Reviews for Andromeda Klein

The average rating for Andromeda Klein based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-04-25 00:00:00 Angel Batallan YA. Andromeda Klein lives so deeply in her head that in the first couple of pages of this you only get a few glimpses of her. She's riding her bike. She's wearing a hoodie. But mostly she's thinking about tarot and the Egyptian god Thoth. She relates to the world through tarot and her thoughts are complicated and infinitely layered, but I have to believe Portman purposely made them as dense and inaccessible as possible -- maybe to show us how different Andromeda is, how alienated from her peers -- because he later explains many of the same concepts in a way that's easy to grasp. In fact, the rest of this book is highly readable once you get over the steep wall of Andromeda's thoughts. It's hard going, though. The opening throws a lot of new concepts at you. Andromeda has difficulty hearing because of osteogenesis imperfecta, a condition that affects the bones and cartilage, and she's developed her own language based on words and phrases she's (mis)heard. It's a lot to remember, but as chapter four promises: Most magical writing is deliberately obscure, designed to hide crucial matters from the uninitiated yet reveal them to those who know how to read the texts properly.That's this book exactly. If you stick with it and learn Andromeda's language, her world will open up to you. Andromeda is sly, funny, odd, and always herself -- and she's in high school, so of course that makes life even more difficult -- and this book is about libraries and magic and finding people who accept you for who you are, and it's pretty damned satisfying. Four and a half stars rounded up to five for good behavior. This starts off ploddingly, but I soon became immersed in Andromeda's world and tore through the second half of the book, rooting, hard, for her. Recommended. Difficult, but rewarding. Use the lexicon in the back.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-11-27 00:00:00 Keiran Garvey In all honesty, I really can't recommend this book in good faith. However, for my part, I'm such an easy critic that it really grew on me. Even so, a book that takes until halfway through to really get moving and only really comes together at the last chapters has some problems in the workings. Andromeda Klein tells the story of a misunderstood teenage girl who is obsessed with Tarot cards and the occult. Her life is falling apart at the seams. Her best friend died while she was on a family trip, her much-older boyfriend has lost interest in her and the library is weeding out all her favorite books. And now, she is receiving odd signs in her Tarot readings and from the world around her. What does it all mean, and what is the universe trying to tell her? You'll have to slog through the book to find out. Andromeda Klein read more like a blog, based on the rate it told the story. It was very slow moving, and heavy on character inside jokes based on the main characters mis-hearings of words. However, the book is very well researched and packed with names, dates, references and lexicons to all things magic. I enjoyed the story by the end, but most readers will have closed this book long before the chapters reach the double digits.