The Spindlers, by Lauren Oliver

“One night when Liza went to bed, Patrick was her chubby, stubby, candy-grubbing and pancake-loving younger brother, who irritated and amused her both, and the next morning, when she woke up, he was not. In fact, he was quite, quite different.

[…] Liza knows exactly what has happened: the spindlers have gotten to him and stolen his soul.

She knows, too, that she is the only one who can save him.

To rescue Patrick, Liza must go Below, armed with little more than her wits and a broom. There, she uncovers a vast world populated with talking rats, music-loving moles, greedy troglods, and overexcitable nids…as well as terrible dangers. But she will face her greatest challenge at the spindlers’ nests where she encounters the evil queen and must pass a series of deadly tests—or else her soul, too, will remain below forever.” (—from the inside flap)

I’m honestly not quite sure to make of this book. I didn’t fall utterly in love with it, but I didn’t loath it either. It was too…almost too dreamlike to have an opinion about. Actually, what it reminded me most of was Alice through the Looking Glass or The Wizard of Oz. Not as weird and insane as Alice in Wonderland, but certainly not “normal” either. The entire thing felt like a really good dream you might have—one that has its nightmare elements along with the fun ones. It’s a world with its own rules, its own system of reality, that both corresponds to and disagrees with that of the waking world. Here, rivers can whisper, hope grows on bushes, market stalls vend trinkets you lost under the bed or between the couch cushions and tree roots can be venomous snakes. Just when you think you’ve figured out how things work…a nid ball erupts into a madhouse or a beautiful woman turns into a hideous monster.

Liza is a fun character, but she felt very young to me. That is to say, she acts like your typical, middle-grade adventure heroine. She’s clever, brave, and determined. But when the author gives her thoughts or memories outside the current plot of the story, she feels far younger. She acts about twelve or thirteen, but sometimes she feels like eight or nine. More Junie B. Jones than Ella of Frell. (We’re never told exactly how old she is, or at least, I couldn’t find it.) For example, when she’s regretting all the things she never taught her brother before her chances were lost forever, we’re told:

“Liza was filled with regret. She had forgotten to tell the real Patrick, her baby brother, so many important things. For example, she had forgotten to tell him that when you reached third grade the cafeteria would try and give you celery and peanut butter with raisins on top and pass it off as dessert and how important it was not to be fooled, and instead stuff your pockets with gummy bears before school.”

Perhaps it’s all my projection here, and perhaps this passage suggests that Liza is only about nine (if she’s in the third grade), in which case her behavior isn’t odd at all. But it is inconsistent.

I’m still not entirely sure what I think of this book. I’m going to give it a three-quill rating, because it was very original and well written…but I can’t say this is one that I’ll read again or really even think I’d recommend to someone else. Unless, of course, that person thought that Alice through the Looking Glass and The Wizard of Oz are the two best books of all time, in which case The Spindlers is right up your alley.

~Brownie.

Curse of the Thirteenth Fey, by Jane Yolen

Time for another FTR! (Fairy Tale Retelling) This time around, it’s Curse of the Thirteenth Fey: the true tale of Sleeping Beauty, and really, it has very little to do with Sleeping Beauty. Rather, it’s about the evil fairy who cursed the princess to die on her sixteenth birthday. Only she’s not evil—she’s only thirteen.

(From the inside flap):

"Gorse is the thirteenth and youngest of the Shouting Fey, a family of faeries who are tied to the evil king’s land and [. . .] if they try to leave or disobey any member of the royal family, they will burst into a thousand stars.

When the accident-prone Gorse falls ill just as the family is Bid to bless the king’s new baby daughter, a story like—and unlike—Sleeping Beauty starts to unfold.

Sick as she is, thirteen-year-old Gorse wakes out of her fever and races to the castle [. . .] But that is when accident, mayhem, and magick combine to make Gorse’s story veer into the unthinkable, threatening the baby, the Shouters, the kingdom and all."

That’s a decent summary, but it only gives you an idea of the first six chapters or so. It tells you nothing about the selfish, exiled Prince Orybon and his loyal-but-not-loving bondsman Grey; it gives you only a vague idea of the importance of Shouts and Biddings and Oaths (you can tell how important they are by the capitalized letters); and it gives far more weight to the story of Sleeping Beauty than the actual novel does. Really, Sleeping Beauty is the side note to this story. It is the conflict that keeps Gorse going—she must get to the castle before the christening is over and give her gift, or else she and all the Shouting Fey will burst into a thousand stars—but it’s not the conflict that drives the story. That comes from Orybon and Grey’s captivity in a deep cave, where they are kept by magick until Orybon repents of an ancient evil…something his royal snootiness is not exactly willing to do. When Gorse comes along with the power of Shouts, which just might be able to free him, he forces her to take an Oath to help him. Driven by her Oath and her anxiety about her family, an uneasy partnership blooms between Gorse and the two exiled fey. Mix in a tribe of cave trolls, a malfunctioning Cloak of Invisibility, and a magicked Gate that refuses to fall, and The Curse of the Thirteenth Fey makes the transition from mere FTR to self-actualized story.

There were many things I loved about this book. Gorse herself is an amusing and likable main character, her motivations are clear and unforced, and her love for her family—as disagreeable and difficult as some of them are—is a sparkling point in the plot. She does tend to think too much. That’s my one beef with this book: when Gorse first falls into the cave-prison of Orybon and Grey, she spends approximately 29 pages out of a thirty-page section thinking. Now, thirty-ish pages of anything will get old. But Gorse’s life is being threatened by the sword-wielding Grey, and no fewer than ten pages pass between when Grey draws his sword to off-with-her-head and when we see him again, his hand back on his undrawn sword. We never even see him put it away. We spend ten pages in irritated suspension, being told about this wondrous place and all its glamorous glitter and beauty, while Gorse thinks about things we’ve already been told anyway. While the threat of death is hanging over her.

Now, I’ve had my little rant, and I have to admit that this is really the worst example in the book. There are a few other places where I thought, Honestly, Gorse, just stop thinking about it and do something. We’ve already seen these deliberations three times over. But those places are only a paragraph or two in length. I’m not sure what realm that massive section described above came from, nor how it slipped past editors, but it is—blessedly—the only such place in the book.

And other than that, this really was a delightful book with some fantastic worldbuilding. Shouting Fey and their histories and background are especially interesting, and there is a better portrayal of the Seelie/Unseelie courts than I’ve seen in most other places. Gorse’s father in particular—an elf who married a fey woman and whose love of books and learning drives several of the story’s development arcs—is a wonderful character that I quickly grew to love.

Speaking of characters I grew to love…(here there be possible spoilers) Grey is my favorite character in the entire story. This man who gave a foolish Oath in his youth (an Oath, I might add, that could be dissolved if the Oath-taker died before the Oath-giver) to the unworthy Orybon and followed his master into exile for several hundred years, is still willing to give his life for his spider-like leader purely out of honor. No love lingers between these two, if indeed there ever was any, but Grey is so blasted noble that he puts himself in harm’s way to protect this liege lord of his. He’s dryly sarcastic, a good storyteller, protects Gorse from Orybon’s short temper, and still manages to keep a sense of humor despite his dark and dreary circumstances. I do believe I fell in love. (There’s a bit of a twist with Grey’s story near the end of the book that I didn’t like too much, because it felt like a bit of meddling-where-meddling-wasn’t-needed, but on the whole I can forgive it because, after all, Gorse was only thirteen. Read the book and you’ll know what I’m talking about.)

So. Now that this review has gone on far too long, let me sum up: Curse of the Thirteenth Fey is a well-built story set in a world that has clearly defined rules (usually designated by the All Important Capital Letters) and nicely drawn characters playing out their parts in a compelling novel that draws from the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale while still remaining a completely original and wonderful romance. (And I mean romance in the literary sense, not the kissy-kissy sense. Romantic literature usually has a child/woman/noble savage main character, set in a world where nature is kindly, and decisions are made through emotion and intuition more than cold logic.)

The Brownie gives Curse of the Thirteenth Fey: the true tale of Sleeping Beauty a nice, comfortable four stars.

~Brownie

The Dark Unwinding, by Sharon Cameron

It’s a wet, windy, damp time of year. Time for some steampunk: the world of dampness, soot, smog and sparkling mysteries hidden in swaths of dusty velvet and lace.

Mm. That was downright poetic, now wasn’t it.

I’m always a bit hesitant to pick up steampunk, because though I love the genre, so much of it is either too dark or too weird for my tastes. But, though The Dark Unwinding is indeed weird and dark (mm, the title might give that away) it’s also fascinating and enthralling.

(From the inside flap):

"When a rumor that her uncle is squandering away the family fortune surfaces, Katharine Tulman is sent to his estate to have him committed to an asylum. But instead of a lunatic, Katharine discovers a genius inventor with his own set of childlike rules, who is employing a village of nine hundred people rescued from the workhouses of London.

Katharine becomes torn between protecting her own livelihood and preserving the peculiar community she grows to care for deeply. And things are made even more complicated by the developing feelings Katharine has for her uncle’s handsome apprentice.

As the mysteries of the estate begin to unravel, it is clear that not only is her uncle’s world at stake, but also the state of England as Katharine knows it."

Right, so—as a side note, I really have a bone to pick with whoever it is that writes those things. They say a lot that isn’t even true, and misrepresent a whole lot else. But I’ll get to that.

For the first paragraph or so, that’s a good summary. And it’s one of the things that immediately snagged me about the book. Poor young girl, orphaned and reduced in circumstance, sent to a mysterious and massive mansion in the country to deal with a reclusive and peculiar relative…Classic scenario, right out of The Secret Garden, and one that I fall for every time. Katharine’s matter-of-fact approach to even the strangest circumstances kept the weirdness of this baffling place from falling to mere spook story, turning even the creepiest things—like a broken automaton in the empty chapel, where poor Katharine, newly arrived and nervous, hears mysterious laughter—into a mystery to be uncovered. As the story develops and you learn more about this estate and its heritage, a setting and plot that could easily have been shelved in the horror section turns rather into a full-on mystery complete with hidden doors, secret tunnels, and a money-grubbing relative out to snatch up the estate.

The second paragraph of the summary—about the "developing feelings"? (Eye roll) Sure, there’s some romance. In fact, for a few pages, I was suspecting a good-old-fashioned-cliché of two suitors, one good and upstanding and the other dark and brooding…Here, this is the line that had me worried: "I looked from one young man to the other, one a thundercloud, the other sunlight. There was something in the air, a strain that made me uncomfortable." However, Katharine only shows true inclination toward one, so any awkward love triangles were successfully averted, thank goodness. And honestly, Katharine’s developing love life is vastly overshadowed by her desire to figure out the puzzle of her uncle’s estate and how to save it, and her growing love of the people there in general—the romance, while integral to the plot, is not the focus of the story.

No, the focus of the story has more to do with automatons, exploding fish, French spies, tea, secret rooms, roller skates, and a boy with a rabbit.

Actually, now that I think about it…There really are a lot of parallels between The Dark Unwinding and The Secret Garden. Not the story itself, of course—The Secret Garden is basically the tale of a girl who finds a garden she believes is magic and how she and her cousin grow to be healthy there. At the barest bones, anyway. And yet…The Dark Unwinding has that central plot of a girl sent to live in a strange house with even stranger relatives, and there are so many elements, like the boy with the hare (the first time we see Dicken, he’s surrounded by animals), the talkative maid (Martha in Garden, Mary in Unwinding), the strange uncle… Hm. I hadn’t thought about it until now. I wonder what Ms Cameron would say?

Sorry. I digress. I was just going to say that the last bit of the flap-summary, about "the state of England as Katharine knows it," is a load of bunk. She doesn’t even suspect any of that until about 240 pages in (out of a 320-ish page book). So ignore that. It motivates the plot, but really has nothing to do with the plot.

My one problem with the book turned out to be fairly important to the story, but it still annoyed me a bit. There were a few too many sequences where events go muddled. I dislike reading authors like Robin McKinley who tend to make things all dreamy and vague and the reader feels as though there’s no solid ground to stand on: you’re not sure what things look like, what’s going on, or how you’re supposed to feel about it. I usually end up just feeling sick. And The Dark Unwinding has several of these places, where Katharine’s grasp of reality seems to slip a bit and you’re left with a jumble of mismatching and half-formed images that make no logical sense…It was irritating. However, by the end of the book I had more-or-less forgiven them, because they are indeed a major part of the story.

Anyway, I loved this book. The descriptions of the uncle’s workshop—he makes "toys," fantastically complicated automatons so lifelike they might stand up and talk at any moment—were the reading equivalent of wandering through a giant’s candy shop; Katharine’s practical, sensible, and yet oh-so-naïve outlook on life was a refreshing character perspective; and the ending was as thick with poetic justice as a good current bun is with raisins. Oh, and one word: Lane. (To be said with a happy-and-slightly-annoyed sigh.)

I have yet to find a better steampunk-esque novel, and can give The Dark Unwinding a solid five quills—though it’s dangerously close to the edge of a four, because of a few unresolved bits in the ending. A sequel should be in the making if the universe has any sense of fair play.

~Brownie

The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom, by Christopher Healy

 

So, first off, this is another one of those "my sister told me I should read it" books. I think it worth mentioning that she’s younger than me, and has excellent taste in books. Well, she does now anyway. She went through a spate a few years ago where she was obsessed with those Black Stallion books (the cheesy serials, not the originals)…but I have since set her on the path to true literary enlightenment. And now she gives me good books to read.

Well played, if I do say so myself.

 

The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom was a wild and rollicking ride through a world where the stories didn’t actually end after "and they lived happily ever after." Because they didn’t. Not really.

Sleeping Beauty turned out to be a downright terror. Repunzel’s prince couldn’t stand the idea of someone else rescuing him. Cinderella was bored to death by her prince’s danger-less life. And while Snow White and her prince fell in love and got married…she needs a bit of alone time—a girl can only handle so many rounds of "Let’s Name All of the Animals We See," even with her true love.

 

Oh, and by the way: none of these guys are named Prince Charming. That’s a misconception propagated by those dratted, lazy bards who couldn’t be bothered to really tell us about Princes Duncan, Frederick, Liam and Gustav.

 

And that’s where our story begins. The four princes stumble upon an evil plot that could endanger their entire world if left unchecked. Somehow, against all odds and most common sense, this quartet of unlikely heroes—Frederick is afraid of everything, Liam has a bit of an ego problem, Gustav just wants to smash everything and keep smashing, and Duncan has a royal case of oddness wrapped up in a layer of kook—must band together and save the day, the kingdoms, and their tarnished reputations.

 

As you can probably tell by now…I loved this book. It was, as I said, a crazy and laughter-inflicting romp through the world of what-you-thought-you-knew-about-fairy-tales. That said—it did give me a mild case of literary whiplash. There’s no one character viewpoint, so everything is in the omniscient, third-person POV, and keeping track of who all is doing what when you’ve got a cast this big (four princes, four princesses plus a little sister, an evil witch, and a motley assortment of kings and queens, brigands, trolls, dwarves, and the odd giant) takes some doing. This is especially true in the first six chapters or so (approximately 124 pages, or about ¼ the entire book) where you get a dash-along account of the four princes and the circumstances that throw them in together.

 

Also, the action may be a bit hard to follow for some folks, not because it’s complicated, but because it’s like one of those door-and-corridor comedy routines. You know the one—where you’re staring down an aisle and everyone is chasing each other back and forth across the stage, in and out of doors, changing order and always just missing the other ones? Very funny, but tending toward confusion.
 

Oh, and the illustrations. I rarely get books that have interior illustrations, but this one does and they add so much to the story. Done by the brilliant Todd Harris, the whimsical and oft-amusing illustrations gave me a wonderful idea of what the characters looked like and were so completely in tone with the text that I at first assumed that the art and writing were done by the same person.

 

Overall, this was a fun and amusing book. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who loves poking fun at fairy tale tropes or a good romp through fairy tale lands. If The Lord of the Rings is a (chewy) steak dinner with fine wine, The Hero’s Guide to Saving the Kingdom is pizza and soda and a night out with friends.

 

The Brownie gives The Hero’s Guide to Saving the Kingdom a satisfied and happy five quills.

~Brownie.

The Amaranth Enchantment, by Julie Berry

Anyone who has read my blog for any amount of time could tell you this one simple fact: I like fairy tales. And fairy tale retellings (FTRs). And books that are reminiscent of fairy tales. You get the idea. In fact, in my stack of Christmas Break Reading books, I have no less than five such books (out of a total of ten novels…)

Including this one: The Amaranth Enchantment, by Julie Berry.

(From the inside flap)

Lucinda Chapdelaine was orphaned as a young child when her parents left for a royal ball and never returned. Ever since, she has toiled away in her uncle’s lonely jewelry shop under the cruel hand of her step-aunt. But now, all at once, Lucinda’s lot is about to change.

A mysterious woman, a handsome young gentleman, and an unusual gem all enter the shop on the very same day. The woman is none other than the dreaded Amaranth Witch, and she has a daring task to offer. If Lucinda succeeds, she will not only reclaim all that is rightfully hers, but she will discover a true friend, and perhaps a true love. Family secrets, magical surprises, and another royal ball will test her, but Lucinda is determined to finder her own happily ever after.

Though not a strict FTR, The Amaranth Enchantment has all the elements of a classic fairy tale: Cinderella. The orphaned young girl whose fall from grace has left her scrubbing floors for a less-than-likable relative, dancing with the prince in borrowed finery supplied by a "fairy" benefactress, even the infamous moment with a lost shoe on the palace stairs. However, that being said, this is not a retelling of Cinderella. It’s a completely original novel that just happens to have a lot of the same elements. (Like Mary Poppins and Doctor Who. They both have mysterious British strangers showing up out of the blue—sky or box—and taking young friends on magical adventures, but you can’t really say that it’s the same story. And…that may not be the best analogy. But you hopefully get what I mean.)

So, first: the pros.

Like I said, this is a very original story. There’s some excellent world-building with Beryl (the "Amaranth Witch") and her gem, and the character of Peter—a young and brilliant thief with whom Lucinda strikes up a highly-argumentative partnership—is one of the best I’ve read in a while. His snappy dialog and devil-may-care exterior cover a heart that is genuinely likable, if mischievous and ne’er-do-well. The Cinderella-esque elements are well-placed—you could almost say hidden, but only in the way that the support-beams on a building are "hidden". Some of them are downright tongue in cheek. Like the whole losing-a-shoe-on-the-stairs thing? Here’s that bit from the book:

"My flimsy slippers threatened to fall off with each step down the stairs. Once one did, and I considered leaving it there, but one footfall in my stocking feet on the cold granite changed my mind. I shoved my foot back into the shoe and hurried on

."

Honestly. That makes so much more sense to me.

And now, on to the cons:

I didn’t really care much about any of the characters. I cared about the story, and I wanted to see where it would go, but Lucinda was too…thin. I hesitated a long time before using that word, but it’s the one that fit. It’s the oddest thing: the book is in first person (as you can see by the excerpt above) but while you see Lucinda’s struggles and how she misses her parents and how she wants this or hates that or fears this other thing…you never really feel it yourself. I’ve never really seen that in a first person before. Usually, those are the easiest books to get into the character’s head. But this one…Part of it, I think, is that the tone is very formal throughout the whole book. It doesn’t really feel like someone’s thought process so much as it does a well-checked personal essay or something.

Also, the conflict. The entire book is based around (possible spoiler alert) Lucinda’s trying to return/regain Beryl’s stolen gem. That’s what gets her going when she’s kicked out by her cruel aunt. That’s what gets her to the royal ball—more than once. That’s what gets her working with Peter and running from the bad guy and everything else. But in the end…that whole conflict feels more like a prop than anything else. As if this was supposed to be a character-driven story where the plot showcases the character development (rather than a plot-driven story where the character development comes secondary to the story), but someone forgot to flesh out the character development. It felt…unfocused. And disappointing. Everything that the characters work for ends up getting turned on its head—and Lucinda doesn’t really end up accomplishing anything. Beryl is the one who saves the day. (Oh, and Lucinda’s "romance"? Uh…no. Just…no. Instantaneous crushes on a beautiful young man who has half the kingdom swooning do not constitute convincing love stories.)

Overall, the novel reminded me of a soap bubble. Lovely, beautiful, and shining. Something lustrous to admire and sigh over with enough sparkle to be enjoyable. Unfortunately, though, not one I plan to reread.

I would recommend it, especially to people like me who enjoy this genre. It’s not by any stretch of the imagination a bad book. It’s fun, fluffy, and one that I instantly held up to my sister after reading the last page, saying "Hey. You need to read this one." One can never have too many FTRs under one’s belt. But I’m afraid that I can only give it a three-quill review. Too many bounces where I was expecting a smooth ride, and not enough end-satisfaction to redeem the whole.

~Brownie

The Peculiar, by Stefan Bachmann

(From the front flap)

Don’t get yourself noticed and you won’t get yourself hanged.

In the faery slums of Bath, Bartholomew Kettle and his sister Hettie live by these words. Bartholomew and Hettie are changelings—Peculiars—and neither faeries nor humans want anything to do with them.

One day a mysterious lady in a plum-colored dress comes gliding down Old Crow Alley. Bartholomew watches her through his window…[and] forgets the rules and gets himself noticed.

First he’s noticed by the lady in plum herself, then by something darkly magical and mysterious, by Jack Box and the Raggedy Man, by the powerful Mr. Lickerish…and by Arthur Jelliby, a young man trying to slip through the world unnoticed, too, and who, against all odds, offers Bartholomew friendship and a way to belong.

 

Once again, this is a book recommended by my sister. (See the review for Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat…my sis has some good taste.) The Peculiar is the story of Bartholomew’s quest to save his sister, and Mr. Jelliby’s quest to take down an evil faery who has been murdering changeling children. (Changelings are, in this world, the offspring of one human parent and one faery parent.)

Overall, I enjoyed it, but there’s an intangibly odd feeling to the entire story that causes me to hesitate before recommending it wholeheartedly. Something just a little dark, just a little…disturbing. Haunting, almost.

Here, this paragraph from the prologue gives a pretty good idea of what I mean:

“…the faeries were simply a part of England, an inseparable part, like the heather on the bleak gray moors, like the gallows on the hilltops. The goblins and gnomes and wilder faeries were quick to pick up English ways. They lived in English cities, coughed English smoke, and were soon no worse off than the thousands of human poor that toiled at their side. But the high faeries—the pale, silent Sidhe with their fine waistcoats and sly looks—they did not give in easily. They could not forget that they had once been lords and ladies in great halls of their own. They could not forgive. The English may have won…but there were other ways to fight. A word could cause a riot, ink could spell a man’s death, and the Sidhe knew these weapons like the backs of their hands. Oh yes, they knew.”

See what I mean? Magic, yes; faeries, sure. But also smoke and gallows and toiling poor…It’s a world of magic, but it’s more dangerous than it is enchanting. Here, the air in the streets can strangle you and inviting a house faery in to help you with your housework can backfire drastically and your little sister can have twigs for hair and the bells in the church towers ring out every five minutes to stifle minor magics. It’s steampunk with magic, which makes for a dark and dirty and still-somehow-scintillating world and story, like a rough-cut gem crusted in mud.  If you’ve read The Spiderwick Chronicles or The Series of Unfortunate Events or Thirteen Treasures, it’s a bit of the same feel, but with a smoky, steampunk flavor of Victorian England, complete with Parliament in session, sumptuous gowns, and mechanical street sweepers cleaning up the city in the dim, foggy glow of pixies in the streetlights.

As I said, I enjoyed this and will probably pick up the sequel when it comes out, simply because The Peculiar ended on a pretty big cliffhanger and I’m curious to know where Bachmann plans to take things. I’d say that The Peculiar, peculiar as it is, deserves something like a four-quill rating, give or take a bit. Pick it up and read it, and drop me a line to tell me what you thought!

~Brownie

The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict, by Trenton Lee Stewart

Before even beginning, let me simply say: Trenton Lee Stewart never disappoints. Ever. Granted, I’ve only read four of his books, but he’s only written five. And every single one of them is a joy to experience.

I’ve mentioned before, in this blog, the book series The Mysterious Benedict Society. (A thus-far three book series comprised of The Mysterious Benedict Society, The Mysterious Benedict Society and The Perilous Journey, and The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma.) It’s a wonderfully warm and witty series about some exceptionally intelligent children who use their various talents to save the world alongside their mentor, the enigmatic Nicholas Benedict after whom their society is named. It’s a brilliant trio of very smart books written by a man who understand very well how children think and what they like. Heck—I’m an adult and I like them. :) Thus, when I spotted The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict at my local library, I snatched it up without even glancing at the cover art, which is normally a prerequisite. I didn’t need to look; I knew I’d like it. And I wasn’t disappointed.

(From the front flap)

“Before there was a Mysterious Benedict Society, there was simply a boy named Nicholas Benedict. Nine-year-old Nicholas Benedict has more problems than most children his age. Not only is he an orphan with an unfortunate nose, but also he has narcolepsy, a condition that gives him terrible nightmares and makes him fall asleep at the worst possible moments. Now he’s sent to a new orphanage, where he encounters vicious bullies, selfish adults, strange circumstances—and a mystery that could change his life forever. Luckily, he has one important thing in his favor: he’s a genius.

“On his quest to solve the mystery, Nicholas finds enemies around every corner, but also friends in unexpected places—and discovers along the way that the greatest puzzle of all is himself.”

Of course, I was predisposed to like this book, but even I was somewhat surprised at how quickly I came to love Nicholas and his story. From the time he arrives at Rothschild’s End (the name of the orphanage—more simply known as ‘Child’s End, and even more simply known as The Manor) Nicholas is an engaging character. His friendship with John, an older boy at the Manor, is especially well-played—then again, I am a sucker for the whole Robin Hood/Little John, Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Frodo/Sam friendship thing, and the relationship that develops between Nicholas and John is deliciously endearing. As they outwit the bullying Spiders—a trio of rather nasty boys—and seek a long-lost treasure, Nicholas and John had me enthralled. There’s a horrible twist near the end that—though I saw where it was probably going—nearly made me cry.

All in all, as you have probably already guessed, I loved The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict. I highly encourage anyone who liked books like The Westing Game or The Wright Three to pick up a copy of The Mysterious Benedict Society and all of Trenton Lee Stewart’s other books. Oh—and you don’t have to have read The Mysterious Benedict Society books to read The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict. It’s completely a stand-alone sort of prequel, and you could read it before the rest of the books, or after, or in the middle, or all by itself (though I don’t recommend that last approach—read them all!).

The Brownie gives The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict a very highly satisfied five quills—and begs Mr. Stewart to write more soon!