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Wednesdays In The Tower (2013)

by Jessica Day George(Favorite Author)

4 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1599906457 (ISBN13: 9781599906454)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Bloomsbury Children's

series

Castle Glower

review 1: Celie is back and has almost completed her atlas of the ever-changing Castle Glower. However, the Castle seems to be in trouble. Rooms are appearing that are not needed, and not disappearing again. Entire stables have come to stay, along with a weapon room full of exotic-looking armaments that no-one has ever seen before.Then Celie finds an egg at the top of a new tower, which hatches into a griffin. Oh dear. How long is she going to be able to keep this under wraps? This was a slower book than the first, but still inventive and enjoyable. I liked that we get more of the backstory of Castle Glower in this one, so that the magic and changes start to make sense in a broader context. Hey, what do you know? My library shows #3 as "In processing." Yes!
review 2: "Tu... moreesdays in the Castle" is an awesome book. I convinced my mom to read it. (She liked it, too!) I bought my very own kindle copy, and I'm usually a library girl. It had a great voice, fun setting, likable characters, and a pretty rockin' plot ("oh no some evil dude is trying to steal the kingdom and our parents are gone! Let's thwart him with our magic castle!"). "Wednesdays in the Tower" is a disappointing sequel. We have many of the same characters, but no character growth--Lila (who, despite her vanity, managed to be fairly awesome in the original) is reduced to a clothes-obsessed ninny; Older Brother 1 usually cloisters himself in his room and/or the magical armory doing magical stuff; Older Brother 2 rarely makes an appearance; and effeminate foreign prince with little dogs gives them a French lesson. (Yay?) The biggest disappointment, though, is the lack of substantial plot. The plot is twofold:1. Oh how silly! Pets--especially griffins--make big ol' messes! Let's make sure mom and dad don't find out we hatched a griffin! Gosh darnit--did it just eat another of Lila's dancing slippers? Quick--hide it!2. Castle Glower is getting bigger, fast, and there's a mysterious old wizard hanging about who seems vaguely sinister and doesn't want Celie to learn about griffins, because... sinister reason, apparently. But all this could have been forgivable--it's still a fun read, despite its lack of plot or character growth or... well, purpose, really--if only it had a resolution. We get a lot of backstory about 1) griffins are real! They really used to exist! How cool is that? (I guess I kind of figured they were real when, y'know, we find out ON PAGE ONE that Celie hatches a griffin); 2) Castle Glower had weird medieval-looking people living in it at one point and 3) Castle Glower is maybe from another land/dimension/planet. 4) Also, castle name etymology. (Just what every seven-year-old looks for in a fantasy adventure novel!) This is not a plot! This is backstory! And we finish with a cliffhanger? THERE'S NO CLIFF TO HANG FROM! All we know is that Castle Glower is cranky and our protagonists have been whisked to another dimension! We don't have an antagonist (besides vaguely-sinister medieval alien Castle Glower wizard)(who, incidentally, is trapped back in the real world) or a goal (besides getting back to the real world) and we don't have a resolution for either of those problems. There *might* be a plague, but we don't know what it does or why or to whom. It's not just that I'm grumpy about not getting answers to questions raised by this novel; I'm grumpy that there aren't any good questions in the first place. Gosh darnit, Jessica Day George, I love your books--Sun&Moon, the Dragon trilogy, the Princess trilogy? They're fantastic! No matter how hard I tried, though, I couldn't love this one! I'm going to chalk it up to the fact that the second story in a trilogy is usually kind of lackluster (see: Indiana Jones and the Whiny Cabaret Singer; Star Wars: Attack of the Wooden Acting and Unintentionally-Hilarious Dialogue; Harry Potter and the Threats Against Small Children Painted On the Wall in Chicken Blood...Wait, Is This Really a Kids' Book?; Ocean's Twelve).I will read the third book, but I'ma be pretty crankypantsed if it doesn't live up to the first. less

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