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Title: Skulduggery Pleasant (Skulduggery Pleasant #1)
Author: Derek Landy, Tom Percival (Illustrations)
Format: Epub
Rating: 4/5
Status: Finished
Reading Date: August 29 to September 09, 2016
Book Summary: Meet Skulduggery Pleasant. Sure, he may lose his head now and again (in fact, he won his current skull in a poker match), but he is much more than he appears to be—which is good, considering that he is, basically, a skeleton. Skulduggery may be long dead, but he is also a mage who dodged the grave so that he could save the world from an ancient evil. But to defeat it, he'll need the help of a new partner: a not so innocent twelve-year-old girl named Stephanie. That's right, they're the heroes.

Stephanie and Skulduggery are quickly caught up in a battle to stop evil forces from acquiring her recently deceased uncle's most prized possession—the Sceptre of the Ancients. The Ancients were the good guys, an extinct race of uber-magicians from the early days of the earth, and the scepter is their most dangerous weapon, one capable of killing anyone and destroying anything. Back in the day, they used it to banish the bad guys, the evil Faceless Ones. Unfortunately, in the way of bad guys everywhere, the Faceless Ones are staging a comeback and no one besides our two heroes believes in the Faceless Ones, or even that the Sceptre is real.

So Stephanie and Skulduggery set off to find the Sceptre, fend off the minions of the bad guys, beat down vampires and the undead, prove the existence of the Ancients and the Faceless Ones, all while trading snappy, snippy banter worthy of the best screwball comedies.
Book Review: “Doors are for people with no imagination.”

To be honest, I was skeptical about picking this one up. It had been recommended to me by a friend and the last time I listened to them, I end up with a book from the Twilight universe.

This one seemed a bit more of Harry Potter with a Dark Lord lurking within the shadows and Stephanie as Harry Potter. Stephanie is brilliant, twelve, and a killer of the deadpan. She has inherited her late uncle's estate and when someone breaks into the home to do away with her, her theory of her uncle being murdered for something isn't so farfetched now. She meets her Uncle's friend, Skullduggery, and finds herself whisked into a world of magic. They were a great pair and they seemed to be able to match each other perfectly (and not in the pairing sort of way).

I really enjoyed this book immensely. It was funny and really sucked you into the world until the very end. Stephanie and Skullduggery worked as team very well. They were humorous together and complimented each other very well.

I think my only slight problem was I would have loved spending more time knowing the other characters within these pages and perhaps with the next book I just might.

I recommend this book to anyone who loves the Harry Potter series.