October Reading Letter

Dear Mr. Buxton,

If You’re Reading This it’s Too Late, the sequel to The Name of This Book is Secret, by Pseudonymous Bosch is a magical book starting from two young magicians.  Pietro and Dr. L, the magicians, are much older now though.  Dr. L turned on Pietro one night after a performance and teamed up with Ms. Mauvais to do bad things to Pietro and ended up stealing thing too.  Cass and Max-Ernest, members of the Terse Society are the “super heroes” out to stop Dr. L and Ms. Mauvais.  Cass and Max-Ernest are in the Magic Museum, the Terse Society’s “layer” finding only robots in the whole museum.

          Before discovering the robotic creatures, Cass and Max- Ernest came across posters advertising unfamiliar magicians.  Since Cass and Max-Ernest had no idea what or who the poster were from, I can infer that the posters were probably from a long time ago.  Maybe even from Dr. L and Pietro when they were living with the circus.  Another possibility is that the posters are a fake and are used to cover something up.  For instance, if Dr. L and Ms. Mauvais ever got into the Terse Society’s “layer”, they wouldn’t know what the Terse Society was up to.  Maybe the posters are some kind of code.

          While reading If Your Reading This It’s Too Late, I had a confusion question.  At the top of the doorway after the posters saying “Magic- A History of Disappearing or a disappearing History?”  The question mark made no sense because I thought that they are the same thing.  In reality, there is no real magic so I guess I can’t really say.  Magic can be more complicated than it seems.  But relating back to the posters, it could just be a weird code.

          Many different vocabulary words came up, and one vocabulary word was... ingeniously. First, I looked for any familiar words in the word.  Genius is in it so it must be either really smart and original or really dumb and unoriginal.  The prefix is in which in this context means really smart.  The suffix ly just makes it an adverb.  So my conclusion is that ingeniously means really smart or original.

          Pseudonymous Bosch is great at grabbing your attention.  First of all, the topic is amazingly interesting and nobody can write a good piece of writing with a bad topic.  On the other hand, Pseudonymous Bosch has great cliff hangers at the end of chapters.  For example, on page 85 it ends the chapter with one of the members from the Terse Society being the mean teacher.  The last sentence is “It was Owen.” It may be a simple sentence, but it was perfect to end a chapter that way.  The last thing that is impressively nice about If Your Reading This It’s Too Late is that he has descriptive sentences like “SLIDESHOW...SLIDESHOW....SLIDESHOW... blinked a sign of tiny popcorn style light bulbs.

          Regularly, I am not a fan of mysterious books.  But this book has changed my opinion.

Sincerely, Caroline