Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Book Review: Gilbert and the Scepter of Silence



Book: Gilbert and the Scepter of Silence by Dahlia Huh and Sunmee Huh with illustrations by Christopher Huh

Rating: 3 1/2 stars

Review:

Read this was felt like Harry Potter meets Disney's Little Mermaid animated series, it was really funny and had a great adventure. The story had 11 years old Gilbert finding out by accident (when he jumped in the water to try to save his dad and dog during a bad storm) that he was a Mermid. And unfortanutyly the Coast Guards had been filming the incident.

Gilbert had always known he was adopted but he had no idea that he wasn't human. His parents told him that his biological parents had placed him with them to keep him out of harms way due to Merter, a menacing dictator trying to take over. He was imprisoning people trying to find the one person who could decipher the old code that could change everything.

To stay off the Government's radar, Gilbert with help from his parents escaped to the underwater world. He ended up meeting two other Mermids, Dev and Evie who helped him try to stop Merter. It was interesting because the Mermid trio had went on several adventures to try to find the items that they need to try to fight Merter.

I thought this was a unique story that reimagined the image of Mermaids because the most common image of Mermaids is this:



But in this book, the Mermids are human like but with a colorful fin on their backs. That was different.

I enjoyed reading this but I didn't rate this higher because I felt like the story was a little erratic at times and seemed to skip ahead without too much explanation. But that will most likely be fine for kids/middle grade who this is geared to. All they will care about is, that this is a well written funny story.

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