One of my favorite books of the year. I loved that little kid. The illustrations in the margins were a nice touch. ( )

An imaginative glimpse into the mind of a precocious boy. TS Spivet travels across the country to accept an award, and the book is filled with the story of his journey, complete with illustrations. Unique. ( )

Great format and a few snarky moments, but not enough plot for me.

Told through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet By Reif Larson is a wonderful example of imaginative writing combined with an innovative presentation style. While not designed specifically for young people, the book would be of interest to high ability middle school and high school readers.

What makes the novel unique is the author's use of illustrations and side notes in the margins to extend the reading experience.

The story follows a gifted boy who has been invited to receive an award and speak at the Smithsonian. T.S. thinks that once the officials learn that he's a boy and not an adult scientist, they will be withdraw the award. He decided to venture across country from a ranch in Montana to city of Washington D.C. on his own. Many aspects of the book feel set in another time and place, but that contributes to surreal feeling.

I enjoyed both the book's format as well as the quirky characters. I could empathize with the boy's eccentricities and loves of visuals. I recommend this novel. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed being in the head of TS Spivet. The first 1/3 of the book was well-done and I looked forward to the rest of it. But somewhere along the train trip things got weird and the time in WDC was just unbelievable. I'd read another by the author based on the writing in this one. ( )

Did you ever enjoy reading a book, and, at the end, could not for the life of you decide if you liked it or not? I gave it five stars, because I really did enjoy reading it, but I don't think I could recommend it to anyone. How odd. ( )

What an odd book. I started loving it, but quickly tapered to an eagerness for it to end. It became very contrived and tedious for me. I see that so many have rated it very highly, and I think I must have missed something.

At the beginning, I loved the clever illustrations and side bars... It is a very beautifully crafted book. The story then took an odd segue into his great grandmother's life. Interesting, but it didn't go anywhere meaninful. Then, he arrived in Washington to run into a series of cardboard, comicbook quality characters - very shallow and unidimentional.

what kind of ending was that??? sigh ( )

Wow. This book is highly imaginative, with a main character whose voice is unlike any others yet immensely likable. T.S. Spivet is a 12-year-old child prodigy who lives with a quirky family on a ranch in Montana. He is awarded a presitigous prize from the Smithsonian for his maps and illustrations, although they are unaware of his young age. He decides to hop a train to D.C. to receive the prize. While the ending and even some of the middle is not as strong as the beginning, this is a must-read. T.S. is quite a character, but perhaps his most endearing quality is his innocent and straightforward way of describing his feelings. ( )

With each page I grew more tired of this book. I didn't believe that the narrator was a 12-year old, no matter how precocious. The novel had a dated feel. For example, the director of the Smithsonian awards him a prize without thinking to Google Spivet's name to find he wasn't associated with any university. I didn't understand the relationship between the scientist mother and rancher father. The middle section which centered on the life of a distant relative distracted from the story of the boy's journey. Without the interesting illustrations and the amusing ideas about what can be mapped, the novel would be mediocre. ( )

What an amazing book! Hard to define, but some of the most beautiful writing I have ever read. Larsen has a way of using words that is magical....he moves around ordinary words to create images, feelings, thoughts in a new and totally brilliant way. The layout of the book at first put me off, but I quickly came to appreciate the style and recognize the importance of the side bars. An unexpected masterpiece! ( )

A boy travels across the country in order to find out that his parents really do love him, after all...and a bunch of really interesting stuff that might have happened had he not found this out, doesn't. Extra star for the pretty pictures. ( )

Starts Strong... Ends with a Whimper

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet started so strong and with such flair, that I was excited to be reading it within ten pages. This feeling continued for the first 80 or so pages; I even quoted from it in a few places. Then the story slowly unraveled from there.

Tecumsah Sparrow Spivet is a twelve year old mapmaker who lives on a ranch in Montana. His mother is a scientist who has spent her life looking for a beetle that may not even exist; his father is a gruff farmer with few words to spare; his sister is restless and bored; his younger brother was killed in a gun accident. All of these family figures play a role in what makes T.S. tick. He is a brilliant mapmaker that can map the geology of Montana as well as its dispersion of McDonalds locations; he maps how his sister shucks corn, how his father herds cattle, how people smile. He is a master illustrator whose work is on display at the Smithsonian.

But, when the Smithsonian calls to award him a prestigious fellowship, knowing that they do not know his actual age, he neglects to inform them of the fact. his also neglects to tell his family, who have no idea about his extracuriculur activities, about the award until he leaves a note and hopes the rails like a hobo to head to Washington D.C. to accept the award and fellowship.

Thus starts what appears to be a great road trip story in this heavily illustrated and side-barred novel by Reif Larsen. Unfortunately, the book bogs down in the middle when T.S. delves into the history of his great-grandmother, Emma, one of the first female geologists in the 19th century. This history is fascinating and appears to directly relate to T.S.'s adventure and his mother's fruitless search for a mythical beetle; but, the story of Emma becomes the focal point of the middle of the book and most of T.S.'s adventure by rail across the country. Nothing happens on this journey, he just reads the story of Emma... oh, and appears to travel through a wormhole... did the book just become a science fiction novel???

Once we learn the story of Emma - frankly, this would have been a better book in and of itself - the book almost fast forwards to Washington D.C. where things get weirder and more muddled as T.S. is immersed into the culture of the Smithsonian. Secret Societies, jerk bureaucrats, and a complete lack of relevance to what has come before ensues. And, the ending? Well, it could have been good and relevant and a nice ending if the rest of the story fleshed out the relationship with his father a little better and didn't leave his relationship with his mother and his connection to Emma in limboland. ( )

It was with great anticipation that I picked up The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet from the library. The synopsis of a 12-year-old science prodigy hopping a train “hobo style” to accept an award from the Smithsonian sounded like the coming of tale that I would adore. Once I had the book, the illustrations and marginalia that graced each page pleasantly surprised me. For certain, this was one of the most aesthetically pleasing books I’ve seen in a while.

Unfortunately, the plot couldn’t keep up with the visual interest of the book. The beginning and middle of the book were fantastic, learning about T.S. and his overanalysis of the world around him. His depictions of his scientist mother, rugged father, sarcastic sister and the innocence of his deceased brother all emanated from the pages. T.S.’s narrative made me smile and laugh in some parts, sigh and reflect in others. He was a little boy with a big brain and heart.

As I reached the last 75 pages, the story became muddied with displaced characters, secret societies and a sense of detachment from the first two-thirds of the book. The daVinvi Code-meets-Alvin and the Chipmunks ending was lost to me – as was T.S.’s humor, wit and childish innocence. I missed my old T.S.

Despite the lackluster ending, I would encourage any visual person to check out this book – if for nothing else but to look at the illustrations and sidebars. They did not detract from the story (in fact, T.S. drew arrows to his sidebars so you knew when to veer off). Like T.S., they were wonderful in every way.

All in all, I am glad I read The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. This was the debut novel by Reif Larsen, and I hope he continues to mature as a writer. His writing style and characterization are spot-on. Perhaps a T.S. sequel is in order? ( )

Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (Penguin, 2009) is the sort of book that doesn't lend itself well to reviews (or at least, to the composition of a review). This is partly because it's difficult to describe, and partly because it's somewhat uneven: I want to rave about certain aspects of it, and some others just didn't seem to work quite right. So I'm not sure how this is going to end up, but let me give it a try.

T. S. Spivet is a 12-year old Montana ranch boy, whose proclivities run to making maps, tormenting his older sister, and analyzing the stuffing out of every aspect of his life and the lives of those around him. He's intensely precocious in some respects, but childish in others ("I had a stash of Cheerios in every pocket of every piece of clothing I owned, which often led to a mess in the laundry room"), and the tensions between these two conflicting elements of his personality carry through the book. The story opens with a surprise phone call to T. S. from an official at the Smithsonian, announcing that Spivet has won their prestigious Baird Prize and asking him to travel to D.C. for the award ceremony. Naturally, an odyssey ensues as T. S. packs up and ships out, hopping a train headed east.

We follow his travels across the country as he muses about himself, his family (distracted parents, both marred by a recent tragedy), and his hunger. A subplot, in the form of a pilfered notebook from his mother's study, revolves around one of T. S.'s ancestors, another precocious young scientist trying to make her way in the world. The narrative is complemented by marginalia - footnotes, drawings, charts and maps - part of the wonderfully complex and delightful design of this book (it is certainly one of the most aesthetically pleasing trade hardbacks I've read recently). These additions do nothing to detract from the narrative, indicated as they are with handy arrows which tell you precisely when to check them out. If you don't like footnotes, this will probably annoy you. I found it enjoyable.

At about the halfway point, things start to get a bit odd, and it's all downhill from there. The final few chapters, covering T. S.'s time in Washington, didn't fit well at all with the rest of the book; the end came suddenly and, I'm sad to say, was a disappointment. Spivet's wit and humor mixed with pathos and emotional upheaval, which made the first two thirds of the book a delight, evaporated into a grand muddle of weirdness which I think Spivet himself would have been unable to diagram coherently.

Overall, I have to give Larsen very high marks for the design of the book, the wonderful character he's created in T. S. Spivet, and the first nine or ten chapters. I will look forward to his next book with anticipation.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2009/... ( )

The story is about a 12 year old child prodigy cartographer whose younger brother has recently died in a shooting accident on the family's Montana farm. The format of the book is unusual in it's format and design with drawings and notes peppered through the margins. These do add something to the book as well as provide some marketing hype for an otherwise mediocre story.

The beginning and end of the story move along quickly. There's a part in the middle where it drags while T.S. is alone with his thoughts in an RV being transported by a train.

There is a parallel story in the book which is not clear whether it's a family ancestral story or a piece of historical fiction by T.S.'s mother.

Through the book, T.S. has an unnatural concern for his mother's scientific career and his belief that she is wasting her scientific ability. How many 12 year old's truly have much of a concept about their parent's career.

The end of the book resolves T.S.'s relationship with is father, but leaves his relationship with his mother hanging. ( )

First the unusual title caught my attention, and when I read a review of this book that stated “…few if any will have experienced anything like it,” I knew I HAD to read it.

It’s true. The story itself is quirky enough – a twelve-year-old genius cartographer receives a prestigious award from the Smithsonian (unaware of his age) and he sets off on a cross country trip from his home on a ranch in Montana to Washington, DC. The book just continues to surprise – most obvious, the numerous drawings, charts, maps and notes in the margins that make you chuckle; then the unique perspective of a genius trapped in an adolescent’s body as he encounters the world outside his sheltered ranch home; the crazy events and people he meets along the way; even the slightly oversized dimension of the book along with it’s curio-case designed cover adds to its charm. Looking at the author’s photo at the back of the book, one can’t help thinking that this guy looks way too normal to have written such a wacky and captivating book!

And check out his fun website – www.tspivet.com – for even more curiosities! ( )

This book is a thing of beauty. It stands out being an oversized hardback and invites you to pick it up and look inside ... whereupon you'll see all the intricate illustrations, sidebars and marginalia. Then reading the blurb, you'll find out that it is the story of a 12 year old genius, Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, how he gets to be invited to go to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC and his journey to get there. Totally captivating already without reading a word.

TS, as he likes to be known, lives on a remote ranch in Montana. His father is a taciturn cowboy, his mother is a talented scientist totally obsessed with studying rare beetles, his sister is a typical teenage girl. His brother, Layton we soon find out died a few months previously. His is not a typical household, and TS is not a typical boy. He loves nothing more than to understand the world by mapping it - drawing illustrations, diagrams, and making lists. His mentor Dr Yorn submitted some of his work to the Smithsonian, not telling them he was only 12. So when they call inviting him to come and accept a prestigious award, TS sees his chance to escape Montana and make a pilgrimage to the home of learning, so he runs away and jumps a train hobo-style. Having grabbed one of his mother's notebooks, he starts to read it on the train, and is surprised to discover it's not one of her beetle books, but the draft of a biography of one of his ancestors on his father's side, who went on to become the first woman professor of geology. Eventually after many adventures, he arrives in DC. To his surprise, (but not ours), the museum sees that it can capitalise on their prize-winner only being 12, and the media circus starts leaving TS homesick and missing his family.

I really took to TS. He's a loveable geek and an independent spirit. He struggles to understand his parents, especially since the death of his brother though. Throughout his journey, we share his confusion, his grief and need for space. In the boredom of the long train ride, through reading his mother's manuscript, he begins to understand his heritage and to find his place in the scheme of things. Arriving in the big city, his skills don't help him and he's a fish out of water - it's here for the first time that we really feel he's just a boy.

This is a totally charming book. I loved everything about it - especially all the diagrams and footnotes. The middle section on the train did slightly drag (intentionally I would wager), but the imagery (and TS's maps) of the train gradually wending its way through the American mid-west is fantastic. Also wonderful is the masterful way the author has teased out the story of the Spivet family - by the end of the novel we care about them all deeply. TS's realisation, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, that there's 'No place like home' and his subsquent rescue has the merest hint of schmaltz but is a truly satisfying ending to an amazing tale. ( )

http://unabridgedopinions.com/2009/05... ( )

T.S. Spivit is a precocious twelve-year-old "mapmaker" living with his family on a ranch in Montana. Along with maps of the ranch and his bedroom, T.S. maps things like "Gracie Shucking the Sweet Corn" and "Fear Is the Sum of Many Sensory Details." When his scientific illustrations of bombardier beetles land him the prestigious Baird Award from the Smithsonian (based upon the mistaken assumption of T.S.'s adulthood), T.S. jumps on a freight train and heads to Washington D.C. to accept his award. As you might expect, many adventures ensue. In T.S., Larsen has created a wholly loveable character. T.S. is sweet, curious, honest, naive, courageous, and one of the best characters I've encountered in contemporary fiction. On top of all that, he's still a (mostly) believable twelve-year-old:

"I got up from the couch and did some calisthenics. I found another carrot stick that had migrated to the bottom of my suitcase and ate it without shame. I did some vocal warm-ups. And yet, I still could not shake the feeling of dull melancholy that had been lurking since my departure, a kind of persistent hollowness, similar to the feeling I got when eating cotton candy: initially there was so much associated nostalgia, so much promise emanating from those luscious pink threads, but when I got down to the act of licking it or biting it or whatever one did to cotton candy, there was just not a lot there--in the end, you were just eating a sugar wig."

Just about every page of this book is filled with T.S's marginalia, including illustrations, anecdotes, and random thoughts. T.S's story in prose combined with these inventive and attractive sidebars make for a multi-sensory reading experience that's like reading a carefully crafted journal. For me, the incomplete story-within-the-story in the book's mid-section and the rare supernatural occurrences were the only false notes in this otherwise imaginative, charming, and often hilarious book.

This review also appears on my literary blog Literary License. ( )

Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet is a twelve-year-old genius living on a farm in the midwest. His mother, Dr. Clair, is a scientist searching for a rare beetle. His father is a farmer and cowboy. T.S. likes to think of himself as a mapmaker. He doesn’t just draw maps of land, though, he draws maps of everything from facial expressions to gunshots. One day, he takes a phone call from the Smithsonian Institute and discovers that he has been selected for the prestigious Baird award, for which his friend Dr. Yorn has nominated him. That phone call prompts T.S. to sneak on trains in his quest to get to Washington, D.C., to give a speech and accept his award. Along the way, he meets a number of strange characters and makes a series of important realizations about his life, his age, and most importantly, his family.

I’m not sure there are words to describe how I felt about this book. I haven’t seen many blog reviews around and I’m really wondering why. This book is phenomenal. T.S. is a stunning character. He is clearly a genius but clearly a child at the same time; he makes amazing conclusions but then his child-logic can’t always keep up with his scientific mind. I found this fascinating. I’m no genius, but I truly felt that with T.S. I was having a peek into the mind of someone like Stephen Hawking, although much more understandable.

This book isn’t for people who dislike footnotes, though. Me, I love footnotes, and this book is full of them, although usually on the sides, along with T.S.’s maps and observations. In my opinion, these little asides added immeasurably to the main story even if they required me to read a little bit slower. They flesh out this little boy’s world and show us how he works, who he is friends with, and sometimes illuminate larger questions in the novel; for example, his facial diagrams allow us to see the way his father appears when he looks at T.S. in a way that words could not really match. The maps allows us to slowly feel the depths of pain which T.S. has been experiencing since his brother, Layton, killed himself; so much is revealed in that sibling relationship not through words, but through the implied sharing and affection in certain maps and footnotes. My favorite of all of the asides, though, was probably the three-prong diagram of why McDonald’s appeals to adolescent boys.

I also really, really loved the backstory behind T.S.’s family which is covered towards the middle of the book in sections which were from a notebook T.S. stole from his mother. Having had no inkling of his mother’s writing talent, T.S. is startled to discover that she has been writing a novel of the life of one of his ancestors. I loved this story-within-a-story, both because it felt like historical fiction, my favorite genre, and because it revealed so much to T.S. about his mother, who has many more secrets than she lets on. I can’t say that it moved the plot forward, but I never minded at all.

In the end, this was a wonderful, quirky, endearing story about a boy who figures out what his family means to him and, in the meantime, starts to grow up on his journey east. It might not be for everyone, considering the lengthy footnotes and digressions from the main plot, but I loved every minute, especially after T.S. sets off. I was in the mood for an ambitious story and I certainly got one. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

http://chikune.com/blog/?p=917 ( )

Anyway, the book is released on 7th May in the UK and it is a thing of beauty. The story is pretty entertaining and well written, so no worries there, but the real joy of this book is the doodling and notes in the margins. Read the book once, then go back and properly explore these margin entries, just enjoy the book for it's quirks.
full review at www.unboundblogzine.com

This is a beautifully produced book, set out as if it is one of the sketch books of T.S. Spivet - 12 years old, scientific genius, skilled illustrator and map maker and average, everyday boy. It follows the story of T.S. who, feeling like he doesn't belong in his somewhat dysfunctional family in Montana, accepts a prestigious award from the Smithsonian. Unfortunately, they don't know he is only 12, and he doesn't really know how to get to Washinton D.C. But using his abilities, he gives it a try - and discovers a world which is both confusing and fascinating to his scientific mind.

If you suspend your disbelief and remember that this is the world of a 12 year old, you will come to enjoy the inanimate objects which talk, and the strange coincidences of this novel. But you can't fail to be delighted by the illustrations which litter the pages and help you to see the world in the same way that T.S. sees it. The novel touches on love, acceptance, science, belief, loss and learning and is the kind of book you will go back to again and again. As a first novel, it is fantastically conceived and beautifully presented. ( )