The Cardturner by Louis Sachar

This story about a seventeen-year old boy who is hired to help his blind and wealthy uncle play bridge has an interesting and unique premise, but turns out to be uninteresting and too technical to be a page-turner. The complicated descriptions of bridge hands and plays take up most of the book; although it's interspersed with romance and the main character's personal narrative, it might as well be a bridge handbook. I skipped most of the bridge lingo, but I still had trouble getting through it. On the whole, it bored me and was disappointing considering that Louis Sachar wrote it. His purpose for writing the book was to interest people in bridge, but at the end of it, I found myself wondering how such a complicated game could be at all enjoyable. If I had to rate this novel on a ten-point scale (ten being the best and one being the worst), I'd give it a four. The Cardturner by Louis Sachar