Reviews for Twins

The average rating for Twins based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-26 00:00:00 Jill Padilla Spellbound takes on various popular elements of English fantasy and children's literature, merges it deeply in a sense of wilderness and landscape that fits to that world of secrets, tunnels and hidden places, and tells an entertaining tale of a young girl coming to terms with the nastiness inside her. In the tradition of everything from Narnia, to Watership Down and even Harry Potter, this is the story of twelve year old's Athene's encounter on a British farmyard holiday with the world's secretive, nocturnal residents, the Gloams. On discovering the existence of a group of vicious underground, slave-driving Gloams beneath a gnarled old tree, Athene contrives to send her irritating six year old brother Zach into her clutches and then, perched on the precipice of erasing his memory altogether, makes the guilt-laden decision to go and rescue him. The book is unspectacularly written, face-paced, dialogue packed prose with a knack for a good action scene. The magical creations are not too original, another race of beings keeping their existence secret from the prying eyes of humans, but they are unashamedly human in manerisms and language, making the suspension of disbelief easy. The animals talk, like in many great English children's books, and have also come under the spell of the underground Gloam. The evil characters are merely misguided or uninformed, although there is a particularly nasty jailer and some moments of real danger and threat, especially during the dramatic final escape. The plots revelations are evenly and interestingly spaced and Dale takes a leaf from the Rowling book of magic ideas in revealing to Athene the falsity of the Gloam's history through a history book not to be trusted. Yet in all such magical adventures, it's the characters that make or break it. The two Gloam are uninspiring yet suitably heroic and emotional when the time comes. Little brother Zach starts well with his sister's hateful depiction but then barely comes into the story as more than a plot function to trace Athene's progress to nicer, more accepting human being. The deluded Lodestar is a fitting bad guy with plenty of conceitedness to go with her stupidity. And Athene is an excellent protagonist. Her arc is believable and the betrayal of her brother shocking. She redeems herself with heart-stirring bravado and determination, a couple of moments of aggressive heroism (kicking the jailer) and a few ingenious escape ideas that all makes for a rousing finish to a very respectable magical adventure. 4

Review # 2 was written on 2013-12-06 00:00:00 Bobby Machado The only major flaw that I could find in this book is that the main character seemed to have a dramatic shift in not just her attitude but who she was as a person. This shift was very sudden and seemed to have no real reason or explanation behind it.