Lively and engaging.
Battered but unbowed after their last adventure (The City of Sand, 2017), grave robbers Tianyi and Kai match wits against a new cast of supernatural beings.
While helping their friend Gold Tooth with his Beijing market antiques stall, they meet a farmer from Shaanxi hoping to sell a valuable Ming dynasty shoe. Tianyi, Kai, and Gold Tooth immediately head west, fired up by the farmer’s tales of treasure-filled tombs in his hometown. Risking life and limb in a maze of haunted caves populated by gigantic spiders—which they end up fleeing clad only in their underthings—Tianyi and Kai are horrified to find their backs marked with a mysterious symbol. Chinese-American archaeologist Julie Yang returns to China reporting that both she and Professor Chen, whose desert expedition the teens led in the previous book, also bear this sign. Julie relates the story of an early-20th-century grave robber whose quest holds clues to this mystery—and, finally, a chance meeting with a blind fortuneteller/con artist points to an expedition in Volume 3 that will tie everything together. The episodic story structure with its delayed resolution may be intriguing to Western readers in its contrast to typical thriller fare, and the blend of derring-do, horror, humor, and a rich invented mythology will sustain interest. The dialogue is refreshingly snark-free, and the boys are considerate of others and respect the behavior code of their profession. Most characters are Han Chinese, but some slightly stereotypical white foreigners feature.
Lively and engaging. (Thriller. 11-15)Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-553-52414-7
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel,...
Adventure drags our heroine all over the map of fantasyland while giving her the opportunity to use her smarts.
Elisa—Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle—has been chosen for Service since the day she was born, when a beam of holy light put a Godstone in her navel. She's a devout reader of holy books and is well-versed in the military strategy text Belleza Guerra, but she has been kept in ignorance of world affairs. With no warning, this fat, self-loathing princess is married off to a distant king and is embroiled in political and spiritual intrigue. War is coming, and perhaps only Elisa's Godstone—and knowledge from the Belleza Guerra—can save them. Elisa uses her untried strategic knowledge to always-good effect. With a character so smart that she doesn't have much to learn, body size is stereotypically substituted for character development. Elisa’s "mountainous" body shrivels away when she spends a month on forced march eating rat, and thus she is a better person. Still, it's wonderfully refreshing to see a heroine using her brain to win a war rather than strapping on a sword and charging into battle.
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel, reminiscent of Naomi Kritzer's Fires of the Faithful (2002), keeps this entry fresh. (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202648-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
If it were a Golden Age comic, this tale of ridiculous science, space dogs and humanoid aliens with flashlights in their hands might not be bad. Alas... Number Four is a fugitive from the planet Lorien, which is sloppily described as both "hundreds of lightyears away" and "billions of miles away." Along with eight other children and their caretakers, Number Four escaped from the Mogadorian invasion of Lorien ten years ago. Now the nine children are scattered on Earth, hiding. Luckily and fairly nonsensically, the planet's Elders cast a charm on them so they could only be killed in numerical order, but children one through three are dead, and Number Four is next. Too bad he's finally gained a friend and a girlfriend and doesn't want to run. At least his newly developing alien powers means there will be screen-ready combat and explosions. Perhaps most idiotic, "author" Pittacus Lore is a character in this fiction—but the first-person narrator is someone else entirely. Maybe this is a natural extension of lightly hidden actual author James Frey's drive to fictionalize his life, but literature it ain't. (Science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-196955-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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