{"id":842,"date":"2015-02-19T03:05:14","date_gmt":"2015-02-19T08:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/?p=842"},"modified":"2015-02-10T20:08:02","modified_gmt":"2015-02-11T01:08:02","slug":"review-clay-by-david-almond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/?p=842","title":{"rendered":"Review: Clay by David Almond"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/clay.jpg\" width=\"51\" height=\"75\" \/>In\u00a0<i>Clay<\/i>, David Almond introduces us to David, an altar boy who occasionally drinks a little extra communion wine and smokes stolen cigarettes with his friend Geordie.\u00a0 David&#8217;s life changes when he befriends Stephen Rose,\u00a0 a new arrival in town, at the request of the local priest. Stephen turns out to be a gifted sculptor.\u00a0 As his friendship with Stephen grows, David learns that Stephen has the ability to mesmerize people and that he had been kicked out of his school for playing with the dark arts. Stephen shows David that together they have the ability to animate some of Stephen&#8217;s clay sculptures.<\/p>\n<p>David and Stephen build a huge clay figure, and bring it to life, but David becomes afraid and runs off.\u00a0 David finds out the next morning that the neighborhood bully, who has given David a hard time,\u00a0\u00a0has been found dead.\u00a0 The rest of the day clay creature follows David around waiting for his command.\u00a0 When David tries to put the clay automaton down he sparks a confrontation with Stephen, resulting in Stephen escaping and the end of their creation.\u00a0 The story is character driven, and Almond does a great job of developing David into a sympathetic and tormented character.\u00a0 Some of the dialogue, however, may be difficult to read or understand.<\/p>\n<p>Potential readers should be aware that , although the title and cover art suggest otherwise, the clay creature appears only toward the last half of the story and isn&#8217;t really the focus or even the source of the terror in the book for David.\u00a0 Stephen Rose who goes from being an awkward new kid to a manipulative destructive evildoer, is the true monster.\u00a0 An interesting take on the creation of a golem,<i>\u00a0Clay<\/i>\u00a0ends up being a solid story.\u00a0 Recommended addition. to YA collections.<\/p>\n<p>Contains:\u00a0 some kissing and a description of a murder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In\u00a0Clay, David Almond introduces us to David, an altar boy who occasionally drinks a little extra communion wine and smokes stolen cigarettes with his friend Geordie.\u00a0 David&#8217;s life changes when he befriends Stephen Rose,\u00a0 a new arrival in town, at the request of the local priest. Stephen turns out to be a gifted sculptor.\u00a0 As [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ya-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3Eu9f-dA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=842"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":844,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842\/revisions\/844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/ReadingBites\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}