Today, I got a copy of Nate Rocks the World by Karen Pokras Toz in the mail, along with a nice handwritten card congratulating me on winning the first reads giveaway for the book. It says:
"Dear Tracy,
Congratulations--
you won! I hope
you enjoy Nate's
Rockin' adventures!All the Best,
Karen"
It also contained a little card--about the size of a business card--with a small image of the book's cover, its title and author, and the author's website on one side, and a very brief blurb on the other. It's so neat! It's a great way to advertise the book, I think, if people could be encouraged to pass the card on to someone who might be interested in the book. Actually, I think it'd be neat to collect them like trading cards, if they were just a little better designed. The back side with the blurb looks quite nice over a watermark of part of the cover, but the front side is a bit plain--the background is just white, and the card may have been cut out by hand, since the bottom of the cover image seems to be cut off. Still, quite a neat little thing to include with the book.
I've begun reading it; I'm a bit over halfway done, now, I think. So far, I'm really enjoying it. Nate's imagined adventures and triumphs are great fun--especially since they tend to sneak up on you, and you might not realize at first that it's all happening in Nate's imagination. I got more than one laugh out of realizing that what was happening--wasn't. Nate's real life is interesting, too. His family has got the kind of mix of personalities that shows up often enough in books--not that they're unrealistic, so much, but they do seem to be chosen to make things interesting. Nate's father likes to recall past glories; I'd say that a part of Nate's imagination must come from him. His mother is an interesting character, and his sister shows the usual evil-through-her-younger-brother's-eyes tendencies that we see in children's book.