3.5 stars
My feelings about this book are pretty controversial. It was a great plot and all but the writing wasn't exactly good. The strongest point about this book is that, even though it has 2 authors, there was no difference at all in the writing style, as if it was written by only one person. However, I did not find it a book suitable for children or middle grade kids at all. The book had so many cruel points.
I know, I know, kids should know about these stuff but heck, I don't even know about them :P
On the whole, it was a bit entertaining although it felt quite random and the description wasn't clear. I had a trouble envisioning a lot of things but that might have been my fault, English not being my first language and all.

I don't regret reading this but I don't exactly recommend.

House of Secrets by Chris Columbus was absolutely phenomenal. It takes a lot for a fantasy series to really hook me in. I'm not a really big fantasy person, but this book was amazing and right up there with some of my favorite series. I hope to read the sequel very soon.

House of Secrets is a story about a group of three siblings who move into a new house with their parents. Little do they know, but this is a house of secrets. A wind witch visits them and destroys their house,

Spoiler

kills their parents,

and transports them to a magical world. The witch tells them to locate the Book of Doom and Desire for her. There is a lot more to the story, but it is hard to explain it without spoilers. But along the way they meet many fantastic characters including the pilot Will, the pirates, skeletons, and a host of other fantastic characters.

This book was for my audio book club, so I listened to it instead of actually read it. I feel like it was a really good book for my book club because there is so much that can be discussed from it.

This book was full of adventure. There was never a slow moment at all.

The beginning is great because if you start reading without knowing what you are getting yourself into, you will be in for many surprises.

The only complaint I have with this book is the ending. The ending is really abrupt and ends with Cordelia, Brendan, and Elinor inside Queen Daphne's castle staring at Fat Jagger. So, really it leaves you with hardly any suspense and it feels like the book is just cut off.

However, overall this book was lovely for both children and adults alike. If you enjoyed The Beyonders or Percy Jackson series, this book series is for you.

This was a DNF for me. I got through 2 chapters and just couldn't do it. When one of the characters was literally "Fat Jagger", a giant Mick Jagger look-alike, I was done.

Sorry PYRCA folks, just not for me.

Final rating 3.5/5


Being blurbed by JK Rowling really sets high expectations for this book. While the setup and storyline were interesting, I wasn't blown away.

I love the idea of the magic in this book. The world is built by mister Kristoff, the former owner of the house and I loved that idea and the interpretation of it. It was creative and very imaginative, almost cinematic at certain parts.

While I liked the three main characters, I felt like I was reading about siblings that reminded me an awful lot of Harry, Ron and Hermione. There was a brave kid, a smart kid and a third one who kept them together.. I wish there was a little more originality there. It wasn't necessarily that they looked like the Harry Potter characters, it was more the feel that I got from them. I mean, they are siblings instead of friends the same age, but I couldn't help but feeling this way.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I really liked the rollercoaster ride aspect of it and I loved the fictional world in the book. Having said that, I think the book dragged on too long. At 560 pages, it's a long book, especially if you consider it's the first book in a middlegrade series. I found it dragging in certain parts and I really wish it hadn't. But to compensate that, the ending felt rushed, predictable and an easy way out. It was terribly obvious and I would have thought that after 500+ pages of adventure and mystery and the characters being thrown into situation after situation, the ending could have been more surprising.

I quite enjoyed myself reading House of Secrets. It sure is exciting and interesting -- I just wish it was a little shorter and the main characters were a little more original. The other characters, however, were excellent. I love how they were portrayed and I really enjoyed reading more about them.

I'm not sure how this compares to Vizzini's other work, as I have not read it, but if you're into exciting and adventurous middlegrades, you might want to give House of Secrets a shot.


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I was really looking forward to this book. Once I read the description I thought this book was going to be amazing. However, I was extremely wrong. What I was expecting was a book full of action and adventure. What I got was a book that had adventure but it was slow and seemed to drag on a lot.

If this book had been cut down some and a lot of the slow parts were taken out, maybe the book would have been more interesting and exciting. The book definitely had potential, it was the way it was done that really took away from the story. It seemed at times that things were being told to you and not shown and that really took away a lot of my enjoyment during the story.

I wasn't really that invested in the characters either. The only character I really liked was Will Draper, and he wasn't even one of the three siblings who started out the adventure. However, half way through the story I began to not even like Will. He made a lot of sexist remarks about men's minds being superior to women's and things like that and I was not a fan of that at all.

I will not be finishing this series. I have no emotional investment in the characters and I have no urge to really find out what happens to them in the end since I really didn't like them to begin with. However, you may like this story. I just went into it expecting a fast-paced story full of action.

Sinceramente, es uno de los peores libros que he leído. Es un cliché detrás del otro. Personajes planos y simples -bastante molestos- una historia que no termina de tener coherencia en sí misma (más allá de ser un libro fantástico).
La verdad, me llevé terrible decepción.

I can relate with Cordelia (character) about reading :3 Wanna start on book 2 now.....!

it was like someone tried to make a story out of a scrapped movie description