Armand St. Just, the brother-in-law of the Scarlet Pimpernel, is even more annoying than his sister was in the original book! Lots of adventure of course but the denouement struck me as very predictable (though of course neither Armand nor Marguerite had the least suspicion!). ( )

A delightful book in the Scarlet Pimpernel series. It opens in France, during the height of the The Terror, at the Opera, where all the surviving aristocrats have come, just like they always do, dressed in their finest. But they’re all trembling in their funny French shoes because no one knows who among them will be denounced and beheaded in the morning. If you wrote a YA novel set in a dystopia like that, you’d be accused of overdoing it, but it really happened! The Scarlet Pimpernel has a plan to rescue the Dauphin, who is imprisoned in the Temple. This really piqued my curiosity because we know that in real life the Dauphin died there and was not rescued, so was Baroness Orczy going to allow her hero to fail?

Eldorado is not as good as the first in the series, The Scarlet Pimpernel, but nothing could be since a) the most exciting part is finding out the Scarlet Pimpernel’s secret identity and b) I read The Scarelet Pimpernel at age eleven, which is surely the Golden Age (in the Peter Graham sense) for these books. However, Eldorado notably lacks anti-Semitism, which is nice. I do not know why the novel is called Eldorado, as it is set in England and France and there’s no gold. By the way, I always thought “Baroness Orczy” was a pen name and she was no more a baroness than I am Count Chocula, but I finally looked her up on Wikipedia and she actually was one! ( )

Armand St. Just, the brother-in-law of the Scarlet Pimpernel, is even more annoying than his sister was in the original book! Lots of adventure of course but the denouement struck me as very predictable (though of course neither Armand nor Marguerite had the least suspicion!). ( )

Armand needs a 2x4 up side his head. Other than that it was a great story. ( )

Not good. Orczy is a little too in love with the French monarchy and aristocracy, and a lot too in love with the Scarlet Pimpernel...or maybe it's the other way around. ( )