Items related to Sang Spell (Jean Karl Books (Prebound))
Synopsis
trapped in a world that time forgot
Josh is hitchhiking his way from Massachusetts to Dallas and a new life he didn't ask for and doesn't want, when he is beaten, robbed, and abandoned beside a remote mountain road. He awakes in a strange, primitive village called Canara, seemingly hidden from the modern world, with no cars or telephones or electricity.
But are the people of Canara Josh's rescuers or his jailers? As he slowly heals from his injuries and the tragedy he has been running away from, Josh begins to realize that Canara is far stranger than just an isolated community passed over by time. How can hills and trees shift in place, and even buildings appear and then vanish? Why can't he escape from Canara? And does he really want to?
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor earned countless fans with the touching morality of Newbery Award-winning Shiloh and the laugh-out-loud realism of Achingly Alice. But aficionados may be surprised to find that Naylor's Sang Spell reads more like a haunting mystery. Grieving over the sudden death of his mother, Josh Vardy is reluctantly hitchhiking to Dallas (to begin a new life with his aunt), when he is mugged and left beside a remote mountain road. A woman driving a horse and cart takes him to a strange, fog-bound, primitive village, where there are no cars or telephones or electricity. The homespun villagers turn out to be a long-lost people of mixed ethnicity, called Melungeons. They accept Josh into their community, but will only answer his questions with evasiveness and enigmas. Mavis, a broad-shouldered young woman his own age, befriends Josh when he is put to work with the others gathering ginseng, a valuable root they refer to as "'sang" and trade once a year to Chinese merchants. Over and over again Josh tries to escape--by road and by river--but finds that somehow all routes lead back to this village that time has forgotten. When Josh finally joins in the villagers' rituals and celebrations, his feelings of despair about his own future begin to transform and heal. And after his loyalty to the Melungeons is tested, Josh finds that he is free at last to make the decision to leave. (Ages 11 to 15) --Patty Campbell
From the Inside Flap
Read by Ron Rifkin
4 hours 47 minutes, 3 cassettes
Josh is hitchhiking from Boston to Dallas to begin a new life, trying to sort out the changes that have skewed his world since an accident killed his mother and made a mockery of his dreams. No longer will he be what he was?an important person in a high school he loved. Instead he will be starting his junior year in a place where no one will know him, on one will care.
He wanders up a road he has taken away from the interstate, where he has been thumbing rides, looking for a village where he might find shelter from the unexpected August cold and rain. When a car comes along, it looks like a ride to somewhere. And that's what it proves to be. But the somewhere he finds is not the somewhere he expected. It is a place that knows him, knows the darkness inside of him; that offers food and shelter, and also confronts him with choices he does not know how to make. It probes his past, examines his possible futures, and finally pierces the wall of despair he has built around himself.
Sang Spell is a fantasy built on the hopes and dreams of a people who longed for a place of peace, for a way out of the dark and the rain. Some might think finding such a place to be a miracle, but not John. To him it is a nightmare, a prison he cannot escape. Sang Spell is an adventure into a place of forgotten people, the Melungeons, and into the boundries created by the human mind.
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- PublisherPerfection Learning
- Publication date2000
- ISBN 10 0756942330
- ISBN 13 9780756942335
- BindingHardcover
- Rating
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