "The Ancient One lives there." Kate, who was visiting just for a week in Blade, Oregon, knew that something was troubling her aunt, something serious. She knew it had something to do with why Kate was now slogging around in the rain instead of sitting by the fire. With a sense of urgency, Aunt Melanie had sent her off to the post office before it closed. She described the envelope she was expecting: long and brown, pretty thick, the kind lawyers like to use. It must have been pretty important to make her go out in the rain like this. Kate learns the hard way that it has something to do with Lost Crater and its ancient grove of redwood trees. She discovers from her Aunt that for thousands of years, no humans had entered the fog-filled crater--except possibly the Halami, people who lived in the region centuries ago, before vanishing without a trace. Kate’s aunt seemed to know a lot about the Halami and about the deep mystery of the crater. That crater is now a source of conflict pitting loggers against environmentalists and Kate is drawn directly into the battle by Aunt Melanie. Kate and her Aunt follow an old Halami trail into the crater, only to discover that the loggers had beaten them to it. During a ferocious thunderstorm, Kate is suddenly thrown back in time five hundred years, into the middle of an epic confrontation between the powers of good and evil. And her unwilling traveling companion is the young logger, Jody, who was also thrown back in time. There, they meet an interesting cast of characters: the stonehags, a group of oddly shaped talking stones, the many-eyed underwater Guardians, the Slimlis or lizard-folk, and the Tinnanis, strange owl-like creatures who rule the moving island in the middle of the lake. They also find a loyal Halami girl named Laioni. But the most frightening character is Gashra, a megalomaniac volcano creature, sort of a combination of tyrannosaur, octopus, and two-year old, who is bent on destroying everything he cannot control. To defeat him and have a chance of returning home, Kate must find the answer to an ancient riddle--and the courage to make the most difficult choice of her life.