Free PDF - The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

Friday only, so get it while you can. Didn't noticed it seemed to have been up for a few months now, so it will still be here tomorrow.
Info Here
Book Here

I've been meaning to check it out, since it has Flamel in the name (yep, HP interest), plus the name itself is pretty cool.

Thanks to Mark from readandfindout.com

lol

Do you mean something like this?

And yet it was not the same. It could never be the same again. In the last thirty minutes, Josh's carefully ordered world had shifted and altered irrevocably. He was a normal high school sophomore, not too brillant, but not stupid either. He played football, sang-badly-in his friend's band, had a few girls he was interested in, but no real girlfriend yet. He played the occasional computer game, preferred first-person shooters like Quake and Doom and Unreal Tournament, couldn't handle the driving games and got lost in Myst. He loved The Simpsons and could quote chunks of episodes by heart, really liked Shrek, though he'd never admit it, thought the new Batman was all right and that X-Men was excellent. He even liked the new Superman, despite what other people said. Josh was ordinary.

Click to expand...

Yeah that was pretty bad and the worst I came across yet in this book. Hopefully the author doesn't repeat all of this later on, or have Sophie (the sister) give us her on lowdown on how oh so normal she was before all this started. Well, she already mentioned what she liked to spend money on (in only one sentence believe it or not), so maybe that was it and he simply didn't get how normal a teenage girl could be to make a huge paragraph out of the normality. What makes the above excerpt so bad is that the reader (me) had already received the point that Josh was indeed normal.

All that said, it's an okay read so far (at pg 54), but nothing has really hooked me and in spite of that good bit of telling above, both the twins are coming across as somewhat...bland...boring. Hopefully they get better and even more hopefully it won't be because of a discussion on the merits of iPods over CDs.

PS- Seriously, what is the deal with older writers and their need to mention all of the latest games, technology and so on to show us that they, the author, is in tune with the youth of today and that they, the author, can be considered young at heart. It especially doesn't help when said author uses language that's a bit adult for the previously mentioned teenage characters. At least I haven't come across any Bizarro (Bobby Pendragon).

PS 2- Someone should have told the author that San Francisco is a big city and that an explosion of the front windows of a store on what should be a busy street (it's near the Golden Gate bridge, so I'm guessing) should cause some...alarm!!! Yet no one seems to be around, and the police never arrive. Odd.