Midnight for Charlie Bone

Title: Midnight for Charlie Bone (Children of the Red King #1)
Author: Jenny Nimmo

Initial Thoughts: Umm...honestly, I've read this too many times to have initial thoughts.

This is a fun series. Definitely Juvenile Fiction, and a little strange, but a fun read nonetheless. I started reading it when only about four of the books were out so I ended up reading it a few times throughout the years as new books came out. I've only ever actually finished the series once, which is kind of why I'm reading it again now, because I want to remember how it all ends. It's a very interesting world in which a few families have these powers and no one else around them thinks it's really all that strange. Like, usually you'd have some sort of discrimination, but instead the other students and families in the area are just like, "Oh, you're one of the endowed. You can do weird things and weird things happen around you. Okay, then. Are you staying for tea?" They're really not surprised or anything. Manfred can hypnotize people. That is understood. Such is life. Moving on. If you're not close friends with one of the endowed and strange things start happening, you just wait to see what the consequences are for you, and leave all the action for the endowed children to handle. "Got nothing to do with me. Let the endowed do what they will. Oh, cool, they saved a kid. Party!" Also, it took me too long to figure out where they lived, America or England. When I first started reading the series, I was young enough to just assume that everything I read happened in America unless they made it blatantly obvious that it was somewhere else. (I made that assumption with Artemis Fowl, too.) A couple rereadings later, I started questioning it because it didn't totally sound like America but the language wasn't obviously British and I could never quite figure it out. Apparently I was just not reading carefully enough because at one point, Uncle Paton definitely says that some of the descendants of the Red King "came here to the British Isles". Yeah, and I still thought it was in America for years. Though to be fair, they use the word "soccer" which is technically only called that in America, I believe. The rest of the world calls it football. So that threw me. And she never writes it "mum", always "mom" (unless that's just the US editions). Pretty much, there were a few conflicting and confusing details that made it way too hard for me to figure out if it was America or England when I was a kid (because I somehow always seemed to miss that little British Isles bit...). It should be a  quick reread, then I can move on with my life.

Rating: 4/5 (when I was younger, this probably would have been a 5, but now when I read it, the writing is just a bit too JFIC for me to fully appreciate it)