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Too many creatures from too much mythology, too fast-moving - I couldn't get hooked. The book was a smash hit so maybe it's me. From the New Yorker's review, with which I agree:

"That’s often the case when you revisit books you loved in your youth or catch up on the ones you missed or were born too early to encounter at the intended age. As a grownup, you may enjoy such works, but you can no longer wholly enter them. You are, in an inversion of that childhood injustice, too tall to ride the ride.

I was aware of this limitation while reading “Impossible Creatures”—much more aware of it, in fact, than while reading Rundell’s more realist works for kids. That might be because children are so much better than adults at crossing the boundary between the ordinary and the magical, or it might be because the new book occasionally falters in ways the earlier ones do not. Rundell is usually a master of the elegant plot twist, but this book was both less surprising than the others and more convoluted, with an Archipelagic cosmology that involves a magical tree, a maze, an immortal guardian, a heat source called a somnulum, and some crucial moments of overlap with our own earthly history that were a little too “Da Vinci Code” for my taste.

Still, I doubt that any of this would matter to a child. It may be true that adults should read children’s books, but it is definitely true that children’s books should not be written for adults, and Rundell knows her audience; she neither talks down to kids nor shies away from the things that interest them while leaving grownups cold."

I have one of her non-fiction books farther down in the to-read pile.

Piketty outlines the case for the inequality r>g (rate of return on capital > growth of overall economy) with extensive documentation. From this simple rule he describes the forces which lead to the rise of a rentier class that can live very well off inherited wealth which isn't necessarily socially useful. Ultimately I disagree with his solutions to this problem but it seems fairly hard to challenge the idea that wealth above a certain level tends to reproduce itself. Reinvestment of a portion of the returns on capital leads to a natural process of accumulation which Piketty argues will lead to a dangerous level of wealth concentration in the hands of a very few. Throughout the book he's very open about the strengths and weaknesses of his sources and openly declares his personal opinion about wealth accumulation. He did a tremendous amount of research and analysis and that's the main reason for my high rating: he backed up his opinions with historical and modern data. The policies he proposes are debateable but he establishes the premise (r>g) in extensive detail and across a broad range of countries and time periods. Few would accuse him of using too little data and historical sources.