Word: secretively
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...themselves pay lip service to the beauty and value of books. Amy is an obsessive reader - "Young lady, close that book!" her aunt snaps at her in the second chapter of The Maze of Bones. Likewise, one of the novel's key scenes takes place in grandmother Grace's secret library. "She loved books," we learn. "She loved them very much." But would Amy or Grace have picked up The Maze of Bones? Scholastic's strategy seems to be predicated on the idea that kids don't actually like to read at all, that they have to be bribed...
...secret of the family's power is hidden somewhere in the world. In Grace's will, each member of the family has been given a choice: either accept a legacy of a million dollars and walk away, no questions asked, or compete in a global scavenger hunt to find and claim the secret. Of course Amy, who's 14, and Dan, who's 11, take Door No. 2. So do six other teams of Cahills. All scamper off in search of the titular 39 clues, aiding and double-crossing and feuding with each other all the while. The hunt leads...
...Clues to its famous older sibling. "We don't ever dream about having another Harry Potter," he says. But the series does share some cosmetic similarities with Rowling's. Harry is, like Amy and Dan, an orphan who discovers that his family history makes him part of a secret, powerful world. The Cahill family is divided into four branches, each with its own distinct personality, just as Hogwarts is divided into four distinct houses. But in another sense Levithan is very right: if you look under the hood you'll find that Scholastic has engineered The 39 Clues to work...
...listening to, with one click. These if-you-like-that-then-you'll-like-this music discovery services have been around since the mid-1990s. It's hardly the kind of zowee innovation we've come to expect. (And for the record, I have to say, Genius, whose super-secret algorithm makes recommendations by comparing your personal iTunes library to all the music that users have bought on iTunes, seemed a little unimaginative. During a Genius demo, Jobs played Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel"; you might be surprised to learn that if you like "Heartbreak," you might also like Dylan...
...that Florida's vulnerability is a secret. Florida homeowners pay some of the nation's highest insurance premiums; in a recent poll, despite a housing crisis, an economic crisis, a water crisis and an environmental crisis, Floridians named those premiums their number-two concern about the state's future, behind property taxes but ahead of jobs, education, health care and the dying Everglades...