Skip to main content

Glory O'Brien's History of the Future


Summary: 
Glory's mom committed suicide when she was four years old. She's about to graduate from high school and while everyone else is making plans for their future, she wonders if she will even have one, or if she'll die like her mom. One night, she and her only friend drink the remains of a petrified bat and they gain the power to see the past and the future of the people around them. The future she sees is full of war and erosion of women's rights. As she works to try to prevent that future, she learns about her own past and that of her family.

Strengths: 
King's story is rooted in a realistic world but with a little bit of magic mixed in. This element of almost realism is intriguing and interesting. The theme of the book focuses on feminism and the idea that doing nothing can sometimes cause great harm. Glory is without direction until the visions begin and she realizes that doing nothing will cause a whole lot of terrible somethings to happen. The idea that women's rights would be quickly taken away may seem far fetched at first, but one only has to look at post-Revolutionary Iran to see that this sort of thing can happen very quickly.

More books by A.S. King: 

 As I Crawl Through It
Please Ignore Vera Dietz

 King, A. (2014). Glory O'Brien's history of the future: A novel. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bloom's Taxonomy for a Digital Age

Bloom's Taxonomy. One of the things we are constantly hearing in our school is the push for increased rigor in our classroom, as a result of the STAAR tests and others like it becoming more rigorous. We are told to push for higher order thinking and questioning from our students. One of the tools we use to look at how we can increase rigor is Bloom's Taxonomy. But some things about Bloom's don't translate exactly when we are talking about the digital age and the classroom or library. For example, remembering is the lowest piece of the triangle for Bloom's, but remembering looks different when you have instant access to a powerful computer that can use essentially limitless online resources to find answers. I've mentioned to my husband just how much more this and future generations will know about the world around them simply because they no longer have to remember everything they're interested in knowing. If I pass a historical marker for a place I haven...
7 comments
Read more

Library Communication and Social Media

When social media became a "thing", businesses were one of the first entities to jump on board. Many companies realized that social media created an essentially free way to advertise. As social media developed, targeted marketing using social media became an even more effective way to communicate and advertise with specific consumer bases. Educational entities eventually got on board as well. What does this have to do with your library? Plenty. Let's take a look at most popular social media platforms - Facebook and Twitter, and how they are being used by libraries to promote and communicate with their clients as well as help educate and connect library staff members worldwide. Stay tuned for a future post on the social media platform that is ahead of Twitter in teen use, Instagram. Facebook The brain child of Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard classmates, Facebook was created in 2004 as a way for college students to connect online. Myspace, a Facebook predecessor, had al...
3 comments
Read more

Bloggin' It Up.

I'm a huge blog reader. I love learning and reading about others' perspectives and I find blogs to be a great way to be entertained or educated. When you follow a lot of blogs like I do, you are going to need a feed reader, or you're going to spend a lot of time checking for new blog posts that aren't up yet, or missing great reads because you stop checking. Back in the day, I used Google's RSS feed reader, which I loved. But Google did away with it, so it was off to shop for a new one. I now use Feedreader, which you can find here . It's simple. It's been around for a long time and it gets high ratings from other users. I'm not that picky as long as interfaces are generally intuitive, and Feedreader is a simple, barebones, feed reader that works. Now, when I started out reading blogs, it was an extension of reading Live Journals. I'm not sure how many of you remember LJ and it's darker cousin, Dead Journal. I had accounts at both and wrote the...
6 comments
Read more