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Endymion Spring

Matthew Skelton

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Mar 17, 2010 Sara ♥ rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010, challenge-spring-2010, historical, audiobook, fantasy, young-adult

Whew! That took quite a while! I'm just listening to the "exclusive interview" with Matthew Skelton... Okay, all done.

Well, this book was really interesting, but somehow it wasn't so gripping as to motivate me to clean my house, like really good audiobooks do... ;) (Any excuse to keep reading, you see...)

The book weaves two stories together: one set at present-day Oxford University and the other in 15th century Germany.

The Oxford part of the story is about Blake, a young boy who finds a blank b Whew! That took quite a while! I'm just listening to the "exclusive interview" with Matthew Skelton... Okay, all done.

Well, this book was really interesting, but somehow it wasn't so gripping as to motivate me to clean my house, like really good audiobooks do... ;) (Any excuse to keep reading, you see...)

The book weaves two stories together: one set at present-day Oxford University and the other in 15th century Germany.

The Oxford part of the story is about Blake, a young boy who finds a blank book in the library... or more accurately, the book finds him. And really, the book isn't TOTALLY blank, but will only release its contents (which are quite cryptic in nature) to someone of pure heart, whom it deems "worthy".

The Germany portion of the story is about a young printer's devil named Endymion Spring, who is working for the great Johann Gutenberg on printing the Bible. Endymion has to hide the book in order to keep it out of the hands of Johann Fust (Faust)... so he treks to the libraries of Oxford, which are supposed to rival the Great Library at Alexandria, to find a hiding place.

These stories are also interwoven with Blake's relationship with his younger sister, Duck, and their shared concern about their parents' seemingly crumbling relationship. Their mother is there at Oxford researching Faust, and their father, who is back in America... we don't really get to know a lot about him other than he has some interesting ideas concerning some of the topics that arise in the book.

Overall, the book sort of reminded me of Cornelia Funke's Inkheart series, except that Inkheart compelled me a lot more than Endymion Spring. I don't know... ES was interesting... but the writing seemed a bit stilted to me—it just didn't flow sometimes... and I wanted some additional details at times... I sorta felt like I was being left hanging. All of a sudden, I'd be like, "Wait... what?? How did THAT happen?" Maybe I wasn't paying as much attention to the audiobook as I should have been... I dunno. I just thought it could have been better—more cohesive. ...more

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Dec 20, 2007 CLM rated it liked it

Shelves: audio, childrensbooks

I like the back and forth between Renaissance Germany and present day Oxford.

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Mar 11, 2012 Marcus rated it liked it

This book was tough to rate, because I really enjoyed the meat of the story, but felt that it was incredibly hampered by poor characterization. It felt as though this were a book written about middle-school age characters by an author that doesn't actually like middle school children. ...more

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