Boy In The Tower by Polly Ho-Yen is a story of fear and hope, loneliness and friendship. Ade and his mother live right at the top of a tower block. It can get a bit lonely up there, but Ade
loves to spend hours sitting at the window watching the whole city unfold down below.
Things are pretty quiet in the flat since his mother fell ill. She has stopped cooking meals and doing the housework and singing the songs she always used to sing. In fact, these days she hardly gets out of bed. Ade doesn’t know what to do, so he watches the world outside. But suddenly that starts to change.
One day, one of the other tower blocks crashes to the ground and Ade watches the disorder with disbelief. Have some of his school friends died in the disaster? Is his best friend Gaia still alive? Then another building falls down and then another. The world around Ade's tower block is disintegrating under his very eyes.
And then huge plants start to spring up and grow at an alarming rate. Where have they come from? It looks like the plants are pulling the buildings down and they are preventing the
emergency services from helping people.
Is this only happening in the area where Ade lives? The residents (居民) are deserting the tower blocks, and soon Ade is stuck in his flat because he can't leave his mother. Who or what can rescue him?
Ho-Yen has written a thrilling story with Boy In The Tower, but the most successful part is the narrative (叙述的) voice of the boy at the centre of the story. He doesn't understand what is going on around him and this adds a fascinating dimension to the plot that moves the novel along.
Taking place in an urban environment that many of the novel's readers will immediately identify with, Ho-Yen's first novel is an interesting read about an ordinary boy facing a tough struggle to survive.
32. What do we know about Ade?
A. He lives in a noisy tower block.
B. He tries to help his mother recover.
C. He often helps his mother with housework.
D. He likes seeing the world outside through the window.
33. What does the underlined word "disintegrating" in Paragraph 3 probably mean?
A. Showing up. B. Breaking up. C. Moving away. D. Coming back.
34. The plants mentioned in the book are .
A. poisonous B. delicate C. violent D. beautiful
35. It can be inferred that Boy In The Tower is .
A. a personal diary B. a detective story
C. a science textbook D. a science-fiction novel