October 2012

Book #1 of the series “The 39 Clues”.

Fast-paced, enjoyable.  The old and rich Grace Cahill dies and leaves an improbable will letting her relatives join a mystery clue-chase.  Her young favourites, Amy and Dan, join the chase and are competing against other relatives who are willing to set fires and detonate bombs to get ahead.  Nobody dies, but the violence is more than I would like.

There’s plenty of history, for example, about Benjamin Franklin, which as far as I know is accurate.  It makes sense and is needed in the narrative, in a way that will make kids remember it, I believe.

Rick Riordan wrote the “Percy Jackson” series, which my son enjoyed.  I like the fact that the books in this series will be written by different authors that I like; that will be enough to keep me reading through them.

I resisted reading this for a long time.  I said that it didn’t sound interesting, or relevant to me, or some such thing.  When I finally picked it up (from our local Little Free Library) and opened it, I recognized a sense of dread.  Turns out I’d been afraid to read it.

I needn’t have been.  It’s wrenching and awful, yes, but somehow funny and passionate at the same time.  Walls never asks for sympathy; she just tells it like it was.  It’s a fascinating portrayal of family life completely unlike what I experienced growing up.  She’s a wonderful storyteller, and I finished the book in a day or two.

A book like this shows me how everyone I meet has their own unimaginable story, and reminds me that we all have u“>nmet needs, some recent, some a lifetime old.