House of Secrets by Ned Vizzini and Chris Columbus

House of Secrets by Ned Vizzini and Chris Columbus
Series:  House of Secrets, #1
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 490
Source: Purchased

The Walker kids had it all: loving parents, a big house in San Francisco, all the latest video games . . . but everything changed when their father lost his job as a result of an inexplicable transgression. Now the family is moving into Kristoff House, a mysterious place built nearly a century earlier by Denver Kristoff, a troubled writer with a penchant for the occult.

Suddenly the siblings find themselves launched on an epic journey into a mash-up world born of Kristoff’s dangerous imagination, to retrieve a dark book of untold power, uncover the Walker family’s secret history and save their parents . . . and maybe even the world.

 

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.