Elizabeth and Zenobia

By: Jessica Miller

Narrated by: Shiromi Arserio

Abandoned by her mother and neglected by her scientist father, timid Elizabeth Murmur has only her fearless friend, Zenobia, for company. And Zenobia's company can be very trying! When Elizabeth's father takes them to live in his family home, Witheringe House, Zenobia becomes obsessed with finding a ghost in the creepy old mansion and forces Elizabeth to hold séances and wander the rooms at night. With Zenobia's constant pushing, Elizabeth investigates the history of the house and learns that it does hold a terrible secret: Her father's younger sister disappeared from the grounds without a trace years ago.

Elizabeth and Zenobia is a wonderfully compelling middle-grade story about friendship, courage, and the power of the imagination.

©2016 Jessica Miller (P)2017 Tantor

It was not my favorite book

I didn’t really like this book because I felt like the author didn’t really have anything to write about at the end. She wrote about plants, plant “kings” and a plant “kingdom.” She was creative with her writing which I did like, but I didn’t really like the end of the book. When I first chose this book, I thought it was going to be spooky and mysterious, which it was at first. I think that the author took a long time to get to the point of this book. She was creative by the way she talked about a girl trapped in a wall in the Witheringe house because of the plant kingdom that duped her to come into the kingdom.

Some parts that I enjoyed where in the beginning of the book, when the author wrote about trying to capture a ghost in the Witheringe house, which is a mansion that has too many rooms to explore. This book also reminded me of The Secret Garden. The author wrote about a dead garden that no one ever visited because of the little girl that went missing after she went into the garden. The garden was dead and had no visitors. At the end of the book it was also very confusing. The book was confusing because you never knew if the plant kingdom was real or all fake. Overall I would give this book a 2.5 out of 5 stars