Review: The Pearl Thief by Elizabeth Wein

This is the prequel to "Code Name Verity" which I absolutely loved. So when this started bouncing around Booktube I knew I had to read it.



We follow Julia when she is a young girl, she had her 16th birthday part near the end of the book. She returns to the ancestral home of her grand parents, a large estate sold off when her grandfather dies living massive debts behind him. While Julia's family is packing and organizing the last few heirlooms Julia strikes up a friendship with some local Travellers (can they be local when they are Travellers?) and gets herself involved in a murder mystery when a scholar cataloguing her grandfather's archaeological collection comes up missing. Julia is at the very center of the mystery as it slowly unravels dragging almost everyone into its nets.

I really enjoyed this book. It gave me a slight Downton Abbey vibe which I am always down for, and had a real sense of nostalgia with the fading summer days and the unraveling of an old estate. But I fail to see why this needed to be marketed as a prequel to the "Code Name Verity" duology. Yes, we get some back story on Julia, but the time connecting the two stories is missing. So we don't really get to know why and how Julia ended up working for the army. This would have been a great story on its own, but plastering it onto "Code Name Verity" makes it seem like the publishers wanted to ride the wave of success that book has been enjoying.

In the end I gave this book 3,5 stars out of 5.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1000 Places to See Before You Die 20 - Acropolis, Athens, Greece

Image
You cannot go to Athens and not go to the Acropolis. It is a staple on any sightseeing tour and is likely to be crawling with tourists at any given point in time. Still, it is definitely worth it to brave the masses and see the fortified citadel above the city of Athens for yourself.   The word acropolis means the highest point of the city, and there are a number of these acropoleis scattered throughout Greece, but the one in Athens is so well known that it is simply called “The Acropolis”.  There is evidence that the area on the rocky outcropping overlooking the city was inhabited already in the 4th millennium BC, but it was Pericles who started construction on the many famous buildings in the 5th century BC. These famous buildings include the Parthenon, probably the most iconic of the buildings, the Propylaea, the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike. These buildings were all seriously damaged in 1687 AD when the Venetians had sieged the city and used th
Read more

Review: Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Image
This is the first book in a series, but I have no intention of continuing on with this series. The plot evolves around two young people, Amy and Elder. They live on a spaceship that has left Earth to find a new planet to populate. Amy was part of the cryogeniccaly frozen people on board, meant to be woken up upon arrival and using their skill set to populate the new planet. Elder, meanwhile, is part of the population that has been keeping the ship running whilst it travels towards its destination.  One day Amy is woken up from her frozen sleep and now she must learn to live on this spaceship, without her parents, slowly learning the culture and the secrets of this ship. It turns out there is an abundance of mysteries on board this ship, like who is waking up (and killing) the frozen people, who is the mysterious deceased Elder, what is the current Eldest up to and what’s with the “crazy” people and their medication.  Eventually all these mysteries are solved, but is
Read more

Reading the classics: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The book The book first appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, and the year after it was released as a book in a revised edition. As I am working on this post, I discover that the book is not necessarily considered a classic….great choice for the kick-off post for the series then! However, in my experience, it does usually appear on “classics” lists, so I am going to count it! At the time of the first publication in 1890 it was considered immoral, by a lot of people, but Wilde took offense to that and defended his story. When it was published in book form though, he had changed some things and added a preface, that stated that books cannot be moral or immoral, only well written or badly written.  The author Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was Wilde’s full name, but he later changed it to Oscar Wilde because, as he said, the name was too long for someone who was going to be famous. He was born on October 16th 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. He went to Trinity Co
Read more