(I received this book for free as part of Goodreads First Reads giveaways).
(This review may contain spoilers).
For those of you not aware, I actually did also win a copy of the first book in this series. That probably has little relevance to this review, except to say that I was already familiar with the characters.
This is definitely a good book for younger children to read. The two girls are characters I would have found easy to relate to as a child. There’s not a huge amount of mystery in this, but I think it’s enough to keep a child’s attention… possibly not every child, though.
The illustrations worked really well with this book and I think they would certainly succeed in drawing a child in. The bits of history revealed were interesting and didn’t come across as a lecture or info-dump.
It was good that there were actually some German phrases in this book, especially within the dialogue. I think it provides a bit of learning made fun.
The information after the story is finished is quite good and it’s nice that there’s a recipe so that children can experience Austrian cooking.
I passed the first of these books onto my niece and I intend to do that with this one, too.
Ink of Blood 