Charlie Bone and the Beast A-4

Name: Rick Smith
Class: A-4
Book: Charlie Bone and the Beast
Author: Jenny Nimmo
Pages: 387
Rating: ***

Recommendation: Readers who enjoy fantasy, mystery, and magic would really enjoy this book. It has a lot of all of these. It is the 6th book in the series, so people who are thinking about reading it should read the first five books in order to understand what is going on.

Summary: This story is about a group of endowed (special powers) friends. One of the endowed students at Bloor's Academy, the school they all attend, goes missing. "Asa" is a shape shifter that turns into a werewolf at night. He used to be a follower of the evil endowed students, but you find out in the last book that he is really a good kid. When he goes missing, Charlie Bone knows that something is going wrong. To make things worse, Dagbert "The drowner" has just transferred to Bloor's to aid Manfred (The evil head boy) to keep Asa hidden. Throughout the book, Charlie and his friends look for clues to where the Bloor's are hiding this wolf boy. Along the way, they constantly run into the evil endowed children who are trying to stop them from finding Asa. Meanwhile in a bad part of town, an ancient stone knight is being revived by the Bloor's to aid them in their hostile take over of the city. In ancient times this city was the land of the Red King (ancestor of all endowed). If the Bloor's could rule the city, they would rule all the endowed. At this same time the good guys are reviving their own knight (the Red Knight) to fend off the Stone Knight. At the end of the book, after Charlie finds out where Asa is being held, He and his friend Billy, a boy who can talk to animals, set out on a rescue mission to find Asa. They rescue Asa from a deep cave hidden under the school. As the come out of the cave the battle of the two knights begins. The Red Knight, having the ancient Red King's sword defeats the Stone Knight and everything is well. Asa is sent to live with his mother to protect him from the Bloor's. The story ends with everything working out perfectly.

Explantion of Rating: I gave this book three stars because I felt like it was just a filler in the series. Nothing really related to the other books. It was it's own story. None of it seemed relevant to the story the series is trying to tell. But on it's own, it was a good story. Each book is a different year at the academy, so she just needed to fill a book with a story about their second to last year, while leading up to their final year at Bloor's.

Favorite Passage: "They want something, and they shall not have it...Opening the cloth, he revealed a shining sword hilt."

This is when Charlie goes back in time (using his endowment) to visit an ancient blacksmith. Feromel the blacksmith says the lines to Charlie to tell him how important this magical sword hilt is. Feromel knew that this hilt would one day serve a great purpose, so he needed to keep it hidden. It turns of that at the end of the story, the Red Knight used to magical sword with it's hilt to destroy the Stone Knight to save the day.