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knallen's review against another edition
4.0
Great audio book. It kept me interested and I liked the narrator. It's long and I had to pause listening to it for other things, but it pained me to do so. Over all, really nice mystery/treasure hunt sort of book with some historical background.
spectacular_k's review against another edition
3.0
Kind of like The Da Vinci Code meets The Historian, but with the answers to the puzzles coming way too easy. I really, really like the cover.
goodmd14's review against another edition
5.0
Loved this book!!! I listened to the audio that kept me up late at night. If you are a fan of Dan Brown this book is a must. What I enjoyed most about the book was how unpredictable the story was.
selinamarcille's review against another edition
4.0
I really liked this book! There were several layers to the puzzle, and I liked the means the characters had to go to in order to solve them!
The end left me satisfied, but it also left it open for a sequel, which is exciting.
I am pleased that my suspicions were true, but sometimes things seemed a little bit obvious about who to trust or who not to trust.
The beginning of the book moved a little slow. We know from the book jacket that Chris dies, but it takes 100 pages for it to happen! It was great because we got to really know the character of Chris so his death was that much harder, but the beginning was relatively slow.
All in all, a fun read! 4.5/5
The end left me satisfied, but it also left it open for a sequel, which is exciting.
I am pleased that my suspicions were true, but sometimes things seemed a little bit obvious about who to trust or who not to trust.
The beginning of the book moved a little slow. We know from the book jacket that Chris dies, but it takes 100 pages for it to happen! It was great because we got to really know the character of Chris so his death was that much harder, but the beginning was relatively slow.
All in all, a fun read! 4.5/5
difficultwomanreads's review against another edition
2.0
I won't go into this review. It's not that it wasn't good or wasn't well-done. It just wasn't for me.
snaugle's review against another edition
3.0
Huh. I have no idea what to think about this one. I thought the writing was beautiful, but it was so dense and it didn't hold my interest as much as I hoped it would.
lrn22's review against another edition
4.0
I read this book in a couple of days, once I started I was hooked. It was fun and well written and if it was a little less predictable, I would have given it 5 stars.
nerfherder86's review against another edition
4.0
A suspenseful story that winds its way through the streets of Prague, in both present day and the 1600's. I loved the dramatic opening: Nora is in shock over the bloody murder of her best friend Chris; the only witness, Chris' girlfriend (and Nora's other best friend) Adriane is catatonic with grief, unable to tell anyone what happened; and Nora's sweet boyfriend Max is missing, accused of committing the murder! Wow! But then we jump back a few months in time, and the book just slows down a lot. We get to know these characters from when they first met--Chris, Nora knew in childhood, before her older brother died in a car accident, so he knew her "before." But she meets Max in a special research class where the three of them are assisting a professor by translating 16th century letters from Latin. Nora gets caught up in the story of the subject of her letters, a young woman in Prague whose father is some kind of scientist/alchemist. Nora discovers clues, buried in those old manuscripts, often encoded in obscure Latin, to the possible existence of a mysterious machine that could lead to all sorts of supernatural knowledge, even of the divine. Nora gets entangled in the search for this machine as well as trying to prove Max's innocence; the two are intertwined, and Nora's and her friends' lives quickly are endangered by various thugs and secret society members who either want the machine for themselves, or want to stop anyone else from recreating it. I think I would have liked this book better had I not listened to it in audio, because I had to listen in many short bursts of time, so it became choppy for me and hard to follow the many flashbacks and forth in time; also the various Latin phrases were a little hard to understand in audio only, I think I would have liked better getting to read them myself. But I thought it was very well written. It is sort of a "Da Vinci Code for teens"; I would recommend it to readers who like mysteries and decoding ciphers, as well as historical novels and suspenseful action thrillers.
shelfquest's review against another edition
3.0
In The Book of Blood and Shadow, we follow Nora (hehe), a smart senior/Latin nerd at a prep school, and her three best friends. They land spots in a special study class to try to interpret a book that no one has been able to in the 400-some years since it was written. It turns out that an organization is keeping and eye on everyone who shows interest in the book, and once they start to make progress things start to heat up.
This is a really long book, and for most of it I thought that it was a really long book for such an okay story. It was an interesting read and the ending really picked up, but I feel like a lot could have been cut. There are several twists and surprises that keep the book moving and really engage the reader.
This is a really long book, and for most of it I thought that it was a really long book for such an okay story. It was an interesting read and the ending really picked up, but I feel like a lot could have been cut. There are several twists and surprises that keep the book moving and really engage the reader.