The Newstead Project
the giant.
Joel Cranston shouldn’t exist. He just doesn’t know that yet. He’s lived a pretty normal life for the last sixteen years. If you consider being almost seven feet tall and good at about every sport you’ve ever played normal. Normal ends the day Newstead shows up with an invitation to come to their school.
the school.
Newstead is a private high school in Central Vermont by the Green Mountains. It’s a great place to hide a few hundred people who shouldn’t exist while you train them to become tomorrow’s rulers, tomorrow’s dictators, tomorrow’s gods.
the unexpected.
Rachel Newell thinks she’s just passing through. She never stays any place more than four months and with Newstead so close to Weston, she has even more reason to make this her shortest stop ever. The last thing she expects is to have a reason to stay.
Together Rachel and Joel uncover the truth behind what is
the newstead project.
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My thoughts: I thought this book was pretty good. I had read some previous reviews on it and that gave me the heads up to watch for the changing point of views. It might have been confusing had I not had the information ahead of time. For 98% of the book you alternate between Joel and Rachel. Joel has been recruited by a school called Newstead, but they failed to mention a few things to him: that it was an all boys school; that all of the students were giants as compared to the rest of the population; that they had to wear uniforms. He finds out a few more interesting things over the course of the next few months at Newstead - some of which he has in common with the boys, some he does not.
Rachel has only lived in Weston for a couple of months when Joel starts working at Fred's Pizza, where she is a waitress. She has had her fill of Newstead boys as they are usually her only customers. She has as little interaction with them as possible, so is shocked at herself when she finds she is attracted to Joel. Somehow she knows he isn't like the rest of them.
I liked the pace at which this book moved but what I found confusing is where you would cover a period of time from Joel's (or Rachel's) point of view and then would jump all the way back and cover it in the other person's point of view. Where it was very cool to see it both ways, it was sometimes hard to remember where you were starting over from.
Towards the end, I didn't want to put it down, because I wanted to know what became of Joel and Rachel. Of course, you get kind of a cliffhanger with the promise of a second book The Bashan Agenda in November 2013.
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Author Melanie Schulz
I live in Upstate New York with my husband and three children, where I’ve pretty much been planted my entire life. Which is fine, because it’s beautiful here. My only complaint is that most people assume that New York means NYC, which it doesn’t. There. I’ve done my part in exposing the truth.
Truth. The truth is I’m not a writer; storyteller maybe, but not a writer. It wasn’t something I spent years dreaming of, or even what I went to school for. I’m a nurse. I love being a nurse. So why write? I don’t know. I do know when it started, though. September 3, 2010. I know this because I nature journal, and on that day Joel made it into my notes. I guess that’s fitting. Someone like him needed to be birthed out in the woods.
If you were to meet me, and I hope someday you do, you would not connect me with this story. I’m a wife, a mother, a nurse. The person who wrote this should’ve been a guy, first off, secondly he should be some militaristic strategist; that’s who you’d expect to see if you were to come to a book signing, not me. But I’m there, in every line. So if I don’t have the good fortune to meet you in person, I hope to see you in THE NEWSTEAD PROJECT.
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