The Great Number Rumble

The Great Number Rumble is a fictional story about math. When the Director of Education in some non-specific town where a kid named Jeremy lives (the whole book is told from Jeremy's perspective) removes Math from the School Curriculum, the kids held a “yay-saying marathon”. Even the teachers happily ditched their math textbooks, expecting not to see them ever again. But Jeremy's friend Sam, a self-proclaimed mathnic, hated the math ban that the director of education, who's name, by the way is Mr. Lake, set up, so he sets out to prove to Mr. Lake that Math is fun, and also proves that math is everywhere in the doing of it. He covers all of the math in sports, art, music, nature, and more. Sam finally convinces Mr. Lake that math is fun, and then he lifts the ban. Cool, huh?

My favorite thing about this book was how many tricks Sam had up his sleeve. He seemed to have a way to get around everything Mr. Lake threw at him. Plus, I thought that math was integrated into almost everything, but I didn't know how.

There's also some history of famous mathematicians in this book. My favorite one was probably Pythagoras and the order of Pythagoras. They tried to prove a mathematical universe, and got extremely close, but disaster struck when one of them discovered the square root of two, which is impossible to write in whole numbers (decimals weren't part of math then).

Warriors: Into the Wild

Warriors is about four wild cat clans that seem more like societies to me. A human-pet cat named Rusty joins one of them which is called Thunderclan and takes the name Firepaw.

Let me explain something about the clans: the names of them are Thunderclan, with a leader named Bluestar (all leaders are given the name 'star' when they become leader). Thunderclan is perhaps my favorite one, just to tell you. The evil Shadowclan, which is really just evil because they have an evil leader who I think is pretty stupid--all he wants is power. His name is Brokenstar (broken the promise of being a good leader of course :\). Shadowclan is across a street from Thunderclan (they call the street the Thunder Path because they think the cars are monsters). Riverclan lives across a river from Thunderclan's forest; their leader is Crookedstar (because of his crooked jaw). And finally Windclan which is pretty much separate from all the other clans on a plateau near the Thunder Path and a farm. Their leader is Tallstar. Shadowclan drove them out so they aren't heard about much in this book.

There's also something called Star Clan, but that's basically the heaven for the cats.

Anyway, Rusty gets turned into Firepaw in Thunderclan and he becomes a warrior apprentice. The clans of cats have warriors which basically are the fighters. The book is about him training to be a warrior and all that happens within his training. First he quickly becomes friends with a cat named Greypaw (all of the apprentices are named 'something'paw--Firepaw got his name from his fiery red fur.)

Suddenly some warrior or warrior's apprentice says that Bluestar's deputy (Redtail) is dead. This is very disappointing moment as Redtail was Bluestar's deputy for many moons (they call months 'moons') and by warrior tradition Bluestar must choose a new deputy before the next full moon (moon-high). Bluestar chose a warrior named Lionheart.

The thing I enjoyed most in this book was the most exciting part when Thunderclan defeated Shadowclan's sinister leader. There was a huge war between the two clans--some Shadowclan cats hated their leader so much that they helped Thunderclan.

By the end of the book, Firepaw becomes a warrior and his name changed to Fireheart. That's basically the end of the book--of course that's just the first book!

I read this book faster than I usually read a chapter book because of how much it excited me and interested me. I think the author, whose name is Erin Hunter, is probably really good at putting excitement into her stories. This was perhaps the most exciting chapter book I've read ever! And as a result of that I've quickly tried to find the next Warriors book (which we have since my Dad and Fiona read both this book and are somewhere in the next book) and I've already started reading it. So stay tuned for that--coming up pretty soon!

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (part 3)

In this Blog post I will talk about the end of the book. After returning from a long journey trying to destroy a Horcrux (I have no clue how to spell it, OK?), Harry and a weakened Dumbeldore find out that Hogwarts had been attacked by Death Eaters!! :(

Eventually during a fight, Dumbledore gets thrown off a tower after Avadakadavra--the killing curse--is used on him by Severus Snape. It was supposed to actually be Malfoy, believe it or not, he had never actually killed someone and he felt like he just couldn't do it.

Dumbledore was a very important person so this is very, very significant. With Dumbledore not there, Harry will have no one as important as him to help him. When I was reading the book, I couldn't believe Dumbledore was dead! He was quite a powerful wizard.

Dumbledore had rescued Harry and no there was no one to do that. Which is very significant to Harry. I don't know if Harry will be strong enough to defeat Voldemort without Dumbledore's help. Before when Harry reached a stumbling block, Dumbledore would step in and help him, but now there is no Dumbledore to do that. In this book, at the end, Harry says that he won't be going back to Hogwarts because he'll be trying to destroy horcruxes and Voldemort. Ron and Hermione say that they won't go back to school if he won't--so Harry won't totally be on his own. But they're young witches and wizards too. So he doesn't have anyone with much experience following his path with him.

By the way, Harry later discovers that Snape was the Half Blood Prince. So the theory that Hermione earlier placed was correct.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (part 2)

This is another section of my Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince blog post. It is about a certain section. Harry goes to a potions class, which he thought he wouldn't be taking because he only got an "E" on his OWLs because Professor Snape, who Harry loathes, was teaching it. Part of the reason is that Snape only continues teaching people who got "O" on their OWLs for potions. But Harry can take the class because Snape is not teaching it anymore!

Anyway, he forgot his book and then gets a spare which the last user apparently scribbled a whole lot of annoying notes in. He starts making the potion that Slughorn asked his students to make and then eventually (after deciphering the writing that was obscured by those annoying notes) he took a chance and tried to do what the annoying notes said. When he smashed a bean with a silver knife (he was supposed to cut it if he was just paying attention to the author) it did exactly what the book said the results should be.

He now knew that the annoying notes were not annoying at all! And the next time he followed the instructions and got what he wanted in like two seconds once again.

To me the significance of this is it lets Harry get Felix Felicis, which is liquid luck, as a prize. This unlocks a whole ton of things that rely on it so Harry can basically do almost anything he needs to.

A list of stuff Harry learns from the Half-Blood Prince:

1. How to be good at potions, even better than Hermione!
2. A few spells that the Half-Blood Prince invented himself: Levicorpus (which makes someone float in midair) and Sectum Sempre (which makes the person aimed at spill out their blood--the Prince wrote "should only be used against enemies.")

Hermione really doesn't approve of the Prince. Because Harry is kind of following someone else's orders, she gets quite unhappy. She thinks that the person who invented the spells was a dark wizard.

Harry really feels good about this Half-blood Prince but Hermione is suspicious. They both are kind of right but I believe the proof of who this Half-blood Prince is, personally I must say, belongs in my next post.

Stay tuned (please...)!

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (part 1)

Just a quick note: this may be an awkwardly long blog post, so please just... keep... reading...(well, it is a big book!) So, anyway, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is another harry potter book (duh!).

A lot of the energy in the lessons that Harry took from Dumbledore is spent trying to find out about Voldemort (oh no! I said it!) and his past. It's important to find out this because this may help them defeat Lord Voldemort. They go into many people's memories with the Pensive and each one is about something to do with Voldemort. You need to know your enemy's strengths and weaknesses.

Here are a few things that Harry may have discovered in that range.
Voldemort's Strengths:

• He can obviously stand to kill someone, which is probably his main strength.
• He was a pretty good student when he was at Hogwarts. In fact he was pretty much the best student anyone had ever seen. So he's probably pretty smart.
• He has an army of Death Eaters--he basically controls them with fear.
  
• He has killed many people to make Horcruxes. A Horcrux is a part of a person's soul that got ripped apart from the rest. You can't be killed if you have your soul ripped up into pieces until the many pieces are destroyed.
  

Voldemort's Weaknesses:

• He is not good at making friends.
• It's not really good for you to have a ripped soul. He doesn't even look human anymore. He looks kind of like a snake.
• Voldemort never told anyone about the Horcruxes. So it is a weakness that his enemies know, y'know. Now they can destroy however many Horcruxes they know of. They believe the number of Horcruxes is 6, with the 7th piece of soul still in him. Voldemort knows that 7 is the most powerful magical number.
• They have destroyed two, one which was Voldemort's diary, and the other was Marvolo's ring (Marvolo was one of Voldemort's ancestors, to be precise his Grandfather). They think the other ones are: they thought they had found a horcrux in Slytherin's locket (but it turns out to be a fake, there is a piece of paper in the fake that says that someone intends to destroy the real one but we just know they intend to, not whether they actually did), Helga Hufflepuff's cup, and something of Griffendor's and/or Ravenclaw's.
• Dubledore says that Harry has a power that Voldemort doesn't--he can love. It's kind of weird to me. And Harry might think "how is that a power" as well, but still then again Dumbledore is pretty smart!

In my next post I will talk about some other stuff in the book.