Twenty Years After, Alexandre Dumas

 In a room of the Palais-Cardinal which we already know, near a table with silver gilt corners, loaded with papers and books, a man was sitting, his head resting in his hands.

This is the sequel to The Three Musketeers, which I was really looking forward to reading. And I was not disappointed. Dumas writes in much the same style, though the characters are older. Time has separated d'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, but they meet up once again and try to reform their old friendship. Much intrigue, as usual, is going on in France and England, and the evil Milady's son has returned to seek vengeance for his mother. Also, Cromwell is threatening King Charles I. The musketeers are one the side of the king, which was kind of interesting, because I'm not sure who was in the right, whether Cromwell was a hero or a villain. That point is extremely debatable. 

My favorite part of the book was definitely the part with Milady's son. It was the most exciting and interesting part, mostly because I remembered it from The Three Musketeers, and it was more about d'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, than about the king and queen of France, who, frankly, I didn't care that much about. Still, Twenty Years After was a great sequel, and I'm glad that I read it.

Read Twenty Years After:

• if you liked The Three Musketeers and want to read the sequel
• if you like tales of adventure

788 pages.

Very Good! I would recommend this book!

Dragon Slippers, Jessica Day George

It was my aunt who decided to give me to the dragon. Not that she was evil, or didn't care for me. It's just that we were very poor, and she was, as we said in those parts, dumber than two turnips in a rain barrel.


This was another great book by Jessica Day George. Creel's aunt tries to sacrifice her to a local dragon in order to get a rich nobleman to save and marry her, but Creel ends up getting away from the dragon herself and taking a strange pair of blue slippers. She leaves her small town and walks for days to go to the king's city to try and do embroidery. Along the way, she meets another dragon, Shardas. But the country is on the verge of war, and as Creel discovers, her slippers have the power to save the kingdom- or destroy it.

This one reads like a fairy tale too, though it isn't based on anything, I don't think. There are some unrealistic parts in it, like Creel befriending Prince Luka. That didn't make any sense (commoners don't mix with princes generally.) But the book had a good (though somewhat silly) plot, and was somewhat suspenseful.

Read Dragon Slippers:

• if you like fantasy
• if you like books about dragons
• if you like light books

321 pages.

Very Good! I would recommend this book!

The Black Book of Secrets, F.E. Higgins

When I opened my eyes I knew that nothing in my miserable life prior to that moment could possibly be as bad as what was about to happen. 


And indeed, Ludlow Fitch, the narrator is correct. He just manages to escape from a horrible fate and flees to a remote village. He finds a job with a mysterious pawnbroker who trades people's dark secrets for cash. It's all he has ever dreamed of, with a safe place to live and food to eat. Ludlow's job is to transcribe the secrets into the leather-bound tome called The Black Book of Secrets. Joe Zabbidou, the pawnbroker, is kind to Ludlow, but refuses to disclose anything about his own past and what he's going to do with the secrets, and Ludlow doesn't know whether to trust him or not. Meanwhile, the evil controller of the entire town feels usurped by Joe, and plots his demise. The Black Book of Secrets had a sort of wry humor and black magic. It was a great fantasy, with a good plot. Joe was a great character, as was Ludlow and the villains. The names were good too. Very creative...


Read The Black Book of Secrets:

• if you like quirky, slightly-dark, but mostly fun fantasy
• if you like eccentric, shady characters in a book

273 pages.

Very Good! I would recommend this book!

Guest Review: Where Things Come Back, John Corey Whaley

*This review is by my friend Rachel.*
I was seventeen years old when I saw my first dead body.  It wasn't my cousin Oslo’s.  It was a woman who looked to have been around fifty or at least in her late forties.  She didn’t have any visible bullet holes or scratches, cuts, or bruises, so I assumed she had died of some disease or something; her body barely hidden by the thin white sheet as it awaited its placement in the lockers.  The second dead body I ever saw was my cousin Oslo’s.  I recognized his dirty brown shoes immediately as the woman wearing the bright white coat grasped the metallic handle and yanked hard to slide the body out from behind the silvery wall.

“That’s him,” I said to her.


I did this book for my Book Talk, and I really enjoyed it. It’s about Cullen Witter, whose brother Gabriel goes missing, and at the same time a man comes to their town, claiming to have seen the extinct Lazarus woodpecker in this town.  Basically, the book shows the combination of these two events on Cullen’s life.  The really interesting thing about this book, however, is that it also followed the seemingly unrelated subplot of Cabot Searcy, who becomes obsessed with an obscure book in the Bible when his college roommate commits suicide.  It doesn’t seem like much of a plot, but it is.  The author wove the two plots together really well, so you slowly saw how they were connected, and by the end it was glaringly obvious.  The ending did leave a lot of questions unanswered, but it did so in a satisfying way; it could have gone on longer, but I at least finished it satisfied.

Except for the occasional chapter, the book was narrated from Cullen’s perspective, and the author played with his mind really interestingly.  He would make whole chapters about a dream Cullen had, but you never knew it was a dream until zombies started eating each other.  These weren't really my favorite chapters to read: I prefer the more literal.  But it was really cool to see how the author could convey so much of what Cullen is feeling without (almost) ever saying it directly.  In general, all the characters seemed really real, and they acted like real humans would act, rather than how we would think real humans would act.  For example, if my brother went missing, I would expect myself to be upset constantly.  But in reality, shocking as it seems, there would be some times when I would forget that he was gone, or at least act normally. Cullen did this, and many other things that contributed to that sense of reality.

Overall, this was a really great read, if not necessarily the “best” book out there.

228 pages, 4.5 stars.

The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris, John Baxter

Every day, heading down rue de l'Odeon toward Cafe Danton on the corner of boulevard Saint-Germain or toward the market on rue Buci, I pass them. The walkers. 


The Most Beautiful Walk in the World is another great book about Paris. John Baxter, author of various other books about Paris, talks about not only his own experiences in various places in Paris, but also those of famous people before him who have stopped there. This book was similar to The Flaneur, actually mentioning it once, and of course touching on the subject of the flaneur, the walker. But it focused on the sixth arrondissement of Paris, the neighborhood where Baxter lives and where he likes to walk the most. This was actually pretty great, because when I went to Paris two summers ago, my family and I stayed in the sixth arrondissement, so I knew some of the places he was referring to. And also, the sixth arrondissement sounds the most interesting. It has the Luxembourg Gardens, a beautiful park, it's right across the Seine from the Louvre, and it has a market as well. The Most Beautiful Walk in the World also has a very elegant cover.


Read The Most Beautiful Walk in the World:

• if you like books about Paris
• if you like walking
• if you like history

285 pages.

Very Good! I would recommend this book!

The Aviary, Kathleen O'Dell

As a young child, Clara Dooley had felt that the Glendoveer mansion contained the whole world. George Glendoveer had been a famous magician and illusionist, and he and his wife, Cenelia, filled their home with curiosities from around the globe. Even the construction of the house owed its beauty to the arts and crafts of far-flung places: intricately carved woodwork with birds and flowers from Germany, Italian murals that made the ceilings into night skies scattered with stars, glowing Persian carpets int he shades of peacock feathers. 


"Twelve-year-old Clara Dooley has spent her whole life in the Glendoveer mansion, where her mother is a servant to the kind and elderly matron of the house. Clara has never known another home. In fact, she's confined to the grand estate due to a mysterious heart condition. But it's a comfortable life, and if it weren't for the creepy squawking birds in the aviary out back, a completely peaceful one too. But once old Mrs. Glendoveer passes away, Clara comes to learn many dark secrets about the family. The Glendoveers suffered a horrific tragedy: their children were kidnapped, then drowned. And their father George Glendoveer, a famous magician and illusionist, stood accused until his death. As Clara digs deeper and deeper into the terrifying events, the five birds in the aviary seem to be trying to tell her something. And Clara comes to wonder: what is their true identity? Clara sets out to solve a decades-old murder mystery—and in doing so, unlocks a secret in her own life, too. Kathleen O'Dell deftly weaves magic, secret identities, evil villians, unlikely heroes, and the wonder of friendship into a mystery adventure with all the charm of an old fashioned classic."


Though The Aviary starts out kind of slowly, it eventually picks up and becomes quite interesting and suspenseful. I loved the birds in the story, especially the honeycreeper, but also the cockatoo. They really helped Clara in her investigations. I love books set in creepy old houses with mysterious pasts! I was drawn into the mystery and really wanted to find out how it would all end. But Clara's mom seemed really kind of too overprotective; she never let Clara go anywhere. Even though she has a heart condition, she still needs to go outside and get to know other girls, and I found it unrealistic just how protective she was. I mean really. It was interesting though how *SPOILER ALERT* the birds were actually the missing children transformed.

Read The Aviary:

• if you like mysteries
• if you like birds (hint hint McKenzie)
• if you are looking for a suspenseful book
• if you like dark fantasy
• if you like books with ghosts

337 pages.

Very Good! I would recommend this book!

Howard's End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading From Home, Susan Hill

It began like this. I went to the shelves on the landing to look for a book I knew was there. It was not. But plenty of others were and among them I noticed at least a dozen I realized I had never read.


One day, Susan Hill, a British writer was searching for an elusive book, when she noticed that there were tons of books on her shelf that she had never read before. She decided to spend one year only reading books that she already owned; in other words, no new books. Howard's End is on the Landing not only chronicles what she did, but is mostly taken up with various books: the books she loves and rereads, the books she's been meaning to get around to, and the books that she just can't like. They are all quite interesting to read about, and her writing style was engaging too. Hill also met a lot of famous writers, including Roald Dahl! (So jealous...) And many others too. This was a good book, and I'm glad that I took the time to read it. Hill talked about a lot of writers that I had read before (like Trollope) and I got some good recommendations.

Read Howard's End is on the Landing:

• if you like books about reading and books
• if you are looking for a good book to read (this is not only a good book itself, but also provides lots of recommendations)
• if you liked The Yellow Lighted Bookshop

234 pages.

Very Good! I would recommend this book!