Young Simon comes to London at the invitation of his old mentor, but when he arrives his mentor is nowhere to be found. What Simon finds instead is a wicked plot to overthrow King James, and only his wits and unlikely friends can help him save the dayand himself. Black Hearts in Battersea is tho...
I loved all John Bellairs books as a kid & teen, including this one. Reading it again, I was surprised to realize how willy-nilly the plot is and how broadly the characters are painted. The protagonists--an elderly professor and two teenage boys in 1950s Massachusetts--spend most of the story b...
Gothic horror for children. Bellairs was one of my favorite authors when I was a kid, but this is my first time reading this particular book. The problem with reading Bellairs as an adult is that it seems unbelievable when the characters don't seem to learn anything from book to book - Johnny ge...
I'd read this books several times as an adolescent and I always thought kindly on it. I recently just reread it and realized it was crap. The book is filled with plot holes, deus ex machinae, ginormous leaps in logic that belie the author's unstructured story development.It's a perfect example ...