Chasing Vermeer

i remember this as being one of the best and most fun stories i read in my whole childhood (which was, true to my current existence, full of books), but i just gave its reviews a cursory glance, ready to see the hordes agreeing with that take, and saw a whole lot of one and two star reviews. ... is th......more

Charming mystery featuring a few of my young self’s (and old self) favorite topics— art and puzzles. Balliett has brilliantly brought together quirky characters, shared secrets, and middle school mayhem in a pattern-palooza of coincidences and queries!! My grade school self would have spent her allow......more

I loved parts of this book and disliked other parts, so there you are; the epilogue ending is particularly bad (in that "I don't know how to work all this into the plot, so here, this is what happened" kind of way). The "there's no such thing as coincidence" stuff would have been way overdone in any......more

Another YA purchase from Green Apple books, and to be honest, a disappointment. This is a new-ish book, published in 2004, and while I had never read it before, I had high hopes. I had read reviews that said it was clever, it has expert illustrations by Brett Helquist (Lemony Snicket’s illustrator),......more

This book was a lot of fun to read. It reminded me a little of a Da Vinci code for younger minds, only in some ways this book was a lot trickier. Throughout, there is a pentomino code, and another hidden code which I never tried to decipher, although I saw the clues. Codes aren't my thing. But I was......more