{"id":20175,"date":"2018-06-21T13:45:23","date_gmt":"2018-06-21T18:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=20175"},"modified":"2018-06-20T15:46:10","modified_gmt":"2018-06-20T20:46:10","slug":"book-report-crosshairs-by-r-p-vogt-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/21\/book-report-crosshairs-by-r-p-vogt-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: <i>Crosshairs<\/i> by R.P. Vogt (2013)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/crosshairs.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">Full disclosure: when I moved from a nice suburb and good school district to the trailer park in the middle of my seventh grade year, &#8220;R.P.&#8221; was the kid assigned to be my friend to help me get around North Jefferson Middle School in Murphy, Missouri.  He was a smart kid.  I was a smart kid.  I&#8217;d like to think we were numbers 1 and 2 in the smarts for our seventh grade class, but I might be giving myself far too much credit.  By the time we finished high school, I certainly dropped a couple points in the rankings because I didn&#8217;t put any effort into my schooling, and he did.  But I digress.  We go way back, and when I saw he had a book, I ordered it.<\/p>\n<p>This is a young adult novel about a boy (about my kids&#8217; age) who gets to go hunting with his father, uncles, and cousins for the first time.  While he&#8217;s there, he finds one of his cousins stealing from other family members, and the book deals with the fallout of that including a run in with a local hood.  It&#8217;s a short book (120 pages) with none of the cartoons that are rife in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid or &#8220;James Patterson&#8221;&#8216;s Middle School series.  I&#8217;m not sure how much the book captures the zeitgeist of contemporary middle schoolers, but my oldest has expressed interest in the book, so I suppose he&#8217;ll let me know.  The questions the lad has about honoring your word and doing what&#8217;s right in spite of your word are real and tangible concerns for a young man, and thematically the book works.<\/p>\n<p>So I enjoyed it well enough.  But I&#8217;m probably giving some weight to being pleased that someone I knew wrote a pretty good book.  And, quite likely, has sold more copies of this one book than I&#8217;ve sold of all three of my books.  Curses, R.P. wins again!<\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ac&#038;ref=tf_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=stlbrianj-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=B00F1PTEZQ&#038;asins=B00F1PTEZQ&#038;linkId=0edc4ee739e4259b86a06ed5fbf2b7eb&#038;show_border=false&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=false&#038;price_color=333333&#038;title_color=0066c0&#038;bg_color=ffffff\"><br \/>\n    <\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Full disclosure: when I moved from a nice suburb and good school district to the trailer park in the middle of my seventh grade year, &#8220;R.P.&#8221; was the kid assigned to be my friend to help me get around North Jefferson Middle School in Murphy, Missouri. He was a smart kid. I was a smart [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20175"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20176,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20175\/revisions\/20176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}