Booktalking Colorado - Full Booktalk Record

Booktalking Colorado Full Record:

	Title:	City of the Beasts
	Author:	Allende, Isabel
	Date Published:	2002
	Genre:	Adventure
	Grade Level:	7 - 12
	Booktalker:	Bonnie Phinney

Booktalk:
Alex’s life was turning upside down. One day he’s a normal 15 year old whose biggest worry is how to get a girl to notice him. Then his mother is fighting cancer and it doesn’t look good. He’s angry…and depressed. And now this! His father decides to take his mom to a special treatment center–which means that he and his sisters are being shipped off to live with relatives. Sure, THEY get to go to stay with his mom’s parents, but not him – no, Alex is being sent to New York to live with his eccentric grandmother, Kate. Kate was no ordinary grandmother. All his life she’d played heavy-handed jokes on him and his sisters, like when she sent them a box of Chocolates – filled with tobasco! She terrified them when they were younger with scary stories – some real, some imagined – from her trips around the world. His favorite was the story about the 24 ft python in Malaysia that ate her camera. Kate was a free-lance journalist for the International Geographic. She did weird things. Went weird places. Lived a weird life. And now HE was going to be part of that life – and her next assignment – a trip deep into the heart of the Amazon jungle to search for a gigantic, possibly humanoid, creature they call The Beast. Although few people believe the Beast really exists, there are reports that it has been killing people.. This expedition will be trying to find out if it exists or not. Now you’d think Alex would be excited about this opportunity. But, he’s not. Life in the jungle wasn’t easy. The humidity was stifling and the bugs and other creepy-crawlies were both dangerous and annoying, as were other dangers that lurked in the waters and hung from the trees. Then there were the natives, of course, who didn’t always trust strangers. And The Beast, itself. Everything about the trip was so different from the world Alex knew that he felt like a visitor from another galaxy. And to make matters worse, weird things were happening. Someone or something was sabotaging the mission. Alex has to find out who, before it’s too late.