Smoking: Several people smoke, including Link, in an effort to curb their hunger. Since the book is British, the word fag is often used for the word cigarette. The writing (often in vernacular) was very engaging and relatable. I thought this was an effective way of helping us understand the characters better. The book is primarily about this despondent teenager suffering from homelessness, however the author clearly thought that the book wasn't bleak enough and, as a result, decided to incorporate a psychotic serial killer into the story too. I'm not going to say any more about it but hopefully that's peaked your interest. Yet all their skills may not be enough when a deadly new opponent rips off the veneer of Stone’s own mysterious past. An unstoppable killer intent on one goal: the death of Oliver Stone.

Vince leers at Mum, making suggestive comments about going to bed and rounding out a decent night. He nudges and winks at Link, trying to get a reaction. Link notes that he never remembers his own father talking about sex or even hinting at it. Link says that something happened between his sister, Carole, and Vince one night when Mum was working late. He never knew the full details, but he had a pretty good idea about what it could have been. Afterward, Mum and Carole fought, and Carole moved in with her boyfriend. It's supposed to be aimed at kids in their early teens and, as you'll probably know, by that age kids tend to want to read books that explore 'darker' themes (well... I did anyway). And, I'm not gonna lie, Stone Cold is pretty bloody dark. The subject matter is not a nice one but I thought it was dealt with well - it was honest, didn't shy from the horrible bits, and didn't overly dramatise/romantise it. It helped raise an important issue in a realistic way. Robert Swindells lives on the Yorkshire moors and is a full-time writer. He has won the Children's Book Award twice, for BROTHER IN THE LAND and for ROOM 13. In 1994, he won the Carnegie Medal for STONE COLD, and also the Sheffield Book Award.Stone Cold is the first in a series of nine television films based on Parker's Jesse Stone novels. The film first aired on the CBS television network February 20, 2005. Even though it was broadcast first in the series of films, it actually takes place after the second film of the series, Jesse Stone: Night Passage, which aired a year after this. Stone Cold by David Baldacci is the third exhilarating thriller in the bestselling Camel Club series. Link’s narrative details the day-to-day trials of homelessness. He talks about the bitter cold of nights on the street, the burning hunger, the struggles of panhandling, the impossibility of getting a job and the nightly fear of others lurking in nearby dark doorways. One day, Ginger doesn’t return to the boys’ designated meeting place. Link is hurt and concerned, but another of Ginger’s friends says this is just the way it works. Maybe he got a job, decided to leave town, or any number of things. Readers learn from Shelter’s narrative that Ginger has become the newest soldier in his army of dead drifters.

I read some of this with school. Normally when you read books with school you never finish them and they always tend to be quite boring. Well according to my stereotype i did never finish it but it wasnt actually that boring, although in some parts iI'm not gonna lie were boring. Me and my friend were just dreading the idea of having to get this book out and read yet another chapter. In the end though we agreed that it was in actual fact wasn't as bad as we initially thought. After Link's father abandons his family, Link's mother starts a relationship with a new boyfriend, who forces Link out of the family home in Bradford. Link, now homeless, decides to travel to Camden, London. Here he meets Ginger, a streetwise homeless man, who takes him under his wing. Link and Ginger work together and become friends. My sister was talking about this book along with others she had done for her GCSE English and English Language course, among the books she had, this appeared to interest me most. Probably because it was one that I have not read before, even while I was going through my GCSEs.Meanwhile, intermittent chapters describe the ramblings of a disjointed military vet who calls himself Shelter. He is angry at being discharged after many years of service and believes the country’s homeless population is a result of a government conspiracy. He’s taken it upon himself to fight for his country by disposing of drifters. Shelter develops an elaborate plan for luring young homeless people to his house, killing them, dressing them up as his own private army and burying them beneath the floorboards. Convinced that he’s seen Ginger and Link laughing at him, he begins stalking them. No, I have not really enjoyed reading Robert Swindells' 1993 and Carnegie Medal winning young adult novel Stone Cold all that much. It is textually majorly depressing and often really quite emotionally infuriating even if indeed Stone Cold is brilliantly penned, with Swindells deftly and ingeniously providing points of view from two very different and mostly majorly unreliable narrators (protagonist Link and antagonist Shelter), and for me, not at all pleasurable and comfortable reading by any stretch of the imagination. However, and the above having been said, I also do not think that the author in any manner expects and even wants us as readers to find Stone Cold a reading joy, that instead, Robert Swindells' presented text for Stone Cold is meant to make us squirm, is supposed to render us uncomfortable, angry and to also make us think, with yes, Shelter's musings about killing and why he wants to rid the streets of London of the homeless feeling by necessity horrifying and terrible (and in particular so since one kind of knows that there are in fact many people, including police officers, politicians etc. who pretty much have similar attitudes to Shelter even if they do not abduct and murder the homeless, even if they do not actually put what Shelter is depicted as doing in Stone Cold into practice, and not to mention that after the police finally manage to arrest Shelter and incarcerate him, Link realises that while in jail, psychotic killer and all-round lowlife Shelter will actually have a roof over his head and three meals a day, but the homeless will still be out in the cold, despised, forgotten and desperately fighting to survive). The text includes several variations of the Lord’s name in vain. B–tard, h—, d–n, a– (and arse), p—, fugging (used as the f-word would be), crap and s— also appear. Stone Cold starts off when Link (not his real name but is what he is referred to) leaves his house after his mother marries an abusive man who treats him badly. Link decides to move to London, and when he fails to find work he becomes homeless. After getting his watch stolen on the first night Link meets a fellow homeless man named Ginger who teaches him how to survive on the streets. One day though Ginger and various other homeless people begin to disappear without reason, Link takes it upon himself to find out what has happened.

Stone Cold is a Carnegie Medal-winning thriller by Robert Swindells. It is one of The Originals from Penguin - iconic, outspoken, first. Also notable is Link's small and suitably quiet reflection upon the disappearance of another 'dosser': "...and how [his parents] never dreamed he'd be called Doggy Bag and live on scraps and be so unimportant that he'd vanish and no one would care." It's a pathetic moment, but a revealing one which, amid the rest of the book's adolescent bravado (and teen-pitched, exaggerated language) stands out.Carnegie Winner 1993. Living Archive: Celebrating the Carnegie and Greenaway Winners. CILIP. Retrieved 2018-02-28. Harry Finn is leading a double life. By day he is a mild-mannered suburban dad who dotes on his wife Mandy and his three kids. But by night he is on a quest of vengeance, taking out the squad of CIA killers who murdered his father and made it look like a suicide when he was still a kid. He’s been driven to this desperate quest for vengeance by his elderly mother Lesya, who appears to be suffering from dementia, but is actually in hiding in her nursing home as we learn when we witness her speaking perfectly coherent Russian to her son. Lesya is a former Soviet sleeper agent who was embedded in the US but then fell in love with Finn’s father. They married and she became a double agent, but his spymaster, Gray, never quite believed that she was trustworthy. To punish him for the relationship, Gray sent the Triple Six team to kill him and make it look like a suicide. Finn has grown up hearing stories about this injustice all his life, and finally found himself in a position to do something about it. In 1997, the novel was adapted for a television series of the same title, starring James Gaddas, Peter Howitt and Elizabeth Rider, and produced by Andy Rowley. It was nominated for a Best Children's Drama Award at BAFTA. [2] The short series was shown on Scene. Overall I think that this novel is very good and I would recommend it to fans of realistic horror novels but I think most people would enjoy because of the various theme that it uses. It is definitely a novel aimed at the older reader as the ideas in the novel can be a bit heavy going and may scare younger readers. I would rate this novel a 3 out of 5.