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thoughtfullyhaunted's review against another edition
4.0
My students loved this book. Brilliant and Engaging, lots of fun activities to pull from it! Also made me laugh a few times!
yakihammer's review against another edition
4.0
A different kind of story. Fun to read with the family.
amynbell's review against another edition
5.0
This book definitely should be made into a movie. What a pleasurable read. I enjoyed every minute of it and didn't want it to end. The author left it open for a sequel, so I hope he makes one.
A boy finds a wall of cupboards plastered up in his attic bedroom. The all seem to open up to other worlds, but they're too small to crawl through. Eventually, he's able to find a way to go to the other worlds some other way than through his dreams. Quite an adventure unfolds as he learns of his family's past and why the cupboards were plastered over in the first place.
A boy finds a wall of cupboards plastered up in his attic bedroom. The all seem to open up to other worlds, but they're too small to crawl through. Eventually, he's able to find a way to go to the other worlds some other way than through his dreams. Quite an adventure unfolds as he learns of his family's past and why the cupboards were plastered over in the first place.
trixie_reads's review against another edition
3.0
Creepy. I liked it, but it didn't really live up to its potential.
nannahnannah's review against another edition
1.0
First off: ages 9-12? The writing is way to complicated and the book is too gory for this age group . . .
I'm usually a sucker for beautiful, lyrical writing. But sometimes, I feel like authors try too hard to attain this. N.D. Wilson writes as though he's trying to make every sentence a masterpiece and, although I can understand why he'd attempt for it, it doesn't end well (at least in my opinion). His sentences are clunky and really take away from any immediacy in the story.
And for the story itself, I felt the idea BEHIND the story was more interesting than the book's execution of it. Henry York goes to Henry, Kansas to stay after his parents were kidnapped. In Henry, Henry finds 100 cupboards in his house that lead to different worlds.
However, the book took maybe 100 pages to get to any point of action (the opening of the cupboards). And after that, everything seemed suddenly rushed and without point. Henrietta (Henry's cousin) gets lost in a cupboard suddenly because she's curious and he has to find her. Suddenly he finds a random boy that follows him back for no reason. Suddenly a villain is introduced: a witch with no real backstory, no motives, and no personality traits other than PURE EVILNESS. She's one of the most cliched evil characters I've ever read about, complete with a cat to stroke and all.
Worse than this, is the characters. They don't really have personalities. Dialogue seems to bounce off of them with no real thought behind it. Henry, for example, was a character I could not identify with at all, and it's beyond me how any young adult could identify with him. The apathy he has for his parents' plight is almost inhuman. At one point he says himself how he wished he'd be more worried about them, but really doesn't care. When he finds out secrets about his parents or even himself, he brushes them off. There's no shock or anything!
"Oh, your parents weren't actually your parents."
Henry: "Oh, okay." And that's that. The matter ends.
I'm being really mean and sharp-tongued; I apologize, but this book just didn't do it for me. It's a series and I can find it in almost every book store, so I guess it's doing well. I guess it does have a good audience somewhere, which is good for N.D. Wilson . . .
I'm usually a sucker for beautiful, lyrical writing. But sometimes, I feel like authors try too hard to attain this. N.D. Wilson writes as though he's trying to make every sentence a masterpiece and, although I can understand why he'd attempt for it, it doesn't end well (at least in my opinion). His sentences are clunky and really take away from any immediacy in the story.
And for the story itself, I felt the idea BEHIND the story was more interesting than the book's execution of it. Henry York goes to Henry, Kansas to stay after his parents were kidnapped. In Henry, Henry finds 100 cupboards in his house that lead to different worlds.
However, the book took maybe 100 pages to get to any point of action (the opening of the cupboards). And after that, everything seemed suddenly rushed and without point. Henrietta (Henry's cousin) gets lost in a cupboard suddenly because she's curious and he has to find her. Suddenly he finds a random boy that follows him back for no reason. Suddenly a villain is introduced: a witch with no real backstory, no motives, and no personality traits other than PURE EVILNESS. She's one of the most cliched evil characters I've ever read about, complete with a cat to stroke and all.
Worse than this, is the characters. They don't really have personalities. Dialogue seems to bounce off of them with no real thought behind it. Henry, for example, was a character I could not identify with at all, and it's beyond me how any young adult could identify with him. The apathy he has for his parents' plight is almost inhuman. At one point he says himself how he wished he'd be more worried about them, but really doesn't care. When he finds out secrets about his parents or even himself, he brushes them off. There's no shock or anything!
"Oh, your parents weren't actually your parents."
Henry: "Oh, okay." And that's that. The matter ends.
I'm being really mean and sharp-tongued; I apologize, but this book just didn't do it for me. It's a series and I can find it in almost every book store, so I guess it's doing well. I guess it does have a good audience somewhere, which is good for N.D. Wilson . . .
jessalynn_librarian's review against another edition
4.0
100 Cupboards is like the Brambly Hedge book The Secret Staircase, only creepier and for older kids. The atmosphere is wonderful - there's a great sense that the author knows about everything behind each cupboard, even if it doesn't come into the story (and it looks like the first in a series, so he'd better) - this creates a sense that the world is a bigger, more wonderful and frightening place than you thought.
All of which fits perfectly into the character development of Henry. He's led a sheltered life, but he never realized it was sheltered until he starts to experience other things. He tells us about the time he was nine and realized that other nine-year-olds don't sit in carseats. And when he realized that other children don't have to wear helmets for PE, and that boys pee standing up. So when Henry's parents are kidnapped, and he goes to live with his aunt and uncle and cousins in small-town Kansas, and a mysterious wall of cupboards pushes through the plaster in his bedroom, he reacts practically. His mother just never told him about secret cupboards that lead to other worlds, he thinks.
I really liked this approach to the fantastic - Henry's life has been set up in such a way that, to him, the cupboards are really no more surprising than the other revelations. Henry's not the only good character - they're pretty much all fantastic, as is the setting - both the normal world of Henry, Kansas, and the worlds that Henry finds in the cupboards.
The plot starts off a little slow - plenty of build-up of setting and character, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but someone looking for a pull-you-in plot right off the bat might be disappointed. Things definitely heat up, and the second half of the book is something of a whirlwind. A bit too much is left unresolved at the end, while we wait for a sequel, making it feel more like the first installment in a serial novel than a stand-alone story.
All of which fits perfectly into the character development of Henry. He's led a sheltered life, but he never realized it was sheltered until he starts to experience other things. He tells us about the time he was nine and realized that other nine-year-olds don't sit in carseats. And when he realized that other children don't have to wear helmets for PE, and that boys pee standing up. So when Henry's parents are kidnapped, and he goes to live with his aunt and uncle and cousins in small-town Kansas, and a mysterious wall of cupboards pushes through the plaster in his bedroom, he reacts practically. His mother just never told him about secret cupboards that lead to other worlds, he thinks.
I really liked this approach to the fantastic - Henry's life has been set up in such a way that, to him, the cupboards are really no more surprising than the other revelations. Henry's not the only good character - they're pretty much all fantastic, as is the setting - both the normal world of Henry, Kansas, and the worlds that Henry finds in the cupboards.
The plot starts off a little slow - plenty of build-up of setting and character, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but someone looking for a pull-you-in plot right off the bat might be disappointed. Things definitely heat up, and the second half of the book is something of a whirlwind. A bit too much is left unresolved at the end, while we wait for a sequel, making it feel more like the first installment in a serial novel than a stand-alone story.