FOLK SECRETS

A young teenager finds her place in a longtime search for a cursed treasure in Wheelbarger’s middle-grade novel.

Thirteen-year-old Elma Quill’s family isn’t like any other—people believe that her grandfather Jonathan is crazy, her mother, Patricia, has recently come back from the dead, and her father, Jason, is missing. In a quaint Victorian farmhouse in Oklahoma, Patricia calls a meeting so that Elma can hear the full story of her family’s treasure, though Jonathan has a different name for it: “More like my curse. Or rather, our curse. Our family curse.” He has been entangled in a search for a treasure that began in 1963, when his dying mentor, P.R. Simms, bequeathed him a secret tome called The Codex. This journal contains clues stretching back to when the famous author Washington Irving hid chests containing mysterious gold coins in the prairie. As is the case with Wheelbarger’s narrative, with its timelines that overlap and intersect, the history of this treasure (“the Draco Hoard”) is not as straightforward as one might expect. Competing organizations resort to desperate experiments, spy missions, and even kidnapping to beat everyone else to the booty. Among the outlaws, Spanish cultists, and Soviet agents on the treasure’s trail, it may be up to Elma to restore balance and save the world from exposure to a highly dangerous substance that can bend time and space. This debut novel, a tie-in to an augmented-reality experience, is an exciting adventure that plays on themes from films like National Treasure and Indiana Jones franchises. The narrative’s constant time-skipping is not overly confusing until the last quarter of the book, but it still may be excessive for some readers. The ending is abrupt but satisfying after a gripping buildup. Anderson’s pen-and-ink illustrations at the head of each chapter are sophisticated and timeless, standing in stark contrast to Giordano’s flatter, AR-inspired icons that appear occasionally within the text.

An ambitious and epic saga that becomes a bit muddled in its execution.