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					{"id":265,"date":"2023-01-09T00:09:42","date_gmt":"2023-01-09T00:09:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.harley.org\/theacorn\/?p=265"},"modified":"2023-01-09T00:09:42","modified_gmt":"2023-01-09T00:09:42","slug":"winter-book-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.harley.org\/theacorn\/2023\/01\/09\/winter-book-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Winter Book Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">House in the Cerulean Sea<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">When I was first recommended this book, I was apprehensive because people kept saying \u201cyou <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">have <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">to read this,\u201d or \u201cyou\u2019re going to love it\u201d. It\u2019s always disappointing when a book doesn\u2019t live up to the good recommendations my friends give me. Despite my apprehensions, I ended up reading the book (obviously, since I\u2019m writing this review!) and was initially unimpressed. The first 100 or so pages were a bit slow. I was waiting for the thing that would make me love the book as much as everyone else.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The main character, Linus Baker, works for a government organization that handles orphanages for magical children. These children are not magic in the way of Harry Potter &#8211; they come in all species, such as gnomes, wyverns, blobs, and many others. Linus is your average caseworker &#8211; he does his job perfectly, and he even keeps his (very thick) copy of rules and regulations on hand in case he needs some good reading. Because of his exemplary work and sticking to the books, he is given a secret assignment by Extremely Upper Management. He is assigned to look into an orphanage on a remote island where the town&#8217;s inhabitants get paid to keep quiet &#8211; that can\u2019t be good. As Linus spends more and more time on the island with certain characters \u2026.oops can\u2019t go any further, or I\u2019ll spoil the book! Sorry to leave you hanging there. The book turned out to be much better than I thought it would be. I will happily add my voice to those who say this book is great!<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Little Thieves<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The first thing you notice when you look at the cover of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Little Thieves<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is the silhouette of a human and the red ruby teardrop on their face.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">That teardrop is the bane of Vanja\u2019s existence. It wasn\u2019t her fault &#8211; she was stealing for a good cause. It wasn\u2019t her fault &#8211; how could she have known that the enchanted ring she had stolen was gifted to the duchess by the lower god of the forest, the same forest she had just been cursed in moments before? Now, Vanja had two goals: get enough money to leave the country and escape her godmothers, Death and Fortune. She also has to break this curse before she dies. Ugh. And then there\u2019s that Junior Prefect Emeric hot on the tail of the Red Penny thief &#8211; which was also her. It was a mess, one she couldn\u2019t fix without reuniting with some old acquaintances (few of which would be happy to see her, all of which probably wanted to kill her) and the help of a few unlikely allies. With Fortune on her side, or maybe not, how could she go wrong?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>House in the Cerulean Sea &nbsp; When I was first recommended this book, I was apprehensive because people kept saying \u201cyou have to read this,\u201d or \u201cyou\u2019re going to love it\u201d. It\u2019s always disappointing when a book doesn\u2019t live up to the good recommendations my friends give me. Despite my apprehensions, I ended up reading [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.harley.org\/theacorn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.harley.org\/theacorn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.harley.org\/theacorn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.harley.org\/theacorn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.harley.org\/theacorn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.harley.org\/theacorn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":267,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.harley.org\/theacorn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions\/267"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.harley.org\/theacorn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.harley.org\/theacorn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.harley.org\/theacorn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.harley.org\/theacorn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}