Caramel’s reviews – Page 40

Caramel reviews Wayside School Is Falling Down by Louis Sachar

A couple weeks ago, Caramel reviewed Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar. Today he is talking about the second book of the Wayside School books, Wayside School Is Falling Down, first published in 1989. As usual, Sprinkles is taking notes and asking questions.

Sprinkles: So Caramel, you told us a bit about the first book about Wayside School a couple weeks ago. What happens in this second book?

Caramel: Well, there are about thirty more stories about this weird school, which is built sideways, so is thirty stories tall and in each story there is only one classroom.

S: Yes, I remember that. And the first book had thirty chapters, too, each about a specific character, and they all were characters from the classroom on the thirtieth floor.

C: Well, the characters in this book are the same people. And there are really thirty chapters, but three of them are labeled 19 and the three Erics are all together in the chapter numbered 20, 21, and 22.

S: That’s weird. Tell me more about those three chapters labeled 19.

C: They are about this girl named Allison and she gets assigned to the nineteenth floor and Miss Zarves’ class.

S: Wait, but you told me neither of those things exist.

C: Yep.

S: So how is that supposed to happen?

C: I don’t know. But in these chapters there is a Miss Zarves, and some other students of hers. Allison somehow falls into this magical nineteenth story, and then falls back out of it.

S: Maybe it is a dream?

C: Maybe, but it is not really clear.

Caramel is reading Wayside School Is Falling Down by Louis Sachar. — Caramel is reading *Wayside School Is Falling Down* by Louis Sachar.

S: So are the stories just as wacky as they were in the first one?

C: Yes, if not more.

S: So this was funnier?

C: Yes.

S: Isn’t it nice when a sequel is even better than the original?

C: Yep.

S: Okay, so if you were to use three words to describe this book, would “wacky” be one of them?

C: Yes.

S: What about the other two words?

C: “School” because it is about a school and the students and the teachers there. And maybe “confusing” because if a building has thirty stories but the nineteenth is missing, then isn’t the building really twenty-nine stories?

S: I see what you mean. But I guess it is the same with buildings that do not have their thirteenth floors. Anyways, so we can describe this book with the three-word phrase “wacky confusing school”, right?

C: Right.

S: This edition of the book comes with some illustrations. What do you think of them?

C: I’d say they are just as wacky as the book.

S: Agreed. So apparently the author has written a couple other Wayside School books. Do you think you will read those, too?

C: Yep. I want to. Because these are really funny. But also because this book ends kind of in the air. The school is invaded by cows so everybody has to move out. So I want to know if they will get back and what other wacky things they will do next.

S: Okay, let us aim for that then. This might be a good place to wrap up this review. What do you want to tell our readers?

C: Stay tuned for more book bunny reviews!

Caramel enjoyed reading Wayside School Is Falling Down by Louis Sachar and is ready to move on to the next book in the series. — Caramel enjoyed reading *Wayside School Is Falling Down* by Louis Sachar and is ready to move on to the next book in the series.

Caramel reviews How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion by Daniel H. Wilson

Today Caramel reviews Daniel H. Wilson’s How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion (2005). As usual, Sprinkles is asking questions and taking notes.

Sprinkles: Caramel, I know you love robots, and so it was natural that you would pick up a book with robots in its title. So what did you think of How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion?

Caramel: I thought it was a good book. But there is one small problem.

S: Wait, I think I know! Unlike some of the other robot books you have reviewed for our blog, this book is not about lovable robots. Instead, it is about bad robots, right?

C: Kind of. It is about what you should do if robots decide to turn bad and take over the world.

S: I can see that from the title. Reminds me of some of the zombie books I reviewed a while back.

C: Don’t talk about zombies. I don’t like them. But yes, kind of like that. What happens if something really bad happens? How do you survive? But this is a lot better than your zombie books.

S: How come?

C: Well, zombies are made up. But robots are real. And this book has a lot of real facts about robots. And for some reason it teaches you how to make an EMP grenade.

S: What’s that?

C: An electromagnetic pulse grenade. You can use it to fry the circuits of a robot.

S: I see. So it would be a way to stop a bad robot.

C: But it could kill it! And that is bad. You can reason with a robot, and maybe talk it out of being bad, but if you kill it, it is dead. And you can’t take that back.

S: You are right of course.

C: Then again, if it is really evil, you might not be able to talk it out of it. Then, maybe, you do need to do something about it.

S: Hmm…

C: I don’t like it.

S: I totally understand, Caramel. I know you love robots, and you would not want to harm any of them.

Caramel is reading How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion by Daniel H. Wilson. — Caramel is reading *How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion* by Daniel H. Wilson.

S: But back to the book. Did you learn some new things from it?

C: Yes. For example, I did not know about EMP grenades before. The book also talks about different types of robots, and that is cool. There is a part about speech recognition and how it is hard. Some scientists apparently wore a T-shirt with the sentence “I helped Apple wreck a nice beach”, which is a bad way to write down the original sentence “I helped Apple recognize speech”. So that was cool!

S: Yeah, speech recognition is hard, but it has improved so much in the last few years! My phone used to not understand me very well before, and now it gets almost everything I say right. But today, everyone is obsessed with ChatGPT and other AI tools that can write essays and answer lots of questions, though not always correctly. Some people are really worried about artificial intelligence. So I think this book is sort of humorously opening up that fear.

C: Yes.

S: Are you afraid of robots?

C: Kind of but also kind of not. I want to have a robot friend, like R2-D2 or BB-8.

S: Yes, those are really friendly robots, and also very cute.

C: I think so too. I don’t think I’d be afraid of such robots.

S: But the robots in this book are not that kind of robot.

C: They are not. But humans build robots, so they could just build friendly ones.

S: I guess some fear that, at some point, robots would evolve and decide that humans are not treating them well enough or that humans do not deserve the support of robots.

C: I guess so.

S: Do you know of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics? Here they are:

First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

Then there is a zeroth law too, but I will leave that for another day.

C: I do know these laws! And I really like them! I think all robots should be created with those laws built in. And maybe I should read some Asimov.

S: Okay, you can start with his short story “Robbie“. I really like that one.

C: Okay, I will read it then.

S: That means this is a good time to wrap this review up. What do you want to tell our readers, Caramel?

C: Stay tuned for more book bunny reviews!

Caramel hopes that he will never need any of the defensive methods he read about in How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion by Daniel H. Wilson, but he also thinks it is better to be safe than sorry. — Caramel hopes that he will never need any of the defensive methods he read about in *How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion* by Daniel H. Wilson, but he also thinks it is better to be safe than sorry.

Caramel reviews Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar

Today Caramel reviews Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar. The first of several Wayside School books written by Sachar, this book was published originally in 1978. As usual, Sprinkles is asking questions and taking notes.

Sprinkles: So Caramel, I heard a lot about these Wayside School books, but I have not read them myself. Can you tell me a bit about what they are all about?

Caramel: Well, at this point I only read this first book. So I can only talk about that.

S: That’s okay. Tell me about this book. What is it about?

C: It’s about these kids in this place called Wayside School. It is a weird school, and all the students and teachers are also weird, and very strange and interesting things keep happening.

S: How is the school weird?

C: First of all, it is thirty stories high, like a skyscraper. Because they built it sideways. It was supposed to be one story high and with thirty classrooms, but the builder messed up and put all classrooms on their own floors. I think it is a waste of space.

S: Hmm, I think on the contrary it saves space, it takes only the area of one classroom for the whole school. No?

C: I guess. Anyways the students are weird and the teachers, too, and there are some dead rats that seem to be alive.

S: Oh yes, I think I heard about a student made up of a rat or something like that?

C: Well, it was one dead rat, but I am not going to give away too much.

S: Okay, I can see that could be a spoiler. So what do you mean by weird when you say teachers and students are weird?

C: Some of the teachers have a strange way to discipline students. There is one who turns students into an apple when she is angry with them, and then she eats them!

S: What? That sounds pretty terrible and irreversible!

C: Yeah. I told you they are weird.

S: But wait, then there is magic in this book?

C: Not sure. It is not described as magic, but just that these people behave this way. Really weird.

S: I see. So it is kind of absurd then.

C: I think you could say that.

S: But is it also funny?

C: Yes. I think the stories are pretty hilarious. Except when they are kind of scary because I would not want to be eaten as an apple by my teacher. But on the bright side, she gets eaten too.

S: Wait, don’t tell me everything!

C: But I want to!

S: Alright, why don’t you tell me something else instead? Tell me more about the book.

C: There are thirty chapters, one for each story of the Wayside School. But I think everything is happening on the 30th floor actually. And also there is no nineteenth floor. In fact that is the nineteenth story. It is about Miss Zarves who is supposed to be the teacher of the classroom on the nineteenth floor, but since there is no floor, there is no classroom, and so there is no Miss Zarves.

S: That almost sounds like a logic riddle!

C: Kind of.

S: But it is also kind of like how a lot of building in the United States don’t have a thirteenth floor.

C: Wait, I did not know that. Why is that?

S: A lot of people think 13 is an unlucky number, so they don’t like to be on a floor labeled thirteenth.

C: But after the twelfth floor comes the thirteenth, no?

S: True, if you are counting from the bottom, but it is not labeled 13, it is labeled 14.

C: That is strange.

Caramel is reading Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar. — Caramel is reading *Sideways Stories from Wayside School* by Louis Sachar.

S: Everything you are telling me reminds me of my favorite series from childhood: Le Petit Nicolas, about a little kid and his classmates and all kinds of funny things happening to them. In that world, too, sometimes really weird things happened, but nothing quite like a teacher turning children into apples.

C: Yes, I think you read a couple of those books to us when we were little. But I don’t think we understood all the jokes.

S: Yes, I think they seem to have aged quite a bit. The childhood they were talking about is very familiar to me, but it seems quite far from your experiences somehow. Okay, let us get back to the book. Did you like the book overall?

C: Yep. They are really funny. So I want to read the other books about Wayside School.

S: Maybe you will then. Did you know that Marshmallow has already reviewed a book by Louis Sachar?

C: Yep. I know she reviewed Holes.

S: Did you read that too?

C: Yep, and I also watched the movie. And it says on the cover of the book that the author is the author of Holes.

S: But of course Holes was written after this one, and you read this one after Holes.

C: True.

S: Did you also know that the author used to teach in an elementary school named Hillside and some of the ideas in the book might be related?

C: I did not know that! But it makes sense actually. There is a teacher character in the book named Louis.

S: But according to Wikipedia, his teaching days were not too exciting, so he had to make up a lot of stuff.

C: Well, that makes sense too. I’m guessing the teachers in his school did not turn students into apples and eat them.

S: I agree. So how would you describe this book in three words?

C: Short, sideways, outrageous.

S: I see what you did there! Okay, then. I think we can wrap this up now. What do you want to say to our readers?

C: Stay tuned for more book bunny reviews!

Caramel enjoyed reading Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar and is planning to move immediately on to the next book in the series. — Caramel loved reading *Sideways Stories from Wayside School* by Louis Sachar and is planning to move immediately on to the next book in the series.

Caramel reviews The Big Book of Amazing LEGO Creations With Bricks You Already Have by Sarah Dees

Caramel, like a lot of other little bunnies, loves to play with LEGO bricks. He loves building all kinds of contraptions and improving on his previous designs. Today he talks about a neat book he has been using to get some new design ideas: The Big Book of Amazing LEGO Creations With Bricks You Already Have, written in 2021 by Sarah Dees. As usual, Sprinkles is taking notes and asking questions.

Sprinkles: So Caramel, I know you love to play with LEGOs, but somehow I think this might be the first LEGO book you have read. Is that true?

Caramel: I think so.

S: So tell me about it.

C: It shows many many many things.

S: So there are different categories of things to build, right?

C: Yes. You can make a military humvee, a mouse, tiny vehicles, a semitruck, a trailer for the semi, and of course spaceships!

S: I somehow knew that there would be some of those!

C: Yep. There is also a dragon.

S: I see. So you can build all of your favorite things out of your own LEGO blocks.

C: Most of them do not need special bricks, so you can really build them from your own bricks. But some of them do need some special things, and we don’t have those.

S: Hmm, so it is not totally accurate to say “with bricks you already have” in the title then. Because you do have a large collection of LEGO bricks.

C: Yes, true. But it is still a pretty neat book. I could build a lot of the things I wanted to build.

S: Are the instructions clear? Can you follow them and build things easily?

C: Yep. There are fewer pictures than the ones that usually come in the LEGO boxes, but they are enough to build the things.

S: I can imagine if they tried to do the one-step-at-a-time thing like the LEGO instructions do, then the book would be much bigger.

C: Yep. There are a lot of things in the book.

S: How many?

C: Let me count. Hmm, I think there are at least seventy. The cover page says 75+, so there are a lot!

S: I see. And how many of them have you built so far?

C: Not many actually.

S: Well, you probably built most of the vehicles and the animals and the spaceships, right?

C: Pretty much.

S: Did you build the dragon?

C: No, unfortunately not. We don’t have all the pieces for it.

Caramel is reading The Big Book of Amazing LEGO Creations With Bricks You Already Have by Sarah Dees. — Caramel is reading *The Big Book of Amazing LEGO Creations With Bricks You Already Have* by Sarah Dees.

S: So do you think you are done with the book?

C: I read it all, but I will probably like to keep it near my LEGOs for a while.

S: Will you be building more of them, do you think?

C: Probably.

S: Is there any one that you built that was your favorite?

C: I really like the mini-spaceships.

S: I should have guessed! When you are building the things from this book, are you following all instructions precisely, or are you sometimes improvising, especially since sometimes you don’t have the parts?

C: Both.

S: And what are you planning to build next?

C: I don’t know. I’d like to try the dragon, but we don’t have the pieces for it. Other than that, there is a bunk bed and a desk that I might want to try to build.

S: That’s cool, Caramel! I’m glad you are enjoying reading the book and enjoying creating with it. How would you describe it in three words?

C: Instructional, doable, fun.

S: Those work! So let us wrap this up then so you can go back to building. What do you want to tell our readers?

C: Stay tuned for more book bunny reviews!

Caramel enjoyed reading The Big Book of Amazing LEGO Creations With Bricks You Already Have by Sarah Dees and has been having a ton of fun building the many many different things suggested in it. — Caramel enjoyed reading *The Big Book of Amazing LEGO Creations With Bricks You Already Have* by Sarah Dees and has been having a ton of fun building the many many different things suggested in it.