Chapter Twenty-Two: The Alchemyst

I bought this novel, the first of a series by Michael Scott called The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, about six months ago while I was home for winter break.  I'm not sure exactly what prompted me to buy it, other than its advertisement as a best-selling YA fantasy sort of book.  Yet after buying it, it sat on the shelf (I didn't even bring it to school with me--why?) until now, when I finished re-reading the Harry Potter series and was too despondent about it to go to the library.  But I felt like reading something new, and here this was, conveniently waiting for me on my shelf.  The first few pages didn't really capture me and draw me in, but I decided to persevere to the end of the book (which only took a day), and I'm not convinced it was worthwhile (nor am I convinced it wasn't worthwhile).  During most of my reading experience, mostly due to my emotional resistance to the main teen characters (it's not that I disliked them, but I didn't find myself caring too much about them) I found myself thinking I wouldn't bother reading the sequel(s).  But in the last third or fourth of the novel, I found that the main characters had grown on me somewhat, and--I'll admit it--I'm something of a sucker for a cliffhanger ending, which this book certainly has.  So I might get the next book from the library (but not immediately).  We'll see if my interest matures with time or not.  In the meantime, I think one of my main issues with this book is that, even though my knowledge of world mythologies (or any mythology) is sadly limited, especially for someone who enjoys fantasy and sci-fi, I felt like, rather than being based on historical and mythological characters, this novel ends up using them as stock-characters, often--the villains, especially, seemed flat in this way.  Basically, even if I do decide to read the sequel, I'll probably donate my copy of this first book in the series and get the next one(s) from the library.  Basically, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't great.