The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
T.S. Spivet is a genius mapmaker who lives on a ranch in Montana. His father is a silent cowboy and his mother is a scientist who for the last twenty years has been looking for a mythical species of beetle. His brother has gone, his sister seems normal but might not be, and his dog - Verywell -...
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T.S. Spivet is a genius mapmaker who lives on a ranch in Montana. His father is a silent cowboy and his mother is a scientist who for the last twenty years has been looking for a mythical species of beetle. His brother has gone, his sister seems normal but might not be, and his dog - Verywell - is going mad. T.S. makes sense of it all by drawing beautiful, meticulous maps kept in innumerable colour-coded notebooks. He is brilliant, and the Smithsonian Institution agrees, though when they award him a major scientific prize they don't suspect for a moment that he is twelve years old. So begins T.S.' life-changing adventure, travelling two thousand miles across America to reach the awards dinner, the secret-society membership and the TV interviews that beckon. But is this what he wants? Do maps and lists explain the world? And why are adults so strange?
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Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9781594202179 (1594202176)
ASIN: 1594202176
Publish date: May 8th 2009
Publisher: Penguin
Pages no: 375
Edition language: English
When twelve-year-old genius cartographer T. S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal—if you consider mapping dinner table conversations normal—is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T....
While I enjoyed this very much, I thought it ended with a whimper when even the same action could have been a bang. I'd recommend it anyway as an ambitious and entertaining piece that falls just short of its promise.
This was a fascinating book. I found it at the library book sale, and the large format caught my eye. This format is used to allow the margins to be filled in with "maps" by T.S. Spivet. Of course, by his definition, a map could be a geological map, or the method of chopping wood, or the sound waves...
This book is different. It's a pseudo graphic memoir by a "naive-male-prodigy-on-a-mission" (per Newsweek). It is published with extra wide side margins that leave room for numerous drawings and side comments. At first I thought I could ignore these graphics and side comments because it appeared ...