The Goal Of This Site:
This site was made to bring more of America's youth into
the magical world of books. This website teamed up with the
Hood River Valley High School Library to create a safe and fun
environment where one could talk about different adventures
books have taken them on. Every week there will be a new BOTW
(Book of the week) that will come along with some new trivia. This
website also has a link to the OBOB (Oregon Battle Of the Books)
website. Thank you and enjoy.
the magical world of books. This website teamed up with the
Hood River Valley High School Library to create a safe and fun
environment where one could talk about different adventures
books have taken them on. Every week there will be a new BOTW
(Book of the week) that will come along with some new trivia. This
website also has a link to the OBOB (Oregon Battle Of the Books)
website. Thank you and enjoy.
The narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide—for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul.
A beautiful and compelling, but clearly unhinged, sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and insists that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly injured mercenary and she was a nun and scribe in the famed monastery of Engelthal who nursed him back to health. As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion and relates equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love in Japan, Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself drawn back to life—and, finally, in love. He is released into Marianne's care and takes up residence in her huge stone house. But all is not well. For one thing, the pull of his past sins becomes ever more powerful as the morphine he is prescribed becomes ever more addictive. For another, Marianne receives word from God that she has only twenty-seven sculptures left to complete—and her time on earth will be finished.