Book Club; The Secret of Platform Thirteen

[craxyguy562]

I'm going to show the book "The secret of Platform 13" by Eva Ibbotson and my opinions of it. I want to see your opinions of the book to

Quote:CHAPTER 1

If you went to a school nowadays and said to the children: "What is a gump? you would probably get some very silly answers.
"It's a person without a brain, like a chump," a child might say. Or:
"It's a camel whose hump got stuck." Or even:
"It's a kind of chewing gum."
But once this wasn't so. Once every child in the land could have told you that a gump was a special mound, a grassy bump on the earth, and that in this bump was a hidden door which opened every so often to reveal a tunnel which led to a completely different world

mystical

Quote:They would have known that every country has it's own gump

What if a country splits up? What if a new country is discovered? Did Rome have a gump?

Quote:and that in Great Britain the gump was a place called the Hill of the Cross of Kings not far from the river Thames. And wise children, the ones that read the old stories and listened to the old tales, would have known more than that. They would have known this particular gump opened for exactly nine days every nine years, and not a second longer, and that it was no good changing your mind about coming or going becuase nothing would open the door once the time was up

Quote:But the children forgot—everyone forgot

How did they forget?

Quote:—and perhaps you can't blame them, yet the gump is still there. it is under Platform Thirteen of King's Cross Railway Station, and the secret door is behind the wall of the old gentlemen's cloakroom with it's flappy posters saying "Trains Get You There" and its chipped wooden benches and dirty ashtrays in which the old gentlemen used to stub out their old smelly cigarettes.
No one uses the platform now. They have built newer, smarter platforms with rows of shiny luggage trolleys and slot machines that actually work and television screens that show how late your train is going to be. But Platform Thirteen is different. The clock has stopped; spiders have spun their webs across the cloakroom door. There's a Laft-Luggage Office with a notice saying NOT IN USE, and inside it is an umbrella covered in mold which a lady left on the 5:25 from Doncaster the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee. The chocolate machines are rusty and lopsided, and if you were foolish enough to put your money in one, it would make a noise like "Harrumph" ans swallow it, and you could wait the rest of your life for the chocolate to come out.
Yet when people tried to pull down that part of the station and redevelop it, something always went wrong. An architect who wanted to build shops there suddenly came out with awful boils and went to live in Spain, and when they tried to relay the tracks for electricity, the surveyor said the ground wasn't suitable and muttered something about subsidence and cracks. It was as though people knew something about Platform Thirteen, but they didn't know what.

I smell a mystery.

Quote:But in every city there are those who have not forgotten the old days or the old stories.

yay.

Quote:The ghosts, for example...Ernie Hobbs, the railway porter who'd spent all his life working at king's Cross and still liked to haunt round the trains, he knew—and so did his friend, the ghost of the cleaning lady called Mrs. Partridge who used to scrub out the parcel's office on her hands and knees. The people who plodged about in the sewers under the city came up occasionally through the manholes beside the station, they knew...and so in their own way did the pigeons.
They knew that the gump was still there and they knew where it led: by a long, misty, and mysterious tunnel to a secret cove where ships waited to take those who wished it to the island so beautiful that it took the breath away.

The people who lives on it just called the Island,

problem: Aren't there hundreds of islands?

Quote:but it has had all sorts of names: Avalon, St. Martin's Land, the Place of the Sudden Mist. Years and years ago it was connected to the mainland, but then it broke off and floated away slowly westward, just as Madagascar floated away from the continent of Africa. Islands do that every few million years; it is nothing to make a fuss about.
With the floating island, of course, came the people who were living on it: sensible people mostly who understood that everyone did not have exactly two legs arms and legs,

strange but true: I know people who don't live on the island who know that too

Quote:but might be a different in shape and different in the way they though. So they live peacefully with ogres who had one eye or dragons(of whom there were a lot about those days). They didn't leap into the sea every time they saw a mermaid come her hair on a rock. They simply said, "Good morning." They understood that Ellerwoman had hollow backs and hated to be looked at on a Saturday and that if trolls want to wear their beards so long that they stepped on them every time they walked, then that was entirely their own affair.
They lived in peace with animals too.

I like these people.

That's all not enough time to give you the whole chapter.

[Alistoriv]

Sounds kinda stupid tbh

[craxyguy562]

Quote:There were a lot of interesting animals on the island as well as ordinary sheep and cows and goats. Giant birds who forgot how to fly and laid eggs the size of kettle drums, brollachans like blobs of jelly with dark red eyes, and sea horses with manes of silk that galloped and snorted in the waves.
But it was the mistmakers that the people of the Island loved the most. The endearing animals are found no where else in the world. They are white and small with soft fur all over their bodies, rather like baby seals, but they don't have flippers. They have short legs and big feet like the feet of puppies. Their black eyes are huge and moist, their noses are whiskery and cool, and they pant a little as they move because they look rather like small pillows and they don't like going very fast. the mistmakers aren't just nice, they were exceedingly important.
Because as the years passed and newspapers were washed up on the shore or refugees came through the gump with stories of the World Above, the Islanders became more and more determined to be left alone. Of course they knew some modern inventions were good, like electric blankets to keep people's feet warm in bed or fluoride to stop teeth from rotting, but there were things they didn't like at all, like nuclear weapons or tower blocks at the tops of which old ladies shivered and shook because the lifts were bust, or battery hens stuffed two in a cage. And they dreaded being discovered by passing ships or airplanes flying too low.
Which is where the mistmakers came in. These sensitive creatures, you see, absolutely adore music. When you play music to a mistmaker, its eyes grow wide and it lets out its breath and gives a great sigh.
"Aaah," it will sigh. "Aaah...aaah..."
And each time it sighs, mist comes from its mouth: clean, thick, white mist which smells of early morning and damp grass. There are hundreds and hundreds of mistmakers lolloping over the turf or along the shore of the Island, and that means a lot of mist.
So when a ship is sighted or a speck in the sky which might be an airplane, all the children ran out of school with their recorders and started to play to the mistmakers...And the people who might have landed and poked and pried saw only clouds of whiteness and went their way

radar can see through clouds. trololol.

[brainiac3397]

I'm confused.

[craxyguy562]

(04-04-2014 12:47 PM)brainiac3397 Wrote:  I'm confused.

Just post your opinions. post comments under the quotes.

[James Comey]

It's too awesome for you, brainiac.