Book Review 2: The Mysterious Benedict Society and The Perilous Journey

The prompt that I chose to write about this time for "The Mysterious Benedict Society and The Perilous Journey" by Trenton Lee Stewart is the 8th one. The prompt says to pick a character that interested me, and I am to analyze he or she in depth. The character that I decided to analyze is Reynie Muldoon who happens to be one of the most important character in the book. The main reason why I chose Reynie as the character to analyze because of his unique traits that brings the book together. I would like to first start off talking about the basic description that the author of this book gave to him:

“He was an average-looking boy- with average brown eyes, legs of average length, nose an average distance from his ears, and so on- and he was entirely alone.” (Page 1-2)

This show that the author purposely make it seem that Reynie is a boring character, but I think there is good reason why the author did this in the first place. The reason is that by making Reynie Muldoon sound like an average person, all of the accomplishments that Reynie pulled off throughout the book would be put into more of an effect to the readers because the reader would have never expected an average person like Reynie can pull off something incredible.

Reynie Muldoon also show deep compassion and love toward his friend:

"The most important thing. however, was that it had been half a year since he had seen his three closest friends." (Page 2)

In my opinion, these kind of characters are key to a good story because this kind of compassion coming from a character brings out a really important strength to he or she has. It can bring out confidence, courage, and hope from a character. In this book, the power of friendship between the children is a really strong one. It pushed all of them forward with the knowledge that each and every one of their friends are there to support one another. This trait of Reynie Muldoon enable to bring hope to his friends, and ultimately helped them overcome any hardship that bestowed them in their adventure.