Category: Books for Children

This book reads like a blockbuster movie — and it’s not exactly a surprise, considering Chris Columbus [the director of the Harry Potter movies] is one of the authors!  (You may also recognize the name Ned Vizzini because of his hilarious book-turned-movie It’s Kind of a Funny Story.)  The short chapters and high action make this a great selection for reading aloud and/or for reluctant readers.  My son and I absolutely LOVED House of Secrets and thought the only “bad” thing about it is that we don’t know how it ends, since it’s the first of a trilogy and the other two books don’t even have publication dates yet!

Brendan, Eleanor, and Cordelia Walker, like many siblings, don’t exactly get along.  Unlike most kids, though, they get magicked away by an evil witch and have to learn to work together if they ever want to return home and see their parents again.  How did this all happen?  It began when their father lost his job as a surgeon after a mysterious incident that lead to a major lawsuit against the hospital he worked for.  Dr. Walker was having a difficult time finding a new job, which left him unable to afford the house they owned, and the Walkers stumbled upon a too-good-to-be-true Victorian home just outside of San Francisco.  The former owner was famous author Denver Kristoff, and the evil witch was actually his daughter, so the people and places Brendan, Eleanor, and Cordelia encounter are actually born of Kristoff’s imagination.  A fantastic story in both senses of the word.

I think this story is a great creative twist on the whole Percy Jackson and the Olympians series and an awesome way to get kids to compare and contrast the Greek and Roman gods.  People who haven’t read the other series, which began with The Lightning Thief, can probably even just start with this spin-off series because Riordan did a great job including snippets of back-story about important people and events to catch people up (or to refresh the memories of people who did read them).

In this story, Jason wakes up on a school bus with no memory of his past or knowledge of the people he’s with.  The girl who’s holding his hand?  She says she’s his girlfriend, but he doesn’t remember anything about her.  He is also purportedly best friends with a guy named Leo but doesn’t remember him either.  Jason has no idea where they are or where they are going.  All he knows is that his name is Jason, he is apparently a student at Wilderness School (a school for juvenile delinquents), and something is not quite right about the teacher who is supervising their field trip.  As readers quickly surmise, Jason is a half-blood like Percy Jackson.  But, unlike Percy Jackson, Jason has a natural tendency to refer to the gods by their Roman names…

August “Auggie” Pullman was homeschooled for all of elementary school.  And, although it was technically because he was born with major facial deformities, it wasn’t because his parents worried about his being teased.  It was actually because his many doctors appointments and surgeries would have caused him to be absent so often that it wasn’t worth enrolling him.  Even though his mother wasn’t a certified teacher, she did so well with homeschooling that he was not only at grade level but excelled in most subjects.  When it came time for Auggie to start middle school [in 5th grade], his mother felt that he would benefit from attending school with his peers and convinced Auggie [and his dad] that he should give it a shot.  Knowing how cruel 10- and 11-year-old kids can be, I cringed to think what could happen… and was sad to listen as it sometimes played out as expected.  Luckily, this story was about much more than the negativity Auggie dealt with; it was about his zest for life and how contagious it could be to those around him!

Side note: I sometimes get frustrated and/or confused when a story is told by more than two narrators, so I can understand if that aspect of this story has you worried.  Let me reassure you that Palacio’s writing [and the multiple audiobook narrators!] gave each of the characters a unique enough voice that it worked.  In fact, I think it was very helpful to be able to experience this story from multiple perspectives — including Auggie, his teen sister, her boyfriend, and one of his friends from school.  While there were certainly points in the story where I found things to be depressing, there was plenty of hope and joy to balance it out.