Young Llama Thoughts
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Adventurous
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Christian Friendly
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Easy Reading
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Humerous
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Youth Appropriate
Overall
Review
Sometimes the prettiest of covers are the most boring reads… Like this book. Gorgeous cover, fabulous plot line, interesting characters!!!!… And it took me like 9 days to get through. (Which is a lot when the book is only 380 pages long!!!)
This book is about Eva Joyce, a young girl with a strange family and hidden secrets. But Eva gets to see some of the secrets herself this summer when her mom takes her to the family manor in England! Now surrounded by the stories of old, she starts seeing magic come to life, portals open and a whole other world awaken through her families home. But Eva can’t get there, and her family won’t tell her what’s going on. Especially her grandmother, who was once a Queen in that magical world beyond the door…
Sounds great right?!? And it is… kind-of. It’s also a bit slow. And sometimes confusing. And mostly just a bit disappointing. The novel stays mostly in England with little to no glimpse of the other world. What you think is a Narnia story, is just the story before Narnia. Mostly just finding hidden rooms and uncovering family secrets. It’s not that the book is bad, it just doesn’t get too exciting. I did enjoy it, just not as much as other novels.
There isn’t a lot of violence, just mention of wars from the other lands and such. Some mention of monsters over there looking for revenage, but their mostly told in the story not actually part of the plot line. There are also some dark topics. Mentioned of loved ones dying mostly. Not too sad or anything, it’s still clean for kids 10 and up.
Overall, it’s ok. Not one of my all time favorites, but not a book I would get rid of either. Maybe I will read book 2, I don’t know. It gets a 3.7 Llama rating, and if you feel like reading the book it is clean and Christian-friendly. -The Young Llama Reader.
Pros
- Christian-friendly!
- Great for kids 10 and up!
- A novel filled with adventure and magic!
Cons
- Very slow.
- Can be confusing…
When fourteen-year-old American Eva Joyce unexpectedly finds herself spending the summer at the mysterious manor house of the English grandmother she’s never met, she soon discovers that her family, the manor staff, and even the house itself are hiding secrets.
With odd things happening in the gardens at night, Eva embarks on a search for answers. Astonishingly, she learns that the Hall’s staff believe portals to other worlds exist—though hidden and steadily disappearing—and that Eva’s grandmother was once a queen in one of those worlds.
But her grandmother’s heart is closed to the beauty and pain of the past. Now it’s up to Eva to discover what really happened—and to decide if it’s possible that her favorite childhood fairy tales are true. As she starts unraveling the dangerous secrets around the grandmother who is more than she appears, Eva begins to wonder if she, too, is more than she understood herself to be.
