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3.73 AVERAGE
3.73 AVERAGE
I read this the first time when I was young and I just read it again over winter break and enjoyed it just as much so that is kind of amazing.
lighthearted
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Loveable characters:
Yes
This was a cute book with a realistic main character. The mystery was clever and based on historic details. I immediately passed it onto Elise to read!
This was left in our Little Free Library and I thought it looked like a great book for middle school kids. So I checked it out and blew through it in an evening. I've always been interested in the idea that maybe Shakespeare wasn't written by Shakespeare. This book takes that idea and weaves a fun personal mystery around it.
I very much enjoyed the main character, Hero - she is named after one of Shakespeare's characters in Much Ado About Nothing. She's about to enter 6th grade, a bit of a nerd and always being teased about her name. She's a little sullen, but not intolerably so - something I find with so many pre-teen and teen protagonists. There's a young male character who figures prominently, but not as (specifically) a love interest which is great - I think we need more books where girls & boys, women & men just interact and everyone isn't always falling in love or worrying about "OMG, does he LIKE me?!"
There is also an older woman who acts as a mentor to Hero - I really enjoyed her character as well. A good role model, has a lot of personality and is a genuine character in her own right, not just a foil for Hero and the main story.
Good stuff - if you have young readers, definitely check it out!
I very much enjoyed the main character, Hero - she is named after one of Shakespeare's characters in Much Ado About Nothing. She's about to enter 6th grade, a bit of a nerd and always being teased about her name. She's a little sullen, but not intolerably so - something I find with so many pre-teen and teen protagonists. There's a young male character who figures prominently, but not as (specifically) a love interest which is great - I think we need more books where girls & boys, women & men just interact and everyone isn't always falling in love or worrying about "OMG, does he LIKE me?!"
There is also an older woman who acts as a mentor to Hero - I really enjoyed her character as well. A good role model, has a lot of personality and is a genuine character in her own right, not just a foil for Hero and the main story.
Good stuff - if you have young readers, definitely check it out!
Interesting book with a mediocre ending. The theory was a solid one, not the conspiracy theory I thought it was.
Hero hates her Shakespearean-based name. She moves to a new town and starts sixth-grade. Resigned to constant teasing, she concentrates on a new found friendship with her elderly next-door neighbor. Mrs. Roth tells Hero about the missing "Murphy Diamond," a precious jewel that supposedly disappeared from the house where Hero now lives. Mrs. Roth has the necklace that once held the diamond, an heirloom that possibly once belonged to Anne Boleyn. She and Hero set out to find the diamond, with help from Danny, an eighth grader who befriends them both. The mystery itself is fun, but Broach adds a little Elizabethan history and theories about Shakespeare's writings.
A good realistic fiction with the mystery of history.