Leo@fergusrules.com
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Leonora (Leo) is an Italian Asian American teen-ager with a rotten attitude and a genius I.Q. Thrown out of twelve schools and fluent in as many languages, she's sent to live with her grandmother in the Philippines, where she spends all her time in a computer environment called Apeiron - a parasitic virtual reality program which drove its mad creator to dive headlong into a gorge. Only in Apeiron can Leo shed the awkward body of an adolescent girl and emerge in the persona of Fergus, the warrior; only in Apeiron can she hobnob with Socrates and John Lennon. But one day the only boy she's ever liked disappears, and Leo, in a quest to rescue him, finds herself lured into the program's computer generated hell. A post-modern tilt at Alice in Wonderland, a computer-age Huckleberry Finn, leo@fergusrules.com is above all the story of a young woman's search for the lost world of her ancestors in a society in which technology has replaced community.
Arne Tangherlini received his A.B. in History and Literature from Harvard and his M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He was a teacher for many years both in the Philippines and the United States and the co-author of Smart Kids: How Academic Talents are Nurtured and Developed in America.
"Leo @ fergusrulesrules.com is a fantastical coming of age story about a brainy, racially mixed teenage girl…who spends much of her spare time in her bedroom, jacked into a cyber wonderland called Apeiron. This computer-generated 3-D world is a timeless landscape, home to a historical line-up of digitally re-created dignitaries, such as Confucius, Julius Caesar and Napoleon… She also encounters relatives and ancestors, including her great aunt, who as a young woman survives being shot by American soldiers in the Philippine American War. Other dangers include pterodactyls with giant Barbie-doll bodies that dump guano and screech, 'Nike, Guess, Benetton, Levi's! Tommy, Tommy, Tommy-boy!" and a child-steamrollering Zamboni that is operated by gnomelike people and has a control room guarded by a three-headed dog. Needless to say, Leo is a trip…a 21st century homage to the works of Argentine poet and author Jorge Luis Borges
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A lonely 14-year-old Filipino-Italian-American girl sets off on a virtual quest in Tangherlini's promising if uneven futuristic debut novel. There is much to like about the boastful, self-loathing first-person narrator, Leo, whose sassiness has gotten her thrown out of 17 different schools around the world. Feeling abandoned by her parents and living under guard in Manila with her ailing, superstitious grandmother Lola Flor, Leo spends her free time online, battling the forces of evil in the virtual land of Apeiron as her male alter ego, Fergus (inspired by William Butler Yeats's poem, "Who Goes with Fergus"). Before the reader is given a chance to become immersed in Leo's troubled real teenage life, she ducks into her computer: "Whenever I made a fool of myself in school or at home," she writes, "I went to Apeiron to start over." An electronic black hole, called Dlin, has swallowed a file containing her online kindred spirit, Bri, and with the help of the bumbling monk Fra Umberto, Leo heads out to find Bri and bring him back. The rest of the novel is an account of Leo's meandering odyssey to many strange lands, where she encounters Aristotle and Socrates (in a wax museum), gargoyles and former classmates and teachers. Ultimately, she lands in the furnace fueling a fantastic Zamboni ice-cleaning machine, peopled by tiny people much like "duwendes," mythical creatures described to her by her grandmother. Leo's final epiphany is an unsurprising one--she realizes her "strangeness" is caused by her isolation--but Tangherlini's creative use of dream imagery and his appealing narrator redeem his unusual short novel. A moving afterword by Pagan Kennedy is a eulogy to the author, who died three weeks before the book was accepted for publication.
