Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Toshikazu Kawaguchi: Before the Coffee Gets Cold (first published in Japanese in 2015) The first book by Japanese playwright and theater director Toshikazu Kawaguchi, based on his play with the same title. The book won several awards and was translated into English, Chinese, and Vietnamese before being published in Hungarian. Since then, it has been translated to Polish, Italian, Spanish, French, Arabic, Indonesian, Portuguese, Turkish, Romanian, Dutch, German, Finnish, Lithuanian, Czech, Swedish, Serbian, Greek, and Thai. Café Funiculi Funicula opened in 1874 and has been operating for more than 140 years. Legend said that there is a chair which, if you sit on, help you travel in time once in your life. But there are rules: you can only meet someone you already know and you can’t change the past in any way. You also have to return to the present before your coffee gets cold. There are even a…
Alex/Axel
Sam Copeland: Alex vs Axel – The Impossible Quests (Penguin Random House 2024) Alex Always is a smart boy, he has a very good memory and studies well. This is not appreciated by everyone in his class… He is raised by his grandmother, with whom they can barely keep their small apartment. However, he has even bigger problems to solve when he suddenly falls into another world. Axel Stormward is a Grade Nine hero, a defender of justice, a flayer of evil, a slayer of wolves. He doesn’t even know how much trouble he will get into when he suddenly falls into another world. Alex and Axel switch places to complete their Impossible Quests. The story runs on two threads, as the two boys try to figure out why they ended up in another world and how they can get home. Both of them are helped along the way by…
Charlie McGuffin changes again
Sam Copeland: Charlie Morphs Into a Mammoth (Penguin Books 2020) Charlie is an unusual little boy. He can transform into an animal. His friends think it’s really awesome, but he doesn’t think so. They’ve already figured out that anxiety is what triggers this ability in him, and he’s managed to influence it and can pretty much control it. However, there are things in his life that he can’t control, like the fact that his parents are constantly fighting and they can’t seem to get their problems under control together. The story is very expressive, yet humorous, about the anxiety that everyone experiences in their lives, but it is up to us to decide how to cope with it. The main point of the story is that even if we think that bad things happen only to us, don’t forget that we are not alone. Friends play an important role, as…
The Wild Robot
Peter Brown: The Wild Robot (Little, Brown and Company 2016) Peter Brown: The Wild Robot Escapes (Little, Brown and Company 2017) Many thanks to Maxim Könyvkiadó for sending me the books! Peter Brown: The Wild Robot Protects (Little, Brown and Company 2023) Our story begins with the sinking of a ship. After a huge storm, hundreds of crates were floated on the ocean waves, but only one of them reached the shores of an island safely. A brand new robot was hiding in the crate. Thanks to some curious otters, the ROZZUM 7134 unit opens its eyes for the first time here, and a remote, wild island show itself. In order to fit in, our robot must become part of the island, it must be wild. It also finds friends on the island, but unfortunately this idyllic state cannot last forever. The world that the author has invented is very…
Underwater London
Katya Balen: The Thames and Tide Club – The Secret City (Bloomsbury Publishing 2023) The Thames and Tide Club is already known from October, October by Katya Balen. In this book, we get to know another group of people who search for treasures washed up on the banks of the Thames. Clem and her friends Ash and Zara, along with other residents of their estate, go out to the riverbank every Saturday – rain or shine – and look for treasures. They usually find – if not treasures, then objects that the local museum curator deems worth preserving. One day, however, Clem returns from her mudlarking with a very strange find. This sets off a chain of unexpected and astonishing events. At the beginning of the story, we cannot yet guess that the adventures of Clem and her friends will take a fantastic turn when they step into an unknown,…
The Man behind the Work
J.J. Abrams – Doug Dorst: S. – Ship of Theseus (Canongate Books 2013) Many thanks to Geopen Könyvkiadó for sending me the book! A story within a story. The Ship of Theseus is the last novel by the once famous writer V.M. Straka. Its hero S. is a man without a past who takes part in both a symbolic and real journey. The other story is that of two readers, Jen and Eric, who send messages to each other through writings on the margins and try to find out the writer’s identity and at the same time solve the problems of their own lives. The person who came up with all this is the film director, producer, screenwriter J.J. Abrams and university professor Doug Dorst. Together they created this work, the uniqueness of which lies not in its story, but in the fact that it is itself a work of…
The Christmas Operation
Karina Yan Glaser: The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2017) The 141st Street brownstone holds a special place in the hearts of the Vanderbeeker family: it is their home. However, four days before Christmas, they receive bad news: their landlord will not renew their lease for the following year, so they have to leave their home at the end of the month. The children, Isa, Jessie, Oliver, Hyacinth and Laney, therefore decide to convince Mr. Beiderman that the house is not the same without them, no matter what the cost. They must hurry, because they have four days to make “Operation Beiderman” a success or they will have to move. Throughout the story, we can see the everyday life of a family, the preparations for Christmas and the dynamics between family members, neighbors and friends. One of the main points is that raising children requires not only the…
A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast (first published in 1964) Many thanks to 21. Század Kiadó for sending me the book! Ernest Hemingway was born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, the city of “wide lawns and narrow minds”. During his adventurous life, he participated as a war correspondent in both World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, and lived in Paris, Spain, Florida, and Cuba. He hunted German submarines in the Caribbean, and for everything in Africa. In 1950, he began writing The Old Man and the Sea, which was finally published in 1952. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in 1954. A beautiful, new edition of his life series is being published by 21. Század Kiadó. The author lived in Paris between 1921 and 1926, along with other famous, self-destructive members of the „lost generation”. At that time, he began…
The ugly and the beautiful
Clémentine Beauvais: Piglettes (Pushkin Children’s Books 2017) Mireille, Astrid and Hakima have a lot in common: all three are teenagers, lonely, misfits and barely fit into their own clothes, and they have been voted the ugliest girls at Marie Darrieussecq High School in Bourg-en-Bresse. For three years now, a jerk has been organizing voting for Pig Paegant competition on social media among the girls deemed the ugliest. Mireille is already quite “used” to the humiliation, but this is the first time the other two girls have been on the list. That is why they think that instead of crying about it, they should support each other and go on a roadtrip by bike together, with the goal of making it to Paris on the 14th of July, the national holiday, to the president’s garden party. The book deals with very important and serious topics presented with humor. It talks about…
The Nutcracker
E.T.A. Hoffmann: The Nutcracker (Hutchinson 2017) Although Hoffmann was a lawyer and worked as a judge and councilor, he considered himself primarily a musician. He was also an excellent painter and graphic, but he was also acknowledged as a poet and writer. His exceptional imagination cast even the most ordinary situations in an absurd light. His best-known work is The Golden Flower Pot, but he also wrote a Christmas story: The Nutcracker, which is usually known from adaptations. Hoffmann’s tale has been adapted several times. The version from Dumas was rethought by the Russian composer Tchaikovsky in his last ballet. The plot of the tale has also been adapted, so today we are more likely to identify it with the story told in the ballet performance, accompanied by its beautiful and characteristic music. The original story balances on the border between dreaming and awakness, and like other works by the…