ChinAlive

by Bob Jonas

Overview

Charlie Evers is a tenth grade student at an international school in Shanghai, China. He has one last research assignment before summer break -- the damming of the Yangtze River and the Three Gorges Dam. He will never finish this assignment. Ignoring all the warnings about Chinese Internet censors, he navigates to sites that shred the government about the building of the dam. He uses words like democracy and corruption in his searches. He thinks that just because he's a teenage American student he won't get into trouble.

The Ministry of Public Security could care less who he is -- Charlie is now on their radar. His dad had warned him. Charlie knew the meaning of phrases like threatening the social order, endangering state security, spreading rumors, and subverting state authority.

The safe life he has always taken for granted is suddenly ripped away when his dad disappears. Three weeks later Charlie is kidnapped. Imprisoned in a corroded cabin well below the waterline, a seven-day trip up the Yangtze takes him deep into China's turbulent past, and into a mind numbing conspiracy called ChinAlive -- a Democracy movement he could never have imagined, with a mission the world thought long dead -- the overthrow of the Chinese government.

During the time of his captivity Charlie Evers is transformed from high school student to conspirator, terrorist, and refugee. In less than three months he, his family, and ChinAlive will know if the risks, the planning, and all their sacrifices will be enough to change the fate of the Chinese people. The question in the back of all their minds -- will any of them still be alive to see their hopes and dreams come true.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940016431949
Publisher:	Vagabond Librarian Publishing
Publication date:	04/17/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	823 KB

About the Author

Bob Jonas has been a school librarian for seventeen years — four in Beaverton, Oregon and seven in China — Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong. In South America he worked for three years in Santiago, Chile, and then three years in the in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Currently, Bob is working as a school librarian in Erlangen, Germany.
His travel and writing obsessions began after reading Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki — he was ten. His storytelling obsession began with his dad -- the greatest tale teller, BS artiste, mesmerizer, and raconteur the younger Jonas would ever lean on for inspiration. Even at the old age home, the elder Jonas would ask his rapt audiences -- do you want them clean, dirty, or educational?

The Merchant Marine wouldn’t have Bob at the age of eighteen, military service wasn’t an option, he was too young to drive a truck so after much pleading from his mom and dad, he attended an institution of higher learning. At least it offered him hours and hours to dream and a degree that would someday be of significant use — as was the dreaming. Always the dreaming.

His first fifteen years of adulthood found him living the travel adventure in a semi-truck where he logged over a million miles in twelve western states. Unfortunately, the road stint lasted about twelve years too long. After too many speeding tickets, too many run-ins with angry weigh masters, bad, bad, and double bad winter weather, not to mention a real bad back, he knew it was time to find his old college degree and get himself somewhere else. How he went from road weary trucker to school librarian is another story -- he's got a million of them -- but his mom and dad were much happier, until he decided to seek employment overseas.
ChinAlive is one of three novels he has written for young adults in the past decade. Four books for the illustrated market are still off the grid, in deep cover as well. As a storyteller, writer, and librarian he has motivated, inspired, stimulated, stirred, cajoled, provoked, and done what was necessary to instill a love of reading in kids on fours continents. Visit his website www.bob-jonas.com