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Geeks and the Holy Grail (Camelot Code #2), by Mari Mancusi, for Timeslip Tuesday

The first book in the Camelot Code series, The Once and Future Geek , mixed time travel between the medieval world of King Arthur and our own, and it is a very entertaining book.  The second book in the series, Geeks and Holy Grail (Hyperion, October 2019), is also entertaining (though not quite as funny; King Arthur as a modern day high school student is hard to beat....). When Morgana, sworn enemy of King Arthur, attacks the druids of Avalon, Nimue, the youngest of them, takes the Holy Grail and runs with it.  King Arthur is dying, and only the Grail can save him.  Desperate to keep it from falling into Morgana's hands, she stumbles into Merlin's Crystal Cave.  But instead of Merlin there to help her (he's on vacation in Los Vegas, in our time), there's only his very inexperienced apprentice, Emrys.  His attempt to hide the grail works, in a sense--as a small, flatulent dragon, it sure doesn't look much like a grail.  But it isn't much use to Arthur as a...

The Secret

SYLO

By: D.J. MacHale

When I was reading SYLO I decided it would make a terrific movie.  It is action packed, captivating, and well paced -- for the most part.  The beginning was well written and introduced an island off the coast of Maine, Pemberwick Island.  The town is very close and everyone knows just about everyone else.  Autumn is coming on but the warmth of winter is still holding on.  One evening during an intense football game the team's best player, Marty Wiggins, drops dead.  Tucker, a bench player on the football team, witnessed the whole thing and even heard Marty's last words.  To clear his mind he went on a midnight bike ride with his best friend Quinn.  On this bike ride a mysterious shadow flying over the water makes an elongated sound before exploding knocking both Tucker and Quinn off their bikes as well as someone else off their bike.  The only other witness was someone sitting in a pickup truck that disappeared before the police arrived.  The next day Tucker runs into someone he doesn't know, Mr. Feit, who offers him a mysterious red sea salt.  Tucker eats a tiny bit of it and becomes impossibly fast and strong until it wears off.  Once the island gets over Marty's death and how bad Tucker is at replacing his position on the football team life goes back to normal.  Until the lobster pot festival.  Near the end of the boat race one of the competitors runs off course, crashes, and is found dead, but not from the crash.  At this point a branch of the US army, SYLO, invades Pemberwick.  The person in charge of SYLO, Captain Granger, is steely and ruthless.  He tells them that they are barricading the island because there is a virus that they don't want to spread from the mainland.  Tucker and Quinn don't quite believe this but nothing is confirmed until Tucker and Tori, another girl from the island, see something that puts Tucker, Quinn, and Tori in danger for knowing too much.

Overall the book was very exciting but had a couple of flaws.  At the beginning of the book Tucker notices how his parents react oddly to the news of the invasion and seem to know something more.  Even though Tucker notices it he willingly decides not to care.  This bothered me for a long time because odd things were happening on the Island and Tucker didn't care that his parents might know something more.  But, this was mostly taken care of when Quinn yells at Tucker for not asking more questions.  Another problem was what happened to Quinn, it's too fishy.  The next problem was Olivia.  Olivia is a girl visiting the island and gets stuck on the Island without her family when SYLO invades.  On the day of the lobster pot festival Tucker over hears Olivia yelling into her cell phone saying she had already been on the island for too long and it wasn't what she agreed to.  Olivia comes up with a lame excuse and Tucker believes her.  This happened right before SYLO invaded and Tucker  does not even take notice.  From that point on I was always suspicious of Olivia.  She didn't do anything else odd until she seemed a little too handy with gun shot wounds and nothing more is discovered about Olivia.  This leads us to the last problem: the ending.  Just about nothing is wrapped up.  It ends with the worst words in the world "TO BE CONTINUED..." I was not happy.  The characters finished the first step of their journey but don't find any of the answers they were looking for.  Obviously there is going to be a second book but there needed to be a little but more of a conclusion.  Also, hopefully this will be fixed before it gets published, but, there were some very obvious typos.  A couple of times it would have two possessive adjectives in a row -- it would say things like Mr. Feits his.  And then another typo was the name of a sort of important place.  It started out as WCSH but on the next page it became WCHS.

This book was between a 3.5 and 4.5.  It's not really a 4 though.  Some of the book was very good but some of it seemed a little off.  As a whole it is probably around a 4 but some parts were clearly better than other parts.  The book was like a bag of chocolates.  Its a bag of chocolates, rather than a box, because you can't really tell how many  chocolates you have.  The chocolates are very good but then randomly they are filled with something you don't like.  A lot of the chocolates have original flavors that you've never tasted before but are very good.  Then when you think you should be a third of the way through someone grabs the bag from you and says you can have it back in a year.  That person is not very nice.

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Order of the Majestic, by Matt Myklusch

Order of the Majestic , by Matt Myklusch (middle grade, Aladdin, May 7 2019), is one to offer kids dreaming of magic, and hoping it will find them one day. 12-year-old Joey Kopecky wasn't one of those kids.  He was content flying under the radar, living an unambitious life of computer gaming in New Jersey, when his life was upended by perfect standardized test scores.  Now he's been offered a place at one of the most exclusive schools in the country, where every kid is a genius.  He feels like a fraud--knowing how to take tests is a skill, certainty , but is it really a hallmark of genius? But one final test, a strange one involving 150 magic tricks to solve, leads to a 151st trick that transports him to the ghostly shell of a once grand magical theater, the Majestic.  It's fallen into ruins, and to get inside Jack must pass through spooky wraiths, but once he makes it, he finds the magician who once made it famous, the Great Rodondo.  Rodondo was once the leade...

this week's round-up of middle grade sci fi and fantasy from around the blogs (7/14/19)

Here's what I found this week; please let me know of anything I missed! The Reviews And All Between (Green Sky #3), by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, at Say What? The Book of Dust, by Philip Pullman, at Girl With Her Head in a Book Brightstorm, by Vashti Hardy, at Charlotte's Library Changling (the Oddmire #1), by William Ritter, at Metalphantasmreads , Storythreads , and Bookworm for Kids The Haunting of Henry Davis, by Kathryn Siebel, at From My Bookshelf The House with Chicken Legs, by Sophie Anderson, at Arkham Reviews The Longest Night of Charlie Moon, by Christopher Edge, at Middle Grade Mafia The Lost Tide Warriors, by Catherine Doyle, at Book Craic  The Magic Bed-Knob, by Mary Norton, at Fantasy Literature Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow, by Jessica Townsend, at Heather's Reading Hideaway The Rithmatist, by Brandon Sanderson, at Read Till Dawn Serafina and the Seven Stars, by Robert Beatty, at the B and N Kids Blog Ship Rats: A Tale of Heroism on the High Seas, by R...

The Shores Beyond Time, by Kevin Emerson

The Shores Beyond Time , by Kevin Emerson, is the third book in the Chronicle of the Dark Star series that began with Last Day on Mars , and continued in The Oceans Between Stars (links to my reviews).   Basically the premise is humanity, and an alien race with whom humanity is at war, are out among the stars after our sun went nova (and some other stars have too), both races looking for new homes (the aliens because humanity decided the Telphon's planet would be a great new home, and essentially nuked it, so there are only about three hundred of them left).  One human boy, Liam, and one Telphon girl, who goes by Phoebe, became friends on Mars and Liam met an ancient time travelling alien of a different species (as told in the first book) and were both separated from their people on a long lonely space flight, and Liam started travelling in time himself (the second book). In this third book, Liam and Phoebe find themselves at the heart of the mystery of the supernovas and the...

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