Four Corners of the Sky: Chapters 15-28

This is installment 4 of my Big Library Reading diary, covering chapters 15-28. If you want to follow along, you only have until Saturday, June 1, to check the book out from any of 7,500 participating libraries, but you'll still have two weeks to read it.

The Memorial Day holiday, combined with my reading momentum and some exciting passages got me all the way to the end of part 1.

The 2 codes are now half solved, and it turns out I was right about the tail numbers, sort of. A good mystery allows the reader to figure some thing out, after all. But this whole code thing makes less sense now. Who makes a password out of tail numbers and then writes half of it inside a baseball cap? We've learned from Raffie that Jack has a prodigious memory for Shakespeare even if he can't remember his daughter's birthdate. So why would he pick a password that he couldn't remember?

Now that the courier's box has been retrieved from the King, it seems we can just abandon her in St. Louis, which seems a bit callous.

This birth certificate has been bothering me. How, exactly do you get a fake mother's name onto a birth certificate? Even in Key West, a woman can't just waltz into a hospital with an assumed name and drop a baby. So the birth certificate could be a complete forgery. But why bother with it at all? If we assume that it's not a fake, then Annie's mother had some reason to not even have a child. If she had died in childbirth, there would be no reason for the pseudonym.

Brad is seeming less scary, more goofy and more of a plot device. How else would we get characters to St. Louis and Miami?

Do pilots of private jets wear helmets?

I really sympathize with Annie when she says that everyone in her life seems to be talking with everyone else on the phone except her. The reader is similarly cut out of Annie's hyperconnected world. Storytelling will have to adjust somehow. With ebooks, it's not impossible to have a character phone you when you get to a certain page. Or at least send you some texts. That's what I would call immersive storytelling!

There are a lot of close friendships in this book. I was glad to learn the backstory of Clark and Sam. Friendships don't sell books though; I fully expect passion to break out in Part 2.

I'm a bit annoyed at the formatting errors I see in this ebook- random paragraphs aligned center instead of left, inappropriate line breaks. These are conversion artifacts that a publisher would be horrified to see in print, but somehow it's not a disaster in an ebook. It's possible that the errors are introduced by Overdrive but more likely they can be traced back into the publisher's production process.

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