Booktalking Colorado - Full Booktalk Record

Booktalking Colorado Full Record:

	Title:	Into the Labyrinth
	Author:	Townley, Roderick
	Date Published:	2002
	Genre:	Fantasy
	Grade Level:	6 - 7
	Booktalker:	Sam Marsh

Booktalk:
"BBRRRKKK!!! CCRRRAAAAKKKLLLEEE!!! Silence. The Book was gone! The Great Good Thing, the book of Sylvie's life had been republished, and suddenly Sylvie had found herself in living rooms, waiting rooms, apartments, bus stations, and bookstores. Whatever they were. It seemed that The Great Good Thing was the only book in the world. Everyone seemed to be reading it. No sooner would one reader put down the book then another would pick it up and start reading. And, at a different point! Everyone in the book was stressed out from all the performances. "You've got to talk to the Writer!" Said Queen Emmeline, Sylvie's mother. "Even Lulu is nervous...Yesterday she barked through my whole scene by the drawbridge." Further, the Queen was losing weight, something she'd never done before. So, Sylvie talked to the Writer. She had to wait until the writer was asleep, of course, since the Writer was in the real world, not a character in the book. The writer understood at once and agreed to write in someone to help the characters deal with the stress of the book's popularity. A new edition was being put out with corrections of a multitude of mistakes. And they were to be fixed before the book was uploaded onto the Web. Whatever that was. So, Rosetta Stein, a yoga instructor, was written into the new edition. In the book, she was only a shepherdess in the background, so could spend her 'off' time giving yoga stress reduction classes. Things seemed to be working...until the upload to the web. Now, the book was gone, and the smells, and the weight. Gone was the weight of the pages and the cover, the pressure of the binding. Suddenly everyone felt light and giddy. Then, the first Web Reader logged on, and everyone felt a tug that whisked them away to the first scene. Now the words in the story moved slowly upwards and the characters had to step down from one line to the next. No one could stand still, and they had to get used to moving while talking and trying not to get snagged on the tops of t's and l's and so on. Then, to make it worse, they would be suddenly whisked to another place in the book, at random depending on the mood of the reader. Finally, they were transferred back to a written copy of the book and suddenly all the weight they had ignored on the Web was back. It was quite disorienting. And, then they discovered the treacherous wordpools. Dialogue suddenly made no sense. Letters were missing or rearranged. A virus was threatening the Book!