T.C. Robson - reviewed on 8/10/2008 + 147 more book reviews

A kid with the strange ability to hear the people in photographs is forced into a school by his nasty aunts, where he inherits the task of finding and dehypnotizing the lost niece of a local bookstore owner through the use of long-lost mechanical inventions. That pretty much is the premise of Midnight for Charlie Bone. In short, it's a big mess.

I'm sure youngsters with past Harry Potter experience coudl make the magical connections between shrub-headed kid Charlie Bone and the baby-turned-ten-year-old Emma Tolly, the aforementioned niece who was traded for the device that would awaken her soon-to-be-hypnotized state. Go ahead and say it: What?

Oh, it gets better: Bone's uncle, the only saving grace among the controlling relatives of his maybe-dead father, has the weird endowment of making lights unbearably bright (or breaking windows, an ability he suddenly pops up with near the end of the story), and for that reason, only comes out at night so he will only shatter street lights instead of a myriad of other lights on in the city. The rest of the time, he sits in his bedroom writing his book, until he decides to make himself useful by assisting in Bone's quest for the niece and the way to open the device he's been hiding in his best friend Benjamin's basement with guard duty help from Ben's dog, Runner Bean.

Will Charlie awaken Emma from her trance and return her to her rightful home? Or will his evil aunts conquer and keep the secret under wraps? At this point, who really cares?

Don't get me wrong: Jenny Nimmo isn't a bad writer. But the confused and fuzzy details in this particular story isn't a great way to start out a five-installment series and keep readers interested for the remaining adventures. Unlike J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, which mostly resolved its per-book troubles, Nimmo leaves too many things up in the air to secure any interest in further books.

If you want some adventure and excitement with nasty relatives, prefects, professors and all kinds of mischief, just go hunt for the Sorcerer's Stone again and send Charlie on his way.

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