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The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin L Jagi Lamplighter 9781937051877 Books

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The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin L Jagi Lamplighter 9781937051877 Books

To sum up: Fun read. Buy this book, read it, then give it to a young woman, for example your daughter, in the 13 to mid-20ish range. Lovable characters, fun adventures, suitably scary villains, wild speculations about how things are not as they seem, and coming of age issues dealt with frankly yet appropriately.

The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin is the first book in what is intended to be a fairly extensive Unexpected Enlightenment series. Following the current practice of listing the ingredients in the stew, let's go surreal: In a Harry Potter style universe, Narnia meets the Matrix. No, really. The wizarding school aspect is clear on page 1, while the everything is not what it seems, in both the existence of other worlds (Narnia) and the everything you know is a lie (Matrix) is only glimpsed and hinted at in this first volume.

As in the Potter-verse, wizards use spells to shield their activities and very existence from the mundane. In such a world, what keeps wizards from blinding each other? What keeps the most powerful from keeping the true nature of the world (or worlds, as the case may be) from those they seek to control? If so, how would a victim of such deceit become aware of it and make their way free of it? Very grown-up issues, but not told in a way too overwhelming for younger readers.

Rachel Griffin is the youngest daughter of a large, ancient and noble wizarding family. She starts life with all the advantages: loving family, wealth, connections, looks (although she's only occasionally aware of how cute she is in a barely pubescent 13-year old girl way). Plus, she's sharp, has a photographic memory, and is a kind and polite (civilized!) young woman. So - the anti-Harry Potter in origin. The rags to riches role is given to a couple of her friends.

She's also precocious, starting Roanoke Academy a year early. Lamplighter is first of all spinning an adventure yarn, but is also exploring how the world looks to a well-bred, well-loved young woman entering the boyfriend/girlfriend arena, what goes on both good and bad, what sort of temptations a girl her age goes through, and how good and bad choices are made. Of this, the real drama in most young girls lives is made, and what they see around them is largely horror and ruin portrayed as 'normal'. As a father of daughters, it is heartening to see such issues treated appropriately in an engaging piece of fictions. Girls can grow into women without caving to a out of control, narcissistic world.

Don't get the impression that the story and action suffer from too much girly digression - not so. The author does a great job of simply acknowledging what Rachel is going through and following her thought process as she ponders her relationships - one of which is the attentions of a very attractive (and very well-behaved) older boy.

But that's getting ahead. The adventures and mysteries start on page 1, when Rachel awakens from her first night at Roanoke Academy, and never stop. She awakens to overhear two animals - a tiny lion familiar and a huge red-eyed raven - talking about something that makes no sense to her. She then takes a broom flight around the grounds - she's an elite flyer - and sees the statue of an angel, something she has no word to name and has never seen before in her life. She runs afoul of some crass girls, give a famous boy a ride on her broom, spots an impostor pretending to be a wizarding police officer, and helps save a girl's life. All this before breakfast. Action hardly lets up. And this first book only covers the first week or two of Rachel's first year!

Rachel, tiny, young, precocious, shy and and inexperienced, wants to make friends. She has poor luck at first, then finds Siggy, an over-the-top, dragon-owning orphan boy, and Nastasia, a prim princess, as her besties, and a circle of other remarkable friends. They are all trying, in addition to learning to be witches and wizards, to make the treacherous journey from children to adults.

In this first book, mysteries are introduced and deepened - a little - but not resolved. There are two more books out already, and many more on the way, so this is to be expected.

As a man pushing 60, I'm hardly the target audience for the Rachel books, except in the sense where good fiction should work anyway (Narnia and Have Space Suit, Will Travel are among my favorite books - because they're great, regardless of what age the target audience was). And I never made it past about book 3 in Harry Potter - not my cup of tea. Yet, these stories work for me.

I've read the next two installments as well, The Raven, The Elf, and Rachel and Rachel and the Many-Splendored Dreamland, and found them also good and engaging, and plan to read the additional volumes as they come out. Will review as time permits.


Tags : The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin [L. Jagi Lamplighter] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Rachel Griffin wants to know everything. As a freshman at Roanoke Academy for the Sorcerous Arts, she has been granted to opportunity to study both mundane and magical subjects. But even her perfect recollection of every book she has ever read does not help her when she finds a strange statue in the forest-a statue of a woman with wings. Nowhere-neither in the arcane tomes of the Wise,L. Jagi Lamplighter,The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin,Dark Quest,1937051870,Fantasy & Magic,Children: Grades 4-6,Juvenile Fiction,Juvenile Fiction Fantasy & Magic

The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin L Jagi Lamplighter 9781937051877 Books Reviews

I've put up a lot of book reviews this week. In Wednesday's review of Gorilla Mindset I mentioned that it's not so much that I've read a lot recently as that I've finished a lot all at once. The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin is the exception.

I started the book earlier this week and finished it very quickly. It was a very fast read for two reasons. First, it's a young adult book. The language is simple, the story is not overly complex, and it's an easy read. Second, the book is thoroughly engaging. Once I started it, I didn't want to put it down.

I'm not a particular fan of young adult books. I have, of course, read my fair share of them - probably hundreds of them. I also graduated past them pretty quickly I read Tolkien in the fourth grade and Asimov, Herbert, Clancy, and Crichton only a year or two later. Of course, I still devoured a ton of YA books at that age. But even then it wasn't because I preferred the genre. I simply read whatever I could get my hands on out of sheer boredom.

My young adult reading since high school mostly consists of the Harry Potter series. So you can imagine that I didn't particularly seek out this series. Furthermore, while I have been interested in reading Ms. Lamplighter's works for some time, I've also eyed them with some trepidation. You see, I know her better as Mrs. John C. Wright, and her husband may well be my favorite still-living-and-writing author. To be fair, I would never expect any author to live up to that. How could they? Yet it still puts an unfair burden on Ms. Lamplighter.

Thankfully, I can report that this work is excellent. The setting and the world borrow very liberally from Harry Potter. If you're a fan of J.K. Rowling's, you will enjoy this book. And as you might expect from knowing that and seeing the cover, the book can be somewhat fairly described as "Harry Potter with a girl as the main character." Some people will be interested in the book purely for that, and that's fine. If that sounds great to you, skip the rest of my review and just go read the book. It won't disappoint you.

But the great thing is that the book very quickly establishes itself as far more than that. Not that I'm implying that it's better than Harry Potter - it isn't, if I may risk offending Ms. Lamplighter, although it is definitely worthy of Harry Potter. But it's definitely not just a Harry Potter ripoff that happens to be about a girl. The story involves something akin to our modern world, with a hidden world of magic thriving within it. The witches and wizards of this world send their children to magical boarding schools. Evil wizards attack one of these schools. Sound familiar?

The similarities pretty much end there, however. The story is radically different from any of Ms. Rowling's. The characters are very different. A danger of writing about thirteen year old girls is that so many of them are just annoying. Rachel, on the other hand, is quite endearing. She's earnest without being a brown noser, bright without becoming a know-it-all, and feisty without becoming obnoxious. Her friends are just as interesting. I particularly enjoyed Sigfried, the orphan who wants nothing more than to be a valiant knight, and Gaius, the man apart from the group. Yet all of the characters are fun and enjoyable.

I give the book four stars out of five for adults, but I'd give it five out of five if recommending it to a younger reader. SInce that is in fact the target audience, I've rated it five stars here. My oldest son is not yet reading well enough for a book this complex, but in a few years he will be. When he reaches that point, this book will be on his reading list right next to the Narnia and Harry Potter books. If you loved either, but especially if you love the latter, you should take a look at this book.
You know, a lot of books are touted as “the next Harry Potter,” but this one actually is, and it’s not derivative.

Rachel Griffin is the youngest of her siblings to attend the Roanoke Academy of Magical Arts, hidden from the magically “Unwary” on the upper Hudson River. If she has a superpower, it’s a photographic and eidetic memory. This will cause her to see things out of the corner of her eye that others miss, and remember it and be intrigued. She can see through the spells of others with a twist of her phenomenal memory, but what does it all mean? She’s not just missing parts of the mysteries because there are more clues to unfold, she is handicapped by being only 13 years old – a time when much of life is a mystery.

The characters are great, the piled up mysteries pull you along, and while the story arc for this book comes to a satisfying conclusion, you’ll want more and more is hinted at. The message of the doom-of-worlds raven and the mysterious statue with the disappearing wings seem placed to be handled by a wider story arc for the whole series. Get this for a young person in your life, but don’t be shocked if you get hooked on it, too.
To sum up Fun read. Buy this book, read it, then give it to a young woman, for example your daughter, in the 13 to mid-20ish range. Lovable characters, fun adventures, suitably scary villains, wild speculations about how things are not as they seem, and coming of age issues dealt with frankly yet appropriately.

The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin is the first book in what is intended to be a fairly extensive Unexpected Enlightenment series. Following the current practice of listing the ingredients in the stew, let's go surreal In a Harry Potter style universe, Narnia meets the Matrix. No, really. The wizarding school aspect is clear on page 1, while the everything is not what it seems, in both the existence of other worlds (Narnia) and the everything you know is a lie (Matrix) is only glimpsed and hinted at in this first volume.

As in the Potter-verse, wizards use spells to shield their activities and very existence from the mundane. In such a world, what keeps wizards from blinding each other? What keeps the most powerful from keeping the true nature of the world (or worlds, as the case may be) from those they seek to control? If so, how would a victim of such deceit become aware of it and make their way free of it? Very grown-up issues, but not told in a way too overwhelming for younger readers.

Rachel Griffin is the youngest daughter of a large, ancient and noble wizarding family. She starts life with all the advantages loving family, wealth, connections, looks (although she's only occasionally aware of how cute she is in a barely pubescent 13-year old girl way). Plus, she's sharp, has a photographic memory, and is a kind and polite (civilized!) young woman. So - the anti-Harry Potter in origin. The rags to riches role is given to a couple of her friends.

She's also precocious, starting Roanoke Academy a year early. Lamplighter is first of all spinning an adventure yarn, but is also exploring how the world looks to a well-bred, well-loved young woman entering the boyfriend/girlfriend arena, what goes on both good and bad, what sort of temptations a girl her age goes through, and how good and bad choices are made. Of this, the real drama in most young girls lives is made, and what they see around them is largely horror and ruin portrayed as 'normal'. As a father of daughters, it is heartening to see such issues treated appropriately in an engaging piece of fictions. Girls can grow into women without caving to a out of control, narcissistic world.

Don't get the impression that the story and action suffer from too much girly digression - not so. The author does a great job of simply acknowledging what Rachel is going through and following her thought process as she ponders her relationships - one of which is the attentions of a very attractive (and very well-behaved) older boy.

But that's getting ahead. The adventures and mysteries start on page 1, when Rachel awakens from her first night at Roanoke Academy, and never stop. She awakens to overhear two animals - a tiny lion familiar and a huge red-eyed raven - talking about something that makes no sense to her. She then takes a broom flight around the grounds - she's an elite flyer - and sees the statue of an angel, something she has no word to name and has never seen before in her life. She runs afoul of some crass girls, give a famous boy a ride on her broom, spots an impostor pretending to be a wizarding police officer, and helps save a girl's life. All this before breakfast. Action hardly lets up. And this first book only covers the first week or two of Rachel's first year!

Rachel, tiny, young, precocious, shy and and inexperienced, wants to make friends. She has poor luck at first, then finds Siggy, an over-the-top, dragon-owning orphan boy, and Nastasia, a prim princess, as her besties, and a circle of other remarkable friends. They are all trying, in addition to learning to be witches and wizards, to make the treacherous journey from children to adults.

In this first book, mysteries are introduced and deepened - a little - but not resolved. There are two more books out already, and many more on the way, so this is to be expected.

As a man pushing 60, I'm hardly the target audience for the Rachel books, except in the sense where good fiction should work anyway (Narnia and Have Space Suit, Will Travel are among my favorite books - because they're great, regardless of what age the target audience was). And I never made it past about book 3 in Harry Potter - not my cup of tea. Yet, these stories work for me.

I've read the next two installments as well, The Raven, The Elf, and Rachel and Rachel and the Many-Splendored Dreamland, and found them also good and engaging, and plan to read the additional volumes as they come out. Will review as time permits.