Clay

Product Information

A unique clay simulation and visualization technology, designed for user-generated content and making it easy for players to unleash their creativity. One of my Pottery Club members (thanks Richard!) suggested I write a blog post about the best pottery books I have on my book shelf - what a splendid idea! I’ve been reading and collecting pottery books for 15 years now, as a self taught potter, it’s where I garnered most of my knowledge. You can’t beat taking a pottery book to bed to get you inspired for what to make the next day. Davie and his best friend Geordie are just ordinary kids: altar boys, mediocre students, part of a gang full of mischief and rivalry. When Stephan Rose arrives, sent to live with his crazy Aunt Mary, because his father has died and his mother has gone mad, Father O’Mahoney asks that the boys befriend him. They resist, but Davie soon finds himself drawn to the strange new boy, fascinated as much with Stephan’s ability to create fantastic figures from clay as he is with Stephan’s taunting of Mouldy, the bully who’s vowed to ‘get’ Davie. Stephan has a gift, a real genius, for shaping figures that seem to live and breathe. He recognises something in Davie—some innocence, some goodness—that he can use, and begins to draw him into his plan. Together the boys create a monster from mud, a creature that not only lives but walks and obeys. Then something awful happens to Mouldy, and Davie must take action. The human characters are TC, a boy whose single mother largely ignores him and who is ostracised at school for being different, who seeks escape by skipping school to explore and watch the plants and animals around him. Jozef is a migrant worker who lost his small family farm in Poland to the cost of meeting EU regulations, who befriends a fighting dog owned by his employer, a shady operator specialising in house clearances. Then there is Sophia, a widow who takes a keen interest in nature, who forms a bond with her impressionable granddaughter Daisy that complicates her more distant relationship with her daughter Linda (Daisy's mother). Sometimes the we-all-love-nature theme seemed forced. I suppose I want the information shared with me to be essential to the story. Not going a bit deeper into the characters - versus the setting - left some of them with little dimension. There were hints of dimension at times but not enough.

Claybook Game

I thought it was a beautifully written book full of snippets of real life, like Sophia and the daffodil bulbs and her threadbare tea towels. I was all set to give it 5 stars until the end. It was so sad and brutal. In many ways it reminded me of Atonement, the devastation that one thing can have on so many lives. Pottery Journal - Guided Pottery Project Book - 100 Sheets to Record your Ceramic Art - Gift for Pottery lovers As we jumped from character to character (which I like), I wanted the tension to build. I wanted to feel that horrible feeling when we can predict how these worlds are going to collide and blow up. We're told at the beginning what's going to happen. In this case, the break from pure chronology failed. Some stories start with the end, and you're still enthralled. In this case, you're not. There's no tension in this story. It also failed because there's essentially nothing after that. When you're told the ending at the beginning, you expect a bit more. Otherwise, as in this case, the story is anticlimactic. When the crisis reached its climax, it seemed rushed. The experience of reading Clay is like being in a dream. There are recognisable objects and familiar places, but everything is twisted round, suffused with the strange, the extraordinary, the downright miraculous. Keep collections to yourself or inspire other shoppers! Keep in mind that anyone can view public collections - they may also appear in recommendations and other places.Essentially, I think Clay takes a lot of inspiration from Frankenstein. It's about the creation of a "human" through "unnatural" means, and the responsibility required once this creature has been created. The story mirrors Frankenstein's ideas of committing crimes against humanity (i.e. breaking natural laws, such as birth), nature vs nurture, evil vs good, you name it. Davie is caught in between these two worlds, with an unknown power he is capable of to bring life to inanimate objects, one he doesn't discover until meeting Stephen Rose. But things start getting strange, and Stephen comes between the friends as he entices Davie to join him, modeling clay into -- a person. Stephen seems to have the power of creating life from inanimate clay. While this horrifies Davie, it inspires Stephen to more and more daring feats. But there were gaps. I didn’t understand why Linda’s daughter suddenly decided that gardening would be her consuming passion. I didn’t understand what made TC’s mother so very neglectful. Questions like that bothered me. Melissa Harrison’s first novel weaves together a human story of four people whose lives are changed when their paths cross with the story of the seasons changing in a city centre park that those four people all love.

Clay (novel) - Wikipedia

Melissa Harrison's debut novel is a brilliant hybrid of fiction and nature writing centred on semi-wild spaces in a London suburb. The events of the book cover a year, broken into seasonal chapters that mix descriptions of the natural world with a cast of characters whose relationship with nature is at the heart of the story. hornbeams, service trees, acacias and Turkey oaks with bristly acorn cups like little sea anemones. It was alive with squirrels, jays and wood mice, while in spring thrushes let off football rattles from the treetops, and every few summers stag beetles emerged to rear and fence and mate …“ Stephen Rose is the creepiest of creepers, and I absolutely loved the way David Almond used his character to explore the dark side of early adolescence. I also really appreciated the way Almond used Stephen and Davie's clay creation as a kind of metaphor for the loss of innocence. Davie is coming into his own now - spending time with girls, spending less time with his best friend, Geordie, questioning his Catholic beliefs and trying to make them his own - and the clay man represents those things that are secret for an adolescent, the things they feel they cannot say out loud - not in the confessional, not in the street, not at the dinner table, not even alone in a bedroom.

Time passes, seasons change and relationships shift as Melissa Harrison tells her story in lovely, lyrical prose. Almond captures all the energy and awkwardness of youth. A first kiss, sneaking cigarettes, goofing around in class, growing away from a best friend—all these scenes are woven into the darker story of Stephan and Davie’s creation. Underneath it all is a childlike egoism that makes these boys feel responsible for the bad things that happen: If we wish it and it happens, then it must have happened because of us.