Dodger

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If you love Terry Pratchett novels you will love this, if you haven't read any off Terry's works before and want to start, you can't go wrong here. Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide. Get started Close

Dodger | Terry Pratchett

The games we play are lessons we learn. The assumptions we make, things we ignore, and things we change make us what we become.” Young man, the games we play are lessons we learn. The assumptions we make, things we ignore, and things we change make us what we become.” This is a little left field but I feel that story was been written in such a way that once Terry succumbs to his illness it could be continue on in its own fashion without trying to recreate Discworld, that uniqueness and wizardry belongs to Terry Pratchett. I can think of no greater tribute to Terry Pratchett if his works could be continued in a small way by others. A couple weeks ago, I was having a real pisser of a day. Then I remembered there was a new Terry Pratchett book out and things didn't seem so bad anymore. Perhaps it isn't surprising that these working class heroes - who were fighting for a fairer society for everyone - were not included. Because Dodger is fundamentally a rags-to-riches tale, where the audience is asked to empathise with and applaud Dodger's rise to join the upper classes, while throwing out the occasional sixpence whenever he feels a twinge of guilt. Appropriately, the book ends with the new Sir Dodger engaged in the robbery of a priceless historical treasure: a tiara once belonging to Marie Antoinette. No, he is not intending to sell it, and distribute the money to the many starving orphans/girls driven to prostitution who populate the book: in an Animal Farm like ending, Dodger is stealing Marie Antoinette's tiara for his new wife, a former Princess. Great lesson for the kids, Terry.

I was seriously impressed by the writing and to me it seemed as though Pratchett has been leading up to this book via the YA books, particularly Maurice, and the Watch novels. There are undertones of much of Nobby Nobbs, Vimes and others but they are nothing much more than ghosts which leave no trace in this interesting world. Flavourings, but nothing more. In 2008, Harper Children's published Terry's standalone non-Discworld YA novel, Nation. Terry published Snuff in October 2011. Good is Not Nice: Characters are all over the place with this one. Dodger himself, while genuinely affable and friendly to people, has a definite ruthless streak. Then you have the Mayhews, who are both unquestionably good and nice, though perhaps a little too bound up in rules of society to be entirely effective. And of course there's Sir Robert Peel, who under Pratchett's pen owes a lot to Sam Vimes. (Though given that Vimes was heavily inspired by the historical Robert Peel, this isn't much of a surprise.)

Terry Pratchett Books | Waterstones Terry Pratchett Books | Waterstones

Families can talk about Dodger's portrait of life in Victorian England. What do you think of how the novel mingles real historical figures with fictional ones? Can you think of other books or movies that do this? Terry often talked about “doing” his autobiography. In the years before he was ill, he talked about it almost exclusively to dismiss the idea. He didn’t seem persuaded that there was anything in the story of the journey that took a kid from a council house in Beaconsfield to a knighthood and a mansion near Salisbury by the sheer power of his imagination alone; or in the tale of how a boy with, as Terry put it, “a mouthful of speech impediments” became one of his generation’s most popular communicators; or how someone who left school with five O-levels could also go on to have an honorary professorship at Trinity College Dublin. And besides, there were always other things waiting to be written – bigger stories in which far more outlandish and arresting things were free to happen. I wasn't feeling the love. They just ...were. Also, (yes, they attempted to fix this at the end and her husband was trash) she was still married at the end.After Terry was diagnosed with Posterior Cortical Atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease, in 2007, at the cruelly early age of 59, I began to accompany him at public appearances, reading for him when he no longer could, helping him through interviews on stage as “keeper of the anecdote”. We became, of necessity, a sort of double act. The book’s eponymous protagonist is an orphaned street urchin who lives in Victorian London and works as a “tosher”--that is, someone who goes into the sewers to find treasures in the trash. When he pops out of a sewer to be ”the knight in soaking armor” to a lady in distress, he suddenly finds that one small act of kindness will change his life in ways he could not have imagined. Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide. Get started Close This may be classed as a children's book but as an adult reading I can say that you wouldn't necessarily realise that fact if you didn't know it. Terry Pratchett had again written a book for younger viewers that is just as good for adult and as I said if you didn't know you wouldn't know the difference and I think that is one of the many things that Sir Terry is so talented at doing. Sir Terry Pratchett is most famous for his Discworld series, which is already running 39 books, and although I have given these books a fair chance I just never could quite get into them. When the chance arose to review Dodger, a stand-alone young-adult book, I just had to give it another shot. From the short synopsis I didn't really know what I was in for, but it turned out to be unique, fresh and gave me a sense of urgency to finish it.