Teen Cafe’

The last few Saturdays, I have been doing volunteer work at a local animal shelter. The things I saw really gave me mixed feelings about many things. I felt bad for many of the animals, but I also knew that they were with the shelter owner. I think that, it felt very good to help the animals, and I wish that I could just take them all home with me.

Summer is the worst time for shelters, with many full, or close to it. Any help would be greatly appreciated, so make sure to ask if you can volunteer at a shelter nearby. Something else I should mention is that volunteer work can help in getting a first job. Having a reference that you helped and were motivated, even without pay, really looks good on a resume.

With the amount of animals being dumped or given up, the shelters could really use your help. Taking care of all the animals without volunteers, can literally take all day. Please help your local shelters; your help will be appreciated.

Visit Petfinder.org to find local shelters in your area.

I recently finished reading the For Love of Evil, the sixth book in the series I have been reading, called The Incarnations of Immortality. This book is about Satan, the Incarnation of Evil, and it really does a good job in recreating scenes from the previous books in his point of view. Satan reign as an Incarnation is much longer than the other Incarnations, so the book starts many years in the past.

In the previous five novels, Satan has been a serious pain to all the other incarnations, but this book explains why. The man who is Satan really is not evil, and ended up falling into the position. Parry, the man who becomes Satan, was originally a monk, fighting evil. This alerts the Current Incarnation of Evil, who then corrupts Parry. Parry than uses his magic to kill him, and than becomes the new Satan.

Parry realizes that Hell is not in a good condition, so he organizes it, and tries to fix things up. Once Parry realizes that Satan and God really have a common goal, to punish the bad and reward the good, he goes to see God and try to stop the conflict between the two of them. Parry soon realizes that God is not paying attention, and tries to find a way to rework things. The Archangel Gabriel challenges Satan to try to corrupt a specific person, Niobe Kaftan, who will not be born for a few hundred years. This is how the series is tied together, and the story begins to overlap with the timeline of the other five. I will not spoil the ending, but it was a good one, and it makes me even more excited to read the next one.

I recently finished the fifth book, Being a Green Mother, in the seven book series called Incarnations of Immortality, by Piers Anthony. This book is about Nature, and the character who becomes it. The character who ends up becoming Mother Nature is Orb, the daughter of Niobe from With a Tangled Skein, and mother of Orlene from Bearing an Hourglass. The meat of Being a Green Mother is Orb’s life before she becomes an Incarnation, making a less exciting story than the others. There are some suspenseful parts however, such as the long wait for Satan to make an appearance. Orb is also in constant company with other Incarnations, before she even becomes Nature, which helps keep the story going through some of the dry parts.

While most of the story is less exciting than the others, Being a Green Mother has a great ending. It takes a complete twist and I ended up quite surprised. The story seemed very predictable, and I thought I knew the ending, until Piers Anthony flipped the story right on its head. I don’t want to spoil it, but just be ready for a shock. The next story in the series is about the incarnation of evil (Satan), which I personally think will be quite an interesting story.