Wow, this was an awful book! When I finished this book I was extremely disappointed.
This book was crazy random. Like...Gardner states he's extremely lazy and never commits to anything in the beginning of this story, but all of a sudden he has this urge to run and work out? Ok, that would be fine if it leaded to anything but it doesn't. He does eventually try out for track because of his running but he doesn't even LIKE it. He's just training and working out for absolutely nothing even at the end of the book. His fathers reasons for mid-life crisis are stupid and extremely unrealistic. "..When I was a boy I always wanted to run away. God, I didn't want to tell you, but and I have to do that, Gardner! I could go south to mexico or something." And leave and abandon his family? Please. Give me a break.
Powell also drops little sex information here and there that have no point or purpose, and the little romance that is supposed to draw us in a bit, turns out to not go anywhere. Ever.
Skeepo doesn't even act like a real friend should, and for the life of me, I haven't figured out what in the worlds Gardner's sister's malfunction is. She seems anti-family all the way through, but the Powell never takes a moment to explain why.
I admit, that this book's wit does make you smirk every so often, but those times are few and far between. This books a train wreck. Please don't read it. You could use all that wasted time sleeping or something.

I found it difficult to believe that high school students would be interested in this story, which seems to focus more on Gardner Dickinson's father's mid-life crisis than on the teenager and his struggle to deal with the problems this causes for his family. Although there are some elements that usually draw teen readers in--such as the hint of romance, and Gardner's increasing interest in running--the story didn't suck me in or keep me interested. It was sort of a depressing look at parental unemployment and mid-life ennui, without any analysis of the effect that has on individual teens. I won't reveal the ending, but I will comment that it seemed unlikely that a high school student would make the choice Gardner did.

The words "Proven" and "Precise" made me assume that the data would have a high degree of accuracy. When the 5th waypoint I entered showed up 30 miles East of Bellingham instead of the Gulf Islands I suspected a problem. I thought I had found a typographic error that must have been part of the publishing process. I discovered from the publisher's web site that there is a long list of other errors that you want to be aware of and it didn't include the one I found.

I emailed the author, Kevin Monahan, and was told "The error was one degree which is 60 miles, it comes from misreading the edge of the charts as you move along the latitude line near a full degree mark." In the errata sheet there were many others with the one degree error.

If Kevin is right about the source, then these waypoints were never actually used, nor were then even entered into a charting package, or a plotting GPS. Both units would clearly have shown up errors this large.

Needless to say I am going to be very careful how I use the data. Fortunately I do have a charting GPS, which is how the first error showed up.

If you want to have a list of almost all the coffee shops in Seattle, get this book. But don't expect anything else. Nothing is written about the quality of the coffee at each coffee shop, and that makes this book useless to me. I don't need to know where all the coffee shops are, I only care about the good ones that take espresso making seriously.

This is a paper thin book that is supposed to cover 25 years of Seattle baseball. This practically means it devotes a whole (small) page to each year. There is very little detailed content and not many photos. For the price you pay, it certainly isn't worth it.

Seattle Mariners by Paul Joseph is a rip-off! I'm very disappointed in the fact that the information inclosed, in this book, is dated. I'd thought I'd be getting a current book of the Mariners 2001 season. I should have been suspect when there wasn't the opportunity to view the inside of the book and there were no reviews or ratings by buyers available.