Digging around the Internet Archive looking at unfindable out of print books on early computing for a project I'm considering, when I ran across ...
"Wait, what's special about the SWAC, wasn't it just an early stored program computer?"
This is so funny to me, the author isn't coming out and saying SWAC is the first stored program computer, but there's definitely an implication of originality by tying it to modern PCs. I don't know how SWAC is more of a "why" for modern computing than EDVAC or IAS or Manchester Baby, or Whirlwind and the early MIT cohort for that matter if we're discussing functionality and not just architectural similarities (which have diverged anyway).
It seems straightforward that EDVAC and Manchester Baby have claim to the title of first stored program computer, depending on which you put more weight on, being started or completed.
First Draft Report on the EDVAC & IAS Machine certainly muddy the waters of "origins of modern computers" because that was the design that everyone & their mother copied. There's also EDSAC kicking around the field of nominees, because it's EDVAC finished before EDVAC...
But SWAC is such an out of left contender, I'm not sure what the connection is? If SWAC, why not SEAC, it was identical and completed a month earlier?
The paranoid part of my brain wonders if this is an attempt to locate the origins of modern computing in California to fit with the Silicon Valley tech mythos narrative, but I also don't want to say so because I have no evidence of that being the author's intent.
Maybe as a person who worked on SWAC he wanted an attention grabbing title for a project that's dear to him, but pointing out the correlation between SWAC & modern computers, not causality, would be the responsible way to go about that...
SIGH. My curiosity is piqued. Add another thing to the reading list!
Saw a video of somebody saying that adults should be doing book reports so i went on ecosia and downloaded a bunch of book report cards you can use as inspiration
I will here put in a plug for listening to the Simon Vance audiobooks of this series on 1.25x speed, can't recommend highly enough. Except his foreign accents are terrible, I won't lie about that. Anyhow. Get a library card and check these out if you would rather not read my summaries, which despite their thoroughness are not entire. The books are a challenging read but I did manage it at 12 but I did that through the power of being a socially isolated undiagnosed neurodivergent child so I don't necessarily recommend that either.
A NEE HOO, the book:
In part 1 we got female characters (sweet innocent Sophia? or her worldly, dashing cousin Diana?), sweet bachelor pad, social lives, horse farts, and *jazz hands* financial ruinnnnnn, and our intrepid heroes have fled to France where a Frenchman ruined Jack's composure by kissing him. But now, war has broken out, and they must flee without being arrested, which will be very difficult because Jack is approximately the most ostentatiously English person ever to have existed on this planet, in this universe.
And so now we pay off on my earlier bullet-point about Jack's fursona.
I had genuinely forgotten about this when I first relistened to the books. I listened to this long expounded-upon scenario, where a convoy of English prisoners of the French is resting and there's a man with a tame bear passing by and the prisoners, especially a sea officer trying to impress a lady in company with him, want him to make the bear dance even though it is hot and the bear is obviously tired, and the gendarmes finally come over and insist that the bear must dance to prove it really is a tame bear, and I was just expecting this to be some background descriptive passage included in the book for the atmosphere as so many are until, as they are finally left alone and the bear-leader is sitting counting up the coins people tossed at them, unaccountably reciting them to the bear as if the bear is going to care, the bear out of nowhere answers him.
“When one sea-officer is to be roasted, there is always another at hand to turn the spit,' said the bear. 'It is an old service proverb. I hope to God I have that fornicating young sod under my command one day. i'll make him dance a hornpipe - oh, such a hornpipe. Stephen, prop my jaws open a little more, will you? I think I shall die in five minutes if you don't. Could we not creep into a field and take it off?'
'No,' said Stephen. 'But I shall lead you to an inn as soon as the market has cleared, and lodge you in a cool damp cellar for the afternoon. I will also get you a collar, to enable you to breathe. We must reach Couiza by dawn.'
Stephen for his own inscrutable reasons names the bear Flora and tells everyone it is a female bear whose female troubles make it bad at dancing. Meanwhile Jack is being slowly murdered by the suit, his bare bloody feet glued to the costume's paws, insects eating him, never able to eat or drink enough, always overheated. By the time they make it to the Spanish border, Jack is nearly dead. It's a good character study: he is still thinking tactically at some times, still has the capacity to wonder whether Stephen might yet betray him, to notice that he has heretofore in their acquaintance underestimated Stephen severely, but his innate and natural response to this kind of hopeless privation and suffering is to simply submit to it and endure, doing whatever Stephen tells him to, understanding that there is no useful resistance he can make; he resents Stephen but also recognizes that Stephen too is suffering, this is simply what must be done and he must endure it, beyond any concept of limits. As they finally reach Spain he sits on a rock and dreamily tells Stephen he is glad Stephen seems so happy, and just sort of echoes whatever Stephen says, clearly well beyond comprehending what's going on anymore. (He does revive once the bear suit comes off.)
He spends some time very ill in Stephen's house just across the border. Stephen owns a castle there, though it's mostly in ruins. Once Jack can move, they make their way, this time both as humans, down to Gibraltar, and book passage home in an Indiaman* that has happened to put in there for repairs.
[* for the record the word Indiaman refers to a merchant ship plying the rich trade route to India, and would have female pronouns, like any ship. Actual human Indian men, if sailors or soldiers, are referred to as Lascars, with normal human pronouns as applicable, and as far as I can tell this is just a neutral descriptor and even though racial attitudes of the time were what they were, was not ever particularly used as a slur. Now You Know. Listen I'm trying to look things up as I go, since there's Period-Typical-Everything in here, but I might miss some, do be advised; I don't intend to condone any anythings in any of this nor do I wish to carelessly use loaded terms but it can be difficult to suss out what's what in the modern context.]
Aboard that Indiaman is another of my earlier bullet points: yes it's TOM PULLINGS. Jack recognizes him by his huge grin from across the ship, he's so delighted to see them, human sunbeam that he is.
Never confirmed as a lieutenant after the acting commission Jack had given him in the Sophie, quite without any political influence or hope of help in that quarter (though Jack had written letters of introduction for him to every single captain he knew who he thought might have a spot for him), TOM PULLINGS has given up on the Navy and taken a job with the East India Company, which pays better but is entirely without glory or hope of promotion.
“Why, sir, I could not get a ship and they would not confirm me in my rank. No white lapels for you, Pullings, old cock, they said. We got too many coves like you, by half."
''What a damned shame," cried Jack, who had seen Pullings in action and who knew that the Navy did not and indeed could not possibly have too many coves like him.
Another fun bit of fuzzy timekeeping which I should tally somewhere here is that while we know Jack and Stephen's adventure in France was of some considerable duration, every so often for the next few books Pullings will point out yet another Indiaman and say delightedly "I made two voyages in her", and I should start a running tally of How Many Indiamen Has Tom Pullings Been In somewhere because each voyage is a minimum of six months, and we have seen Pullings earlier in this book, he attended the St Vincent Battle Ball in February of-- whatever year that was. (Side note: Mowett mentions having served previously in the Namur, which was at the Battle of St Vincent, and it was only three years before, so it's perfectly possible he was there, but it's never brought up. Thinks to think upon!)
(I am sure some fan at some point has already done this work. But all the discussion boards are from 2003ish and it is hard to search them. Better than modern fandoms, where it all vanishes into private Discords, but it is... sort of sad, to look through the moribund message boards and remember being in spaces like that and how great they were. RIP to the golden days of the Internet.)
I've already explained how promotion works, so I don't need to elaborate on how very slim Pullings's career prospects are. He shows Jack all around his ship, and Jack tries very hard to be polite, but merchantmen, after the Navy, are a sort of sorry, squalid state of things, and there's not a lot to be polite about. Pullings clearly does the best he can but he has only a thin crew, a poor-sailing sluggish fat ship, and a timid captain to work with. What's worse, many of the crew are Lascars-- fine seamen, but they seem poorly; the initial assumption that they are simply not used to the cold proves wrong, it turns out that they're all succumbing to the flu, which is affecting the Europeans too but is hitting the Lascars that much harder. So the ship is now critically short-handed, with many of the crew incapacitated by the flu.
And then a French privateer heaves into sight, the Bellone. The captain doesn't know what to do and is terrified. Pullings beats the ship approximately into shape by sheer dint of competence and strong feeling, but there's not a lot of hope, he quite simply has very little to work with. Jack steps up and volunteers to take charge of one of the divisions of guns. It is so long since they have been used that he has to fire one to blow the port lid off, it having been painted into place long ago.
A brisk action ensues, but the Indiaman, despite all the heroics Jack and Pullings can manage, is overwhelmed and taken. Jack and Pullings are both moderately-to-severely injured in the fight, Jack left briefly in a coma after falling down a hatchway and Pullings being both shot and stabbed. The French steal everything aboard the ship including the passengers' personal property and Stephen's surgical implements that he was in the middle of using, impose a heavy prize-crew, and undertake to sail the Indiaman to a Spanish harbor. Jack will certainly spend the war a French prisoner, with no hope of getting home, getting a command, advancing his career, staying relevant.
But then an English brig, recognized as the Seagull by Pullings because his uncle used to be the sailing master in her, shows up and fights the French prize-crew to a standstill. Our heroes spend the action locked up below, but the French captain lets them out when the action grinds to a pause, the Seagull heavily damaged trying to repair itself enough to continue. Things look bad; the Frenchman is annoyed and might just sink the Seagull out of spite, but then a squadron of homeward-bound Royal Navy ships of the line round the headland-- the HMS Colossus, a 74, the Tonnant of eighty guns, more behind them-- and Jack puts his hand down over the touch-hole of the gun the Frenchman was about to fire at the Seagull and coldly tells him he must surrender to the brig.
Which he does.
So now Jack is home to England, and back in the running to get himself a ship so he can participate in this war and stay alive in his career-- but where he also is still at constant risk of being arrested for debt.
The new First Lord of the Admiralty is Lord Melville, whose family name is Dundas-- the older brother, in fact, of Heneage Dundas, who was a midshipman and then a lieutenant alongside Jack, one of his best friends. Melville thinks his younger brother is a bit of an idiot, but has some small fondness for Jack anyway. So there's hope. But Jack is arriving so late that all the best posts have already been snapped up. Melville promises to do his best to find him something, but tells him not to hold out much hope of something actually good. Jack does explain his specific problem, however-- the debt thing-- and Melville is understanding of it at least.
Jack has taken lodgings in a tiny shack outside of town with Stephen, giving rise to this charming description, please to look out for a particularly excellent 19th-century word usage:
At present they were lodging in an idyllic cottage near the heath with green shutters and a honeysuckle over the door - idyllic in summer, that is to say. They were looking after themselves, living with rigid economy; and there was no greater proof of their friendship than the way their harmony withstood their very grave differences in domestic behaviour. In Jack's opinion Stephen was little better than a slut: his papers, odd bits of dry, garlic'd bread, his razors and small-clothes lay on and about his private table in a miserable squalor; and from the appearance of the grizzled wig that was now acting as a tea-cosy for his milk-saucepan, it was clear that he had breakfasted on marmalade.
Stephen you slut indeed.
They go to a party-- a risky proposition, with Jack a wanted man, but Everyone who is Everyone will be there, and he quite simply needs to remind his various powerful acquaintances that he is here and in need. So they go. Diana is there, and also a well-connected, very wealthy merchant named Canning. Canning's merchant ships are very much preyed-upon by privateers-- especially the Bellone-- and he has been commissioning privateers of his own to defend them. He very politely, indirectly goes as far as is decent toward offering Jack the command of the latest of these, which is to be very large and powerful indeed. It is deeply, deeply tempting, and Jack considers it at length, but his ambition above all else lies with the Navy, and Lord Melville is also at the party and tells him he should come the very next day to a meeting, Melville thinks he might have something for him.
Diana also offers to Jack that he might come see her the next day. He points out, sensibly, that he is at risk of arrest, and so it would be deeply irresponsible of him to go jaunting about the city. She scorns him for this, saying he is being a coward to even consider such things as his own personal ruin. She quite openly only wants him if he's willing to ruin himself for her.
Jack goes out for a walk late that night, out in a deserted area, to think. A man tries to mug him and his immediate reflex, honed by kind of a lot of hand-to-hand combat experience, is to just absolutely beat the shit out of the guy in about two blows. He lays him out cold and then, standing over the body, realizes he can't leave the man lying here as it's coming on to freeze and the fellow will die of exposure. So, cursing how complicated everything always has to be on land, he carries the man home, as you do, and ties him to a chair, and promptly falls asleep in the other chair waiting for Stephen, who went to visit other friends after the party.
(Several times in the series it is made plain that Jack has been at sea since he was an actual child, and his understanding of how laws work by land is very extremely fuzzy at best; his education in general is shockingly lacking. He knows the Articles of War cold, could recite them back to front, can cite them by number unfailingly, but only has a vague notion of any other kind of law, and no idea at all how the land-based justice system actually works. And how could he?)
Stephen comes home near dawn to find them thus, Jack asleep in one chair, and the would-be mugger wide awake, terrified, and extremely-competently tied to their only other chair.
The would-be mugger is an excellent plot device: he succinctly and intelligently explains to Stephen and the reader exactly how English debt law works, he himself being extremely experienced in it. (Stephen is gently spooning food into the man's mouth even as he is still tied to the chair, he having admitted he only took up trying to mug people because he had not eaten in several days.) Jack also forces the man to eat some of Jack's own breakfast, under peril of being headed up in a cask and tossed overboard, which makes plain to everyone involved a) how serious he is and b) where he's more normally accustomed to being.
Jack makes his way to the meeting with Melville, who finally offers him a ship. It is not a good ship. Melville actually feels guilty to even offer it. It is called HMS Polychrest, it is a misguided experiment gone wrong, built by a corrupt dockyard to the specifications of an ill-informed landlubber with ideas. But, it has cannons and it technically floats, so Jack takes it.
He's aware that Melville feels like shit about it, though, so he figures he has one, and only one, big concession he can ask for. And he shoots that shot on one, very dear, very precious thing that he very badly wants:
TOM PULLINGS, to be made lieutenant at last, and to serve with him in this misbegotten floating disaster.
I will break off again here because this is too long. Stay tuned for PART THREE, in which I promise I'll tell you how Barret Bonden punches out a cop.
(I have like 30 indie games in my switch backlog and I wanna talk about em)
I don't think I've ever seen someone nail the "Play an anime" concept quite so charmingly as Kokoro Clover Season 1 :)
It's on Switch and Steam! And the OST is on bandcamp!
Full report below
This doesn't quite get me "nostalgic" so much as it reminds me I need to finish watching (Futari wa)Pretty Cure.
It goes to great lengths to really sell you the Saturday morning experience. It comes fully stocked with an OP, episode recaps, commercial eye catches, etc. and as someone who struggles to sit down to watch episodes of anime, I get the exact same feeling here. Which is a good thing!
The overall vibe is pretty low stakes so it's not the type of story to put you on the edge of your seat, and that accessibility is equally apparent in the gameplay. It's not hard! The gameplay loop is really there just to facilitate the story, and I think that's on purpose.
With short, simple, side scrolling levels; and the boss fights (while each distinct and interesting) are no robot masters. And again I think that's good! You're the bubbly protagonist of an anime in an 8am time slot. You're supposed to save the day! When bosses get to 1/3 health YOUR theme song plays! You rock up to the monster of the week, play your theme song, use your special move, and someone learns a lesson!
I've been playing it with a big smile on my face and it passes the "make me feel something" test with flying colors. Plus the theme song has been stuck in my head for over a week 👍 plus there's already a Season 1.5 (Kokoro Clover SUN) on stream with Season 2 in development!
Back in middle school and high school, I had an English teacher Ms.C. She often said was I bad reader and my analyzing skills were bad and that my skills of interpreting stories and reading in between the lines were non existent. That the reasons why I liked certain books over others and certain characters were 'wrong' or 'not meant to be liked or supported' and that I just didn't understand the literature at all. I had her for over 3 years.
Then one year, in high school, I had a different English teacher, Ms.T. We had an assignment to write an analysis report for one of the books we had read during the year. I went to her, feeling ashamed, and telling her that I did not feel like I could write a good report because the only idea I had couldn't possibly be a good one. She asked me what it was. I told her, I wanted to compare The Secret Life of Bees to Huckleberry Finn, and how the Secret Life of Bees had many comparable themes and that the story was a Huckleberry Finn-esque adventure but with a girl and woman protagonist. She asked me why I didn't think it would be a good analysis. And I told that I always did poorly on reports because I could not interpret stories or understand the author's message correctly or read in between the lines because English was my "second language" even though it was my primary language and that the stories took place in different time periods. And that I had read Huck Finn a year ago and didn't do well on the report because I "missed the themes".
Ms. T said "I don't think any of my students have compared those two stories before. Now I'm curious. Why don't you write it. I think it would be interesting to see how you read the two novels. Go ahead and write it. If you need help just let me know."
So I wrote it. I don't think I worked so hard on a book report. I don't really remember exactly what I wrote, but I remember filling my books with bookmarks, cutting out strips of lined paper with excerpts and gathering them together on the carpet, this was.. before CTRL+F was in my tool box and before the two books were in digital format. I really wanted to show the parallels and show how each kid left a town with an abusive father, ran away with an adult black companion who were their trusted adult figure, their friend, their parental figure and reservoir of wisdom. How their companionship would have been frowned upon during their time period but were integral to their growth as a kid. I remember reluctantly handing this chunky report in, I had exceeded the page count, I was telling myself that despite all that work and all the pages I had typed out and the cover that I had illustrated because I couldn't find good pictures online, that it wasn't going to get anything higher than a B or C because most of my English reports hovered around B or C in the past.
I fretted over the few weeks it took to grade these papers. Then the day came to return the papers, and Ms. T had arranged it so each kid would get in line, find their paper and leave. I could not find my paper. My anxiety flew SKY HIGH even though she said "Perhaps she left in one of her folders. So I waited until everyone else got theirs thinking mine would turn up. It did not and then she called my name and she pulled my paper out from under her notebooks and handed it to me. Then gently and firmly said, "You did a great job. Some spelling and grammar issues, but otherwise it was a great analysis. Don't be afraid to discuss your favorite books or stories okay? Not everyone reads them the same way. Don't let anyone tell you that the way a book impacts you is wrong. Everyone has different life experiences and everyone has different need and wants, that means what they get from a story will be different from one person to the next. Don't be afraid of your next book report, okay? Because your reading skills and writing skills are just fine."
I don't think I was ever so happy to see an A.
Because for the first time in English class, I felt like could understand the language and the literature. All because...someone accepted my thoughts and ideas, and didn't tell me I was wrong. Someone who told me that, I was free to apply my thoughts, experience and world knowledge to the things I read. And that growing up as a kid with two clashing cultures, was fine and that I didn't have to think exactly like everyone else around me and I didn't have to feel guilty or stupid for wanting to share my differing thoughts on a subject matter. And most importantly, that it was okay.... to just read to enjoy a book and not have to worry about having to reading it "right".
I think it’s great that so many people are reading Dracula for the first time with Dracula daily but also, as someone who did an extensive book report on Dracula, I eagerly await scenes like the wall crawling because I can’t wait to see how the people of tumblr will feel about it.
Arright friendos, I have finished reading Jamaica Inn, and now it is time for my Jamaica Inn book report, because this is a fun and cool blog for fun and cool people who like to read and write book reports.
Jamaica Inn is one of those period books that was written in the 1930s, but takes place in the 1820s, so it’s got that weird double-period thing going for it. I was written by Daphne du Maurier, who wrote other books you may have read in English class, namely Rebecca, but also The Birds, as in, Alfred Hitchcock The Birds. This book was recommended to me by my good friend @thegreenfaery because I talk shit all the time about how much I love Cornwall (I went on a day-trip once during in 2003 during the summer I lived in London, also, I watched Poldark) and I had never actually read anything by Daphne du Maurier.
SO! Jamaica Inn is about a girl named Mary, whose family dies, so she goes to live with her mother’s sister, who she hasn’t seen in 20 years, when she got married and moved away. Turns out, Aunt Patience married Joss Merlyn, A Terrible Dude who Drinks and Smuggles and Sometimes Murders People. They live in an inn that used to be nice, but now is just a HQ for the smuggling, hence the name of the book.
The Good: Do you like the musical stylings of Loreena McKennit and/or Boiled in Lead? Have you ever said “Fuck yeah” when someone take a musketball to the sleeve of their puffy shirt and blood blooms forth? This book is a fucking mood. The drama is palpable. Characters in this book actually said “Dead men tell no tales” more than once. Also, there were so many loving descriptions of the moors and people running around in the moors and thinking about how easy it would be to take a wrong step and die on the moors and no one would ever find your body. Towards the end, I turned to my husband and said, “I love a book where the final confrontation is determined by who has better knowledge of how to make their ways through the moors,” and he was like “fuckin’ right.”
Also, it’s short. My attention span is very poor and I love it when a book is considerate enough to be short.
The Bad: I am going to get a few things out of the way.
1) Spoiler, except that it’s extremely obvious from the moment you meet him: The big bad of the book is an albino vicar and it’s pretty gross by modern day standards with his “otherworldliness”, etc, etc. I do give him points for going completely off the rails in the final pages of the book and ranting about Old Gods and stuff, but the albino thing was completely unnecessary and it looks like they at least toned it down a bunch for the tv adaptations.
2) Period-”appropriate” sexism/gender essentialism. I like period stuff, and I have a pretty high tolerance for this bullshit, but I am just throwing this out there as a warning that this book has a ton of “If only you were a man” and “A woman is cannot be expected to have the strength to do such-and-such” so if that is a deal-killer for you, you should probably skip this one.
Speaking of deal-killers: If you are thinking of reading this book, I want to reassure you right away that no one gets raped. I went through this book in great fear that Mary was gonna get raped (I despise rape plots and it usually will ruin a book for me) and she did not. I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I had known that ahead of time. The book has a bit of a rapey vibe-- she’s constantly getting thrown into carriages and Joss will grab her cheeks and say “Ayyyyyy Mary if only I were twenty years younger yeh’d be sharin’ me bed” but nothing ever comes of it.
The Very, Very Good: I have not mentioned what is both the most and least important part of this book, Joss Meryln’s hot younger brother, dirtbaggy horse thief Jem Merlyn, who Mary falls in love with. Now, Mary is a tough lady, and has a very pragmatic view of marriage, namely that it is for suckers and she is having none of it. That being said, she meets Jem and is like “oh no he’s hot.” Her entire attitude toward this man is “WELP, you can’t help who you fall in love with, might as well make out with this thotty dumpster fire.”
For a lot of the book there’s this suspicion that Jem might be the Secret Head Boss of the Smuggling Ring, and every time Mary would get suspicious of him, I would go “Noooooo, Mary, he’s so hot!” and every time she would go “fuck it time for makeouts” I would go “Noooooo, Mary, he’s so terrible!” This was the ultimate in reading experiences for me. The chapter in the middle of the book where he takes her on a date on Christmas Eve to go sell a stolen horse and then they make out in a doorway while it rains was my literal everything, I tell you, reading the entire book was worth it for that one chapter which contained all the dirtbag romance my withered little heart could stand.
Jem does a bunch of heroic stuff toward the end of the book, including chasing Mary’s kidnapper across the moor in the fog in the middle of the night and shooting him from really far away, but it all happens in the background and the book does not make a big deal of it at all, he just shows up being a himbo shitlord at the end and she’s like “this may as well happen” and off they go. Perfection.
TV Shows? TV Shows! So, I knew there was a BBC version because PBS tried to convince me I wanted to watch it after I finished Poldark. I would definitely watch a tv version of this, but only if the actors are sufficiently hot. It does appear that they are, although Wikipedia says everyone hates it because all the actors mumble the whole time. More importantly, while I was looking this up, I found out there was also a 1983 version starring Jane Seymore as Mary and Patrick fuckin’ McGoohan as Problematic Drunk Smuggler Joss Merlyn!!! I lost my shit. I love Patrick McGoohan so, so much. I cannot imagine anyone who could play Joss Merlyn as well as Patrick McGoohan. It’s on YouTube and the two minutes of it I watched looked amazeballs, I will watch it and report back.
Book Review: “ Where is My Mind?: A Gripping Irish Psychological Thriller“
“Where is My Mind?: a Gripping Irish Psychological Thriller” by Shirley Benton
Disclaimer: I received this book for free from LibraryThing in return for an honest review.
After breaking up with her boyfriend, Katie Turners spends most of the day and night out with her friends drinking. That night Katie is convinced she was abducted and left to die in an abandoned houses only to somehow wake up in her friend's home without anyone knowing she ever left it. Her friend is convinced she just drank too much but after taking her to the hospital the doctors find Rohypnol in Katie's system. Now her friends and family are convinced that the Rohypnol making her hallucinate the "abduction". But Katie is convinced it actually happened and she is going to figure out what happened to her no matter the cost.
This book started out very interesting and it sucked me right in. However I found the plot to drag in parts. It seemed like the protagonist went over the same points over and over again. I also found most of the characters to be unlikable and slightly unrealistic. That being said I still could not put the book down because I had to know how the story ended. Was Katie actually abducted or was it all in her head?
