Griffin's Castle by Jenny Nimmo

Lonely and friendless from constantly moving, Dinah finds herself wishing the animal statues protecting a nearby Welsh castle would keep her company. Suddenly, to Dinah's delight, the stone animals start to magically spring from the walls and follow her home. But when the animals refuse to let Dinah leave her house, she quickly realizes that these mysterious creatures aren't rescuing her, they're imprisoning her. 

I found Griffin’s Castle (by Jenny Nimmo) disappointing. The main character Dinah was just frustrating to read about. I kept waiting for the sentence that would grab my attention. It never came. Chapter after monotonous chapter, all the words were just Dinah’s depressing thoughts. The story lacked structure. The plot was obscure and thin as tissue paper. Dinah exhibits extreme introversion, at first I thought that Berry and Jacob would bring her out of her shell by befriending her. I was wrong; she took their attempts at friendship as a nuisance. At the moment Dinah lived at Griffin’s Castle (which is actually just a large house). She longed to save the dilapidated house, I was severely disappointed when she dropped the dream and walked away from it with ease. Her mother thinks that Dinah just gets in the way of happiness; her stepfather lashes out with physical violence in the bat of an eye, and none of them learned their wrongs. Dinah just ends up moving to a relative’s house. It had so many (too many) loose ends. It was like you had fifty puzzle pieces to put together and there was a flaw, all the pieces were from different puzzles. Yet all those pieces were crammed in a box for you to ‘solve’. In my opinion it was just incomplete.

The book just ended that way. No lesson learned, no enemy overcome, no wrongs are righted, and no friends are gained. The story had potential (a lot of it!) I had high hopes; but one by one they were dashed. It was like an airplane that revved its engines and raced down the tar mac, but it just did not have the strength to fly. The only reason for reading this book is if you are running a review website and want to warn readers. Griffin’s Castle was totally pointless.