Luck of the Draw

Our February read, Dark Life by Kat Falls, didn't provide much Valentine's romance, but we did see some hearts while playing a game of Card Sharks about the book. Nooksters had to prove their Dark Life Trivia knowledge in order to get a chance to "play the cards." In case you don't remember the old game show (and none of the Nooksters didn't because, well, they weren't alive yet), Card Sharks consists of working your way across a row of cards by correctly guessing if the next card will be higher or lower than the previous. (Sounds simple, right? Tell any of the Varsity Nooksters that and they would most likely disagree! The cards were not on their side that night!) Whenever participants didn't know the answer to a trivia question, they got the privilege of wearing a picture on their foreheads of one of the not-so-pretty deep sea creatures featured in the book.  Yuck.

Fortunately, the kids did not say "yuck" in connection to the story itself. In fact, the overwhelming majority loved Dark Life. We found that although this was yet another futuristic, somewhat dystopian novel, it was a world unlike any we'd seen before as the setting was a deep sea civilization that has come into existence after global warming and earthquakes have caused the oceans to rise so high that US citizens are crammed into the "stack" cities that exist on the limited amount of land that remains where high areas such as mountains once were. Pioneers have learned to farm and build homesteads at the bottom of the ocean. One of the most intriguing, and we found questionable, elements of the book was the fact that children who have spent several years subsea have started to develop "dark gifts" that can make them both special and dangerous.

Several of the Nooksters have already started the sequel, Riptide, and are already looking forward to the third book.

Congrats to Hope, our Varsity Card Sharks champion!