The Benedict Society’s new mission
Trenton Lee Stewart: The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey (Little, Brown and Company 2008) It has been a year since Reynie, Sticky, Kate and Constance completed their first task as members of the Benedict Society. However, they did not achieve complete success, their main enemy is still free. But that doesn’t matter now, because on the team’s one-year anniversary, they can finally meet each other and Mr. Benedict again, who has a special surprise for them. However, the plan goes wrong and Benedict and Number Two are kidnapped. In order to track them down, the children have no choice but to go on a treasure hunt organized by Mr. Benedict in the hope of saving them as well. The children’s second adventure is also full of exciting events and we get to know many people who help them or want to harm them. In the meantime, the children…
Spies from all over the world
James Ponti: City Spies (Aladdin 2020) Sara Martinez is a hacker, surely one of the best in the world. Now, however, she is sitting in court and thinking about her not-so-nice situation. Then a man, who is not an attorney, but has three passports with different names, rushes to her aid. This could scare Sara, but for some reason she trusts the man who tells her to just call him Mother. Mother is an MI6 agent who organizes a team of children to work as spies. Paris, Sydney, Kat and Rio only kept the name of their former residence, leaving the rest of their past behind. Sara becomes Brooklyn and soon she takes part in an action, at an international youth summit in Paris, where they have to protect someone. The story is very unique, fast-paced, full of action, but we also have time to get to know the characters.…
The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows (first published in 1908) British writer Kenneth Grahame was born in Scotland, but spent most of his childhood in England with his grandmother. He went to school in Oxford, but unfortunately could not go to university for financial reasons, so he ended up becoming a banking officer at the Bank of England. As Milne writes, it is strange how a man who writes such fragile and beautiful things can have anything to do with something as factual and prosaic as a bank. But the bank might also have found it interesting what a responsible official had to do with such an intangible thing as beauty. Some of his books have been published before, but his most famous work is The Wind in the Willows, published in 1908, which has such supporters as Milne, the author of Winnie the Pooh, and Theodore Roosevelt, the…
The Benedict Society
Trenton Lee Stewart: The Mysterious Benedict Society (Little, Brown and Company 2007) Reynie Muldoon is monotonously living his not-so-fun life at the Stonetown Orphanage, where (unfortunately) he is the smartest child. His only friend is the teacher assigned to him, Miss Perumal, who, even if she cannot teach him anything new, at least understands and supports him. She is the one who sees a newspaper article that will change Reynie’s life. In this, talented children are offered a special opportunity. Reynie uses his wisdom to complete the trials. He’s not the only one who manages to pass the challenges: Sticky memorizes everything he’s ever seen, wild Kate is afraid of nothing, and Constance… well, she’s Conscance. The sender of the advertisement, Mr. Benedict, entrusts them with a dangerous mission that will require all their knowledge. The story is a classic children’s book: good and evil, and saving the world, which…
Fantastic One-pot dishes
Rukmini Iyer: The Roasting Tin (SquarePeg 2017) Everyone has come across a recipe that said it would be easy to make the dish, but it was actually difficult. Or that there wasn’t enough time to cook or that the food was burnt. However, this is not the case with this book. I tried it and the recipes really work. They are simple, both the meat and the side dish are prepared at the same time, and while they are baking, we can do other things. The author tried to make the ingredients interchangeable, so if, for example, we don’t like pepper, we can choose another side dish that cooks in the same amount of time and replace the one we don’t like. The eight chapters are separated based on the eight types of dishes, and within the chapters the dishes are listed in ascending order of cooking time. We can…