Reviews for Groundhog's day at the doctor

The average rating for Groundhog's day at the doctor based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-09-09 00:00:00 Allan Roper I recently went solo dining with the 2nd book in the series and sat down at a counter, speeding through the large font and well-spaced text. The restaurant started to fill up and another solo diner sat down next to me. I glanced over at his magazine and saw that it was a scientific journal open to an article about the brain. I casually angled the cover of my Scholastic-published book away from his view and kept reading, very self-conscious of the approximately 18 grades of school between our reading materials. Sigh. I'm bouncing around in my reading material lately. I've been trying to force the weighter books and it's like an overtight pair of jeans. Lay back on the bed, take a deep breath, and hope you can wrestle that zipper up before the oxygen runs out or the button pops off and you lose an eye. The YA and younger books are more like comfortable sweatpants, the waistband slightly stretched and the material over the seat taking on a sheen from wear. I need to take in a few sweatpants books before attempting another jeans book. Who am I trying to impress? No need to do the David Hasselhoff on Baywatch stomach suck. This is what I repeat to myself when I sit next to someone reading a scientific journal open to an article about the brain...you couldn't sit somewhere else, brain guy??? The beginning of the 2nd book helped me pinpoint why I liked this 1st book so much. With the next in the series, Gregor is suddenly having these abilities he never had before. Booooo. The first book moved forward with his own average self, no special powers needed. While he may have been written as more selfless than the typical boy his age, he made mistakes and was cranky like a real boy. When he was courageous, loyal, loving, or expressed empathy, it wasn't unusual - it could be duplicated by any child who read this book. The value of that! You too can be like this!: [Gregor]* nodded. He could never hate people very long because he always ended up finding out something sad about them that he had to factor in. Like this kid at school everybody hated because he was always pushing little kids around and then one day they found out his dad had hit him so much, he was in the hospital. With stuff like that, all Gregor could feel was bad. Wonderful. Oh, the story was set in this quest for his father with a fantastic imaginary world underground featuring people who had lived there so long that they were pale-haired, translucent-skinned, and violet-eyed. The allies and enemies were gigantic bats, cockroaches, and rats. This is meant for a younger audience than The Hunger Games trilogy, so probably elementary age. The quest kicked off with an awful set of prophetic verse (not as bad as Brian "One Trick Pony" Jacques but nowhere near the soaring glory (to me) of Susan Cooper). The ending was rushed. But I loved it for keeping the hero ordinary. My favorite line? From my favorite character, the little sister, Boots: "I poop!" *Lookie! The square brackets don't insert a colon anymore!

Review # 2 was written on 2009-12-06 00:00:00 Michael Sysavath so this is how superweak my life is: on friday i rushed home from work in the rain to get some homework done. whee... but then i ended up writing that wuthering heights review, inspired by the rain and the clouds etc. and i did some work, but not a ton. and i thought to myself, what do i really want to be doing? and the answer was - put on my pajamas, eat peanut butter pretzels and read unchallenging children's books. so i did. and you can all suck it, with your parties and balls and galas. 'cuz i had myself a nice time. i didn't like it as much as the hunger games; which is teen fiction, not juvie, so maybe i'm not as developmentally stunted as i thought. look, i'm growing up before your eyes! she has a real knack for pacing, which is way more important in children's literature than adult, just because of attention-span, particularly now, when the options for children are increasingly electronic and faster-paced - a book really has to capture the imagination in order to hold a child's attention, and i think this does a good job of that. i also appreciate her very low emphasis on sentimentality. it is less pronounced than in the hunger games, because of the younger audience, but it's an adventure book, life's hard, things die. and i think that's a good element in children's literature; her lack of prettifying realities. i will probably read the other books in the series, providing my social life doesn't improve, but i don't feel the same urgency to read them that i do for the teen series. it may be the subject matter/younger audience thing, or the lack of a true "cliffhanger" at the end of the book, but i probably will get to them. it was enjoyable, and if you have children, you should probably pick these up and pretend you are reading them together because your kids enjoy them. and now i can give greg back his copy, and that gets one more book out of my house. which means there's room for one more book, basically. this is how the problem exacerbates... come to my blog!