I AM GLAD THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE READING THIS RIDICULOUS BOOK. Because it is, as you say, completely ridiculous in every way - seriously, five hundred years? Like, at the beginning I thought maybe Marco's grandfather had been deposed when Marco's dad was young, which would make way more sense as a timeline, don't you think? But then they were like, "So we've been waiting five hundred years! Let us lay the fate of the kingdom of the slender thread of two pre-teen boys and a conspiracy that has...apparently been waiting five hundred years?" and I was all WHAT.

Also, Marco is ridiculously short-sighted. He is so bright about some things, but it never even occurs to him that the fact that he looks exactly like the lost prince might mean something? Seriously?

And yet you are right, it is so charmingly earnest. Basically I cannot help loving everything Frances Hodgson Burnett ever wrote, except perhaps Little Lord Fauntleroy, because Cedric is just so saintly that he makes Sara Crewe look like a little hellion, and that just can't be right.