Millions

Product Information

The story started out very slow but after finding the money, the story became very fast and many events occurred over a short time which made it hard to pick up every little detail and most of the important aspects of the story were hinted at by those little details. The boys quickly learn some lessons in basic economics: for one thing, how difficult it is to spend a large amount of cash (particularly when you have to keep it a secret). It seems that they’re at loggerheads over this too, with Damian convinced that the saints need thanking for their intervention in his life. The book is about a young boy named Damian who is obsessed with catholic saints and his older brother Anthony and the problems they get into after Damian finds a bag of pounds, north of two-hundred and thirty thousand pounds to be exact.

The conflict in the book is for Damian and Anthony to find a way to get rid of the money in seventeen days because it is in the old form of money and the money system is changing to a new one( Euros). I don't read children's fiction very often, but this one was recommended to me so I thought I'd give it a whirl.The author also used a lot of symbolism and figurative language throughout the story representing things like family, the boys’ mother and greed among other things.

And furthermore, and finally, albeit I certainly do kind of wonder if I might be reading just a wee bit too much into and below the surface for Millions, as someone who was closely following the political and economic debates happening both in England and elsewhere in Europe (from around 1990 to 2006) regarding the adoption or not of the Euro and the fiascos this actually ended up creating for many member nations, both that Millions was published in 2004 (when the Euro had only recently been adopted as the common currency on the continent and when there was a very heated and often volatile debate in the UK regarding this) and that the entire (fictitious) scenario of the United Kingdom switching to the Euro is definitely being shown by Frank Cottrell Boyce as really being rather negative, this does definitely make me increasingly consider Millions to be Cottrell Boyce's warning fable against the Euro replacing the British Pound Sterling (and while I definitely think that this is interesting, it is also something I do tend to find more than a bit uncomfortable, as it gives Millions a between the lines political and economic message I as an adult reader find quite annoyingly problematic). a b "Press releases for the 2004 Awards, presented in 2005 " Archived 6 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine. Damian and Anthony are well written characters, but I think the way they were written would have been more appropriate for boys older than them. Damian stood out as a character in the book because he had such an outgoing and big personality that couldn’t be contained. Prez has one summer to find ten things about the earth that make it worth saving - but can he do it?His second book, Framed was inspired by a news story he’d read in an old scrapbook: During the Second World War, a collection of valuable paintings from the National Gallery was hidden in a slate mine for safekeeping. However, I personally found the sequencing of the invents a little confusing, with more and more problems rising in the plot where least expected. You guys were so fab and Dawn was such a lovely presence in the schools - I will absolutely be in touch next time I'm in your neck of the woods. But with only 17 days left before the national currency switches to Euros and the money becomes worthless, this proves to be much more difficult than they had anticipated. The real estate and financial commentary of the protagonist's older brother, Anthony, is one example that comes to mind.

Damian's obsession with "being excellent" made him an unusual and memorable main character whose circular, well-intentioned and slightly batty attempts to make sense of adult worry-logic and comfort himself with it would resonate with anxious conscientious young readers. Damian seems adventurous because he explores around the town to find the saints he is looking for and the crooks who stole the money. All I can tell from Frank Cottrell Boyce based on his jacket info is that he looks like Alan Cumming's brother and he has 7 kids.I was at my last school for 4 years and we had ********* book fairs every term – and every term, I was disappointed by the narrow range of books.