Selected Product:
| The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm
Hardcover
Edition: Literature Circl
Author: Nancy Farmer
Publisher: Orchard Books
Release Date: 2004-03-01
Reading Level: Young Adult
ISBN-10: 0439530644
ISBN-13: 9780439530644
List Price: $9.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Tendai, his little sister and their younger brother escape from their splendid home to explore their dangerous city. Tendai is motivated by wanting to earn a scouting badge, and he desperately wants to prove himself, as their overprotective father has always placed tight restrictions on what the siblings can and can't do.
Excellent adventure
| Customer Rating:  | This is a wonderful children's story, woven with myths and legends from Africa. It is a tale of a secret walled garden, three special children, a man-child, a holy innocent who helps to guide them, and three detectives Ear, Arm and Eye who help to track the children down.
It is the story of becoming, and of belonging, and of finding your place and purpose in the world. Incredibly well-written, it will keep most non-readers glued to the pages.
(First written as Journal Reading Notes in 1999.)
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The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm
| Customer Rating: | The title of the book is The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm by Nancy Farmer. The
book is realistic fiction and is meant for middle school.
The book takes place in Zimbabwe 2194 with three children Kuda, Rita, and Tendia all children of the General of Defense. Their father is strict and uptight. Tenda and his siblings desperately wanting to go outside get the Mellower a man who can sing Praises of people which put them under a hypnotized spell. Tendia, Rita, and Kuda get the Mellower to song Praises to their father so he will get them passes to get them outside. After their outside they explore the city and end up getting kidnapped by men and a blue monkey. Then they are put to work at Dead Man's Vlei by a woman called the She Elephant. After working for the She Elephant Tendai goes underground to fetch her some water when he over hears her talking to some workers when she says "We can sell them to the Masks". That's when Tendai freaks out then sees a ndoro and then puts it on and sees an opening after escaping they get a ride to city and try to get home. While their lost the General calls three detectives who have special skills Eye, Ear, and Arm are their names. They start rom everywhere the children went from the monkey and the men to Dead Man. Read the rest to find out the rest of this suspenseful book.
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a marvelous novel of African folklore and tradition in a futuristic setting
| Customer Rating: | _The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm_ is set in Zimbabwe in 2194, where the three children of the powerful General Matsika are forbidden to leave their home for fear of kidnapping. Longing to experience the outside world, the three children figure out how to get out...and disappear. Their parents call in an unusual set of detectives, three people whose unusual physical characteristics have been produced by exposure to nuclear waste. They are the Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, and they pursue the children from the crowded marketplace through the toxic waste dump called Dead Man's Vlei to the seemingly safe suburbs and the Mile-High MacIlwaine Hotel.
Farmer mixes African folklore and tradition with a futuristic environment to create something simply fantastic. The children, brought up in restricted safety, learn about the old culture of Zimbabwe and the new culture; I particularly liked how they see the English residents as strange outsiders. The pacing is excellent, as Farmer cuts back and forth between the kids and the detectives, keeping the tension and the interest level high in both threads until they finally meet in the book's climax. And I really loved the characters, who are portrayed both sympathetically and wittily; the bizarrely talented detectives particularly could easily be over the top, but they're just as human as anyone in the book.
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Very good.
| Customer Rating: | Nancy Farmer, The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm (Penguin, 1994)
Nancy Farmer's young adult novels are something special, no matter what she's writing about. In this case, she takes us to Africa for an examination of class struggle in the guise of a detective story. The detectives are the Ear, the Eye, and the Arm mentioned in the title (all named for their genetic mutations; the Ear has incredible hearing, the Eye incredible sight, and the Arm incredible reach), and the victims the three children of Zimbabwe's Minister of Security.
Thirteen-year-old Tendai is bored with his existence as a pampered, sheltered child, and he needs to get his Scout badge in geography. What better way to solve both problems at once than to cook up a plan with his younger siblings and the house's mellower (a kind of live-in magical psychologist) to get around the house's security and take a quick trip across the city? Unfortunately, while the city is everything Tendai had hoped it would be and more, an encounter with a genetically altered baboon in the marketplace leads to the kids being kidnapped, and their parents calling in the detectives. While the kids start off with the short end of the stick, though, they find that they are far more resilient-- and resourceful-- than their upbringing has led them to believe.
If you're not aware of the work of Nancy Farmer yet, whatever your age, do yourself a favor and get to know her stuff. Her more recent books (e.g., The Sea of Trolls) have garnered more attention, but her earlier work (this was her second novel) is just as fine. As expected from a fantasy novel, this is strongly plotted, but it also contains some wonderful characterization, enough real history, geography, and culture (albeit exaggerated somewhat) to read like an armchair traveller's guide to Zimbabwe at times, and more humor than one can shake a stick at. Farmer is a fine writer whose books are just as compelling for adults as they are for the kids at whom they're aimed. *** ½
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Outstanding Reading for young and young-at-heart!
| Customer Rating: | | This excellent book from Nancy Farmer shows this author's broad range of talent! My children love her other titles, The House of Scorpion and The Sea of Trolls. When they learned that this book was also by Ms. Farmer, they were immediately interested! I appreciate the author's ability to transport the reader to another time, place and culture, and to make other cultures' beliefs and customs easy to understand. As born-again Christians, our family has had many lively discussions after reading Ms. Farmer's books. I highly recommend this book, and the others, by Ms. Farmer. She develops the main characters well, she adds other interesting characters and settings, and there is always a sense of morality, right and wrong that comes not from what each character feels is right to himself but from some other deeper belief in an Absolute Truth. |
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