The Art of Secrets

This book was pretty good. The storyline was almost solid, the characters were understandable, and the information was generally accurate.!!SPOILER WARNINGS!!I really enjoyed the mystery element of this book. I felt like one of the detectives trying solve the case of the missing artwork. Another highlight of this book was getting to see/hear about Chicago and it's history. There was also so much diversity, just like Chicago in real life. In Saba's school community, everyone was different. While a couple things deviated from Chicago's reality here and there, I was pleased to see that there was a lot of accurate representation.I invested myself into the book, and I was really curious to see how it would play out in the end. I'm not satisfied with the ending at all. No matter how I look at it, I feel like all the information that was given just went no where. How could all these teachers be suspected, and then in the end it just turns out that it was mostly just a big misunderstanding. The conclusion of the story left us at a dead end. I would've loved to have seen an extra 50 pages, where someone gets caught and there is an interrogation. Not some, "oh I messed up, but I hope we're still friends," ending.

Granted, as a 60-year-old man, I'm not exactly the target audience for this book. But I enjoy a lot of books written for middle-schoolers; usually, when I've finished them, they go on the shelf to be re-read someday or get passed on to someone else to enjoy. "The Art of Secrets" is going straight into the recycling bin. I found the resolution of the plot to be both completely implausible and, more importantly, presenting a worldview that is way too dark and cynical for me to want to inflict it on a young person.I will not use any of the characters' names, but even my vague explanation will be likely to give things away early to those who read the book. So herewith the SPOILER ALERT!SPOILER ALERTSPOILER ALERTMy problem with the book is that the resolution of the plot requires that multiple characters turn out to be incredibly devious---I'm talking criminal-mastermind level plotting---despite almost 250 previous pages presenting them as nothing of the sort. So in addition to being incredibly (I'm using that word literally: not believably) devious, they also have to be pathological liars to have so convincingly presented themselves as innocent. Never mind that the people in question are of different ages and temperaments---they're all incredibly devious, pathological liars.I'm sorry, but that's not a view of reality that I want to share with a middle-schooler.Of course, there are other dark books for kids; "The Lord of the Flies" comes to mind, but in that case, a reader need only peruse the back cover to know what he or she is getting in for and can make an informed choice about whether or not to read the book. But in this case, the darkness comes out of the proverbial left field at the very end and changes the tenor of what had seemed to be a book about high school friendships and coming-of-age..The book is well written, and the characters all seem like believable people---until they don't. Nevertheless, I'm sorry for the time I invested in reading it. And I would be wary of anything else by the author unless there was good evidence that no equally nasty and implausible surprise awaited me at the end.

I really enjoyed reading the Art of Secrets by James Klise, a librarian at a high school in the Chicago area. I am NOT a young adult, but after hearing him interviewed on NPR, I ordered it and read it. I loved the way he constructed it with a lot of different first person narratives. The story unfolded like a flower from a bud, and although he doesn't come out and give us answers, the answers are quite apparent if you think about it.

(No young adult here)....I also heard the author's interview on NPR and decided to buy the book. Made for enjoyable reading with a very surprising ending. Good purchase!

I bought this for my 14 year old niece after hearing a good review of it on NPR. She was a little dubious about reading it at first the story title didn't grab her. However, one quiet afternoon she finally dove in and she really loved it. We had a long discussion about it. I would suggest it for young teen.

THIS WAS A JOY. THE JOURNAL TYPE OF CHAPTERS AND CHARACTER WAS GREAT. THIS WOULD BE GREAT TO TEENAGERS. THE ENDING WAS SUPERB AND A SUPRISE. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS I'VE READ THIS YEAR.

This. Disc will not open in an apple computer, hp computer, nor play in my bose stereo, car stereo, or DVD player. So I am not able to tell you if the story is any good or not.