Book Review: Mr.Lemoncello's Library Olympics

Make sure to read the first book in the series before reading this one! Also, there are minor spoilers in this review, but nothing major in my opinion. You can probably still read it before reading the book.

Mr.Lemoncello's Library Olympics by Chris Grabenstein

Cover Courtesy of Goodreads

Goodreads Synopsis: Welcome, boys and girls, readers of all ages, to the first-ever Library Olympiad! Kyle and his teammates are back, and the world-famous game maker, Luigi Lemoncello, is at it again!

This time Mr. Lemoncello has invited teams from all across America to compete in the first ever LIBRARY OLYMPICS. Will it be fun? Like the commercials say. . . HELLO? It’s a Lemoncello! But something suspicious is going on . . . books are missing from Mr. Lemoncello’s library. Is someone trying to CENSOR what the kids are reading?! In between figuring out mind-boggling challenges, the kids will have to band together to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Now it’s not just a game—can Mr. Lemoncello find the real defenders of books and champions of libraries?

My Review: It was pretty nice to get back to Kyle and his friends, because I read the first book three years ago and have been meaning to get back to the series since then.

Anyways, the library where everything was held was awesome as usual, but lots of the amazing-ness was gone because nearly everything cool about it was revealed in the first book. That's not really a bad thing, because I could focus more on the story instead of getting distracted by it.

The puzzles were pretty clever for Olympics, again, but were not really what I'd expect in Library Olympics. Airplanes? Dinosaurs? I shall not reveal more.

The story felt a bit rushed as well. I'd have liked to go through each round carefully, instead of cramming in ten events. In my opinion, the ending was a bit bizarre, too. It just really wasn't believable (it revolved around really strong hatreds of something), dragged on for a bit, and I'm not really a fan of "let's all work together now to defeat the enemy, even though we were sworn enemies in the first place" thing. It was a bit cliché, and if I remember, also somewhat present in the first book.

Now, speaking of characters, what was up with Haley? Why did she leave in the first place? And why was there no sadness for her? I mean, she just left! Also, Mr.Lemoncello was over-exaggerated to me in this book. His run-ons were too frequent to be funny.

However, the story wasn't bad, not at all! It was still fun to read, and it was one of those books where you don't realize how much you've read until you look at the page number because you forgot your bookmark. Again.

I give this story 3.5 stars. I loved the first book, and this second one was almost there, too. It just had some issues (I've noticed I'm a lot better at pointing out the issues instead of the good parts, but trust me, this story was nice). Check out the first book before reading this one, like I said above, of course!