![\"House](\"https:\/\/staffpicks.eglibrary.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/House-of-Secrets.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This book reads like a blockbuster movie \u2014 and it\u2019s not exactly a surprise, considering Chris Columbus [the director of the Harry Potter<\/em> movies] is one of the authors!\u00a0 (You may also recognize the name Ned Vizzini because of his hilarious book-turned-movie It\u2019s Kind of a Funny Story<\/em>.)\u00a0 The short chapters and high action make this a great selection for reading aloud and\/or for reluctant readers.\u00a0 My son and I absolutely LOVED House of Secrets<\/em> and thought the only \u201cbad\u201d thing about it is that we don\u2019t know how it ends, since it\u2019s the first of a trilogy and the other two books don\u2019t even have publication dates yet!<\/p>\n Brendan, Eleanor, and Cordelia Walker, like many siblings, don\u2019t exactly get along.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 How did this all happen?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s imagination.\u00a0 A fantastic story in both senses of the word.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This book reads like a blockbuster movie \u2014 and it\u2019s not exactly a surprise, considering Chris Columbus [the director of the Harry Potter movies] is one of the authors!\u00a0 (You may also recognize the name Ned Vizzini because of his hilarious book-turned-movie It\u2019s Kind of a Funny Story.)\u00a0 The short chapters and high action make … Continue reading House of Secrets by Chris Columbus and Ned Vizzini<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,8,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-posts","category-books-for-children","category-fiction","category-reviewed-by-chrissie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffpicks.eglibrary.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffpicks.eglibrary.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffpicks.eglibrary.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffpicks.eglibrary.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffpicks.eglibrary.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/staffpicks.eglibrary.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2070\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffpicks.eglibrary.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffpicks.eglibrary.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffpicks.eglibrary.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}