i about lost all interest when a nazi showed up. it has a good premise, and i felt it had the promise of exploring how low-income families are exploited at the hands of the rich. unfortunately, there was no social commentary. the characters were evil just to be evil. as a jewish person, it's uncomfortable to read about a nazi in this light; the forced german accent was just plain strange. While working full time as a physician, Jane Shemilt received an M.A. in creative writing. She was shortlisted for the Janklow and Nesbit award and the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize for The Daughter, her first novel. She and her husband, a professor of neurosurgery, have five children and live in Bristol, England. And as for that boy, the one who had called out to him, who was he? There was something familiar there, perhaps in the hidden bones, an echo of some old friend; probably the son of a successfully ulcered father.

I remember how scary it was then years later, he found the unexpected steel in his spine to stand up for what he thinks is right regardless of whether his views were shared by his classmates, and treating the schoolyard bullied with strength and dignity that suddenly showed all of my family what an amazing young man he's growing up to be. I remember how I always wanted to shield him from the world that has teeth - and how beautifully he has done without our protection, how he did not need a well-intentioned guiding hand, how he used the meanness of the world to grow up to be a very decent man. I will say that it was interesting to watch how the mystery played out. I figured it out early, but one character made it especially intriguing! Too bad, more of this character wasn’t featured. Overall, I can't say I would recommend The Playground. It has some interesting moments, but the narrative style combined with vile characters makes this a miss for me.

Ray Bradbury has never confined his vision to the purely literary. He has been nominated for an Academy Award (for his animated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright), and has won an Emmy Award (for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree). He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's Ray Bradbury Theater. He was the creative consultant on the United States Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. In 1982 he created the interior metaphors for the Spaceship Earth display at Epcot Center, Disney World, and later contributed to the conception of the Orbitron space ride at Euro-Disney, France. En el parque hay otro niño, Tom, que le confiesa es su amigo Adulto Tom Marshall, quien también se preocupó por su propio hijo, por lo que decidió cambiar de lugar con el. Resulta que el parque tiene ese poder, si juegas en el. I found this to be intriguing at first and then maddening as it became obvious what was going on. There were a lot of characters to get to know and different points of view in the narration to adjust to, but I never really related to any of them. The children needed supervising, that was obvious, and the parents kept on blithely getting drunk, forming illicit relationships, or just not paying attention. I couldn't understand why no one was taking care of them, asking them questions, being more observant. It mystified me how the truth could go unnoticed for so long. I like suspenseful thrillers and I might have quit reading had I not agreed to write a review and also having a compulsion to finish every book I start. I wanted to like it more than I did and the vague ending left me a bit unsettled.

From the iconic science fiction author of Fahrenheit 451, a chilling dystopian short story that became a classic episode of TV’s Ray Bradbury Theater. It was a cooling September night with the first sniff of autumn in it. Next week, and the children would be raked in off the fields like so many leaves and set to burning in the schools, using their fire and energy for more constructive purposes. But they would be here after school, ramming about, making projectiles of themselves, exploding and crashing, leaving a wake of misery behind their miniature wars.”

Customer reviews

I loved the title for this book, The Playground, because it is the sort of metaphor that worked on many levels. And no, it isn’t a physical playground the way you would think of it. But what sort of playground games do you think might arise in a book about three couples and their secrets and deception? What do kids get up to when left to their own devices? Who becomes the alpha? Three low-income families have been given a handsome retainer to join Geraldine Borden for a day at her cliffside estate. All the parents must do to collect the rest of their money is allow their children to test out the revolutionary playground equipment Geraldine has been working on for decades. But there’s a reason the structures in the bowels of her gothic castle have taken so long to develop—they were never meant to see the light of day. The story twists and then twists again while the three families desperately search for answers. It’s only as they begin to unravel the truth of what happened over the summer that they realize evil has crept quietly into their world. When you think you’ve read about everything and anything and then you proceed to read a book like this 👁️👄👁️