The whole 'Luke, I am your father' thing between Yann and Count Kalliovski - I mean, really?Īnd things only got worse when I looked at Yann himself: The 'Book of Tears' lol literally just Count Kalliovski's record of who owes him money The Sisters Macabre (I mean, what even was the point of them other than to look creepy?) Count Kalliovski's very scary dog, Balthazar Count Kalliovski's very vampiric obviously-bad-guy appearance Meeting them in catacombs full of skeletons The times when it jumped out the most were when the good guys had anything to do with the bad guys: I think this was written as YA but pretty much everything about it felt like children's literature. I also like stories about the French Revolution and heard that this story was inspired by The Scarlet Pimpernel, which I read right after.ġ) Yann, a Romani teenager who spends the first book glowing up in a typical rags-to-riches tale and starts saving people from getting guillotinedĢ) His love interest, Sido, the daughter of a French noblemanģ) Count Kalliovski, the bad guy whose actual intentions I forget but who spent most of the time being creepy in the Paris catacombs and not getting over his dead crushes I thought to read it because I remembered having read 'I, Coriander' by the same author in school and thinking it was cute. It sounds like a lot but the type is quite large and the writing style is simple so I read the whole lot in 2 days, which is actually really fast for me. This volume is 683 pages long and contains 2 books in 1. I read this about 3 years ago but I still remember my thoughts because I feel like it's a perfect example of my most hated trope: insta-love.

The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner