Hey Love Muffins! I received a copy from a Public Relations Company for my youngest son to review. This summer has been filled with video games and reading books. Hey! They can’t play the game unless they read and thankfully we received this novel. My youngest son and I are so much alike and reading books is one of our favorite past times. We hadn’t heard of this particular book but we were both up for the challenge. From the moment that he picked up the book it was intrigued.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The author Alex Hiam spent holidays in the mysterious Boston mansion of his great-grandmother. Later on in college, he tracked down stories about the magic in the dusty stacks of the anthropology library at Harvard. He now returns to Boston with his story of a magical world that hides in plain sight. Alex lives with his wife and daughters in an old farmhouse in Amherst, Massachusetts.
BOOK REVIEW
This book made me think about the where I was from which happens to be Savannah, Georgia. There are so many tales about the mysterious things that have happened or continue to happen at night fall. As I glanced through the book while my son read it I had so many childhood memories that were similar to adventures in the book.
This book is complete with secret passages, a moving wall, and stuffed, mounted animals. Hiam created the perfect setting to inspire the Girls’ Academy at the heart of his new middle grade Silent Lee series.
We found his book , Silent Lee and the Adventure of the Side Door Key, he begins by introducing us to fifteen-year-old Silent, aka Sie. Sie is a student at the Girls’ Academy of Latin and Alchemy. We see Sie travels between modern day Boston and the brimming-with-alchemy, 100 years older Boston each day on her way to school thanks to a secret door. You just know a book is going to be good when there’s secret doors involved. Her beloved Great Aunt Generous passes away unexpectedly, whom she had a very close relationship with as she’s the person that her mother left her with when she was younger to travel around the world. This life experience takes Sie on a quest to understand what led to her Great Aunt’s death.
During Sie’s desire to find out what happened and uncover the truth she finds other questions arising around rather her mom was actually her mom, her moms whereabouts and who her family really was and is her aunt was actually deceased.
The outcome for Sie, Aunt Gen, Raahi, and all of Hiam’s empowering female leads in Silent Lee and the Adventure of the Side Door Key is sure to leave readers wondering, “What’s next?” Thankfully, they won’t wonder for long as the second installment in the Silent Lee series, Silent Lee and The Oxford Adventure, is soon to follow!
This is a great unisex book for Middle Schoolers. This book is filled with page turning adventures from the beginning to end. Silent Lee and the Adventure of the Side Door Key is a dynamic magical imagination adventure for tweens. My son is a Harry Potter and Nirna and loves this book. We can’t wait to get our hands on the another book in the series.