The Warlock: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT (unless you've read the first four books, then you're probably okay)

The Warlock. The Deceiver. The Traitor. There were a few warlocks in this book. As I've made my way through The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, I have discovered that I really need to read it with a dictionary, an open web browser and maybe a professor of mythology by my side. I think this is a series that I will one day want to share with J, but I need to better educate myself on mythology. My biggest problem is that most of the myths I know about, apart from the Bible, are Roman and some Greek. Michael Scott doesn't just include those two, he also refers to Mayan, Egyptian, Norse, Irish, and Japanese myths among others. The books are also full of other historical figures, some of whom were instantly recognizable (Mr. William Shakespeare or Joan of Arc anyone?), some of whom I recognized but had very little context for (Machiavelli, Billy the Kid), and some who are most certainly interesting but I had no idea who they were in any context (Virginia Dare).

I read The Necromancer and The Warlock back-to-back over a few quick days. I was away from home with J and had lots of downtime and when I finished The Necromancer, I literally put it down and picked up The Warlock and kept reading. That's mostly why my post on The Necromancer is so short and refers to this one. I can't remember where one book ends and the other begins.

The Enchantress, the last book in the series, is due out very soon and I get to have one of the first copies from the library, fresh off the shelves, before anyone else reads it and I'm hoping that soon there might be a box set, maybe of trade paperbacks, so that I can read them slowly and refer to earlier books as I plug along. Oh, and so I can pay closer attention to the covers.

I wish I had made a map of the main characters and their relationships and drawn myself a family tree of sorts, because I can't remember who goes with whom now...

So far I've enjoyed this series. I am looking forward to the last book and to rereading all of them too...