Tonight I read Antsy Does Time by Neal Shusterman. I was interested after reading the review in Orson Scott Card’s column. My review of Everlost turned into an OSC plug, I’ll try not to do that again here. But if you haven’t read Ender’s Game or Empire or many other wonderful novels by OSC then you should fix that asap!

I have been trying to read Antsy between homework and waiting for nephews. Tonight I had some time after homework and work were over while Anthony and Connor were grocery shopping so I picked it up. It is a very interesting book looking at how different people react differently to knowing when they will die. Some become reassured, nothing else can hurt them until then so they are careless and carefree. Others live with it as constant knowledge that causes them to make choices carefully. Antsy isn’t dying, but he sees this and starts to pay more attention to how he spends his own time. But that’s a subject for another blog entry.

It also gets into family relationships and friendships. How do they work, what happens when they don’t work, what do we do to try to get them to work – the basis for many a dysfunctional family.

I laughed out loud at many parts of this book, and had tears streaming down my face when I read the paragraph about Antsy being a black-clad cavity in a school play back in the third grade. I enjoyed this book immensely and recommend you give it a try. Middle-school boys might find it funny as well. I intend to test that on my nephew tomorrow.

I shall leave you with a quote from Antsy does time.

“A family is a collection of strangers trapped in a web of DNA and forced to cope.”    Maria von Trapp*

*Not really