Thursday, January 01, 2015

Mystery of the Eagle's Nest

22046616Wight, Tamra. The Mystery of the Eagle's Nest (Cooper and Packrat#2)
August 21st 2014 by Islandport Press
Nominated for the Cybils by Shannon

Cooper, whose family owns a campground, has a number of geocaching boxes on the property, and campers can go looking for them. When he finds that one of the boxes has a taxidermied eagle head in it, and when two goons in ties take off after him, he knows that something is up. He enlists the help of friend and camper Packrat (so called because of the number of things he keeps in his trench coat pockets) to fend off the goons (who end up staying in a trailer at the campground) and watch out for the four eaglets who are in a nest at the campground. The mystery deepens when a Native American man, Hawke, seems to be involved, and when one of the eaglets goes missing, Cooper knows that he must do something. How many people are involved in selling eagles illegally?
Strengths: The camp is a fun setting, and it's clear that the author has used her own experiences as a campground owner to bring great details of camp ground life to the book. The environmental issue of the eagles will entice many readers, and the bad guys chasing the protagonists are always interesting.
Weaknesses: If Cooper had just taken the taxidermied eagle directly to his mother and alerted the police, not only would he and his friends not have been in danger, but the eagles wouldn't have been, either. There wouldn't have been a story, but it would have been a much better choice for Cooper to make!

Happy New Year! Of course, the big excitement is the Cybils awards announcing the shortlists! The other thing that is vaguely amusing is that I have posted (I believe) at least one book review every single day since January 1, 2012, ever since I figured out how to schedule posts. Three years is a pretty good run, but I'm not giving up yet! I need to hop over to Goodreads and fill out my 2015 Challenge. Not sure if I want to challenge myself with 800 books or go easy with 700.

My only other resolution is to run TWO miles every single day. I want to work back up to a 5k so I can do one with both of my daughters in April, but it's been hard. I have run at least a mile every day for 53 days, and two miles for 6 days, so it's doable.

The reason I run every day is because I often lie in bed and think "Is this the day I want to give up?" The answer at first is usually "Absolutely! Totally fine with that!", but in the end, I just have to get up and keep going. It's all any of us can do!

No comments:

Post a Comment