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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...
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The Secret

The Secret

The Battle (The Gauntlet #2) by Karuna Riazi

The Battle, by Karuna Riazi (middle grade, Salaam Reads / Simon & Schuster, August, 2019) has just as much exciting fun as its predecessor, The Gauntlet!

It's four years after Ahmad Mirza, his big sister Farah and two of her friends were sucked into a game that came to life, and Farah led the group to defeat the game's architect (as told in The Gauntlet).  Four years in which Ahmed has gotten into trouble, made no friends, and obsessively drawn the game's city setting, Paheli.  And now Ahmed is sitting in the principle's office, in trouble for sneaking the package his sister mailed to him at school from the school office.  Then Winnie, a "good kid," shows up to explain she was the one who snuck the package out.  And when Ahmed sets off home that day, she follows him.

He doesn't understand why, but can't help but hope that Winnie might be a friend....And so the two of them look at the high-tech video game that was in the package--The Battle-- and they begin to fiddle with the game.  Around them everyone freezes.  The game falls, and begins to ooze blackness, and the blackness swallow them and takes them back to the city of Ahmed's dreams, Paheli.

The Architect of The Gauntlet was a spoiled, entitled monster of a boy, and now he's been joined by a manipulative, entitled girl who styles herself the MasterMind, and she'd coding the Paheli into a techno-jazzed up version of its original self.  It's all a disorienting, crazy mess to Ahmed and Winnie, and the only way out is to beat the game by overcoming the challenges the MasterMind and the Architect have dreamed up for them.

It's a wild and crazy world they are in, full of marvelous, malevolent, magnificent settings, creatures, puzzles, and traps.  Ahmed and Winnie make a good team, and are able to get through their three challenges and expect to be sent home again....and just when the reader is wondering it was all too easy, the kids realize those challenges weren't the actual danger.  The game is more than the two manipulators who are its current tinkerers....there is ancient magic at its heart. (Basically, in good gaming style, there's a Big Boss who appears after the earlier challenges).

Paheli sure is a magnificent setting, and all its wonders and dangers are delightful vivid.  So vivid, and so full of many dangers, in fact, that the characters of Ahmed and Winnie don't really get a chance to develop much.  Their strengths play off each other to some extent, and they make progress towards trusting each other and being friends, but essentially they are pawns in a game, and they never quite made it to fully three-dimensional characters in my mind (especially Winnie).  (I really wanted to learn more about the MasterMind, too....).  And so I was a little disappointed.

Though this is an indirect sequel to The Gauntlet, it's not really necessary to have read that book first.  Ahmed doesn't truly remember having been in Paheli before, though it haunts his dreams, and though characters from The Gauntlet show up, I think they make sense on their own terms in this story.

For readers who delight in sparkly action, this won't be an issue, though, and many young gamers will find the kids' adventures (highjacking flying cars, fighting off zombie monkeys, escaping deadly traps, and more) entertaining reading!

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Dead Voices, by Katherine Arden

Dead Voices , by Katherine Arden (middle grade, G.P. Putnam's Sons, August 2019), is a delightfully spooky sequel to Small Spaces , perfect for a chilling read as winter draws closer! Ollie, Coco, and Brian became close friends under somewhat trying circumstances last fall--the evil Smiling Man trying to turn them into scarecrows--and now winter has come, they're on their way to a fun weekend at a new ski lodge with Ollie's dad and Coco's mom.  They almost don't make it through the intense snowstorm, and when they arrive, they find themselves the only visitors.  The snow keeps falling, trapping them inside, and the power goes out.  And there are ghosts. The day after they arrive another visiter makes it through the snow, a young reporter for a ghost hunting magazine.  The owners of the hotel aren't sure that publicity about the hotel's previous incarnation of an orphanage with a dark, sad, history is what they want, but the young man is keen to get ghost hun...
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Premeditated

I'm going to start with the blurb from the back cover of this book, because it does a remarkable job of introducing the story in very few words: A week ago, Dinah’s cousin Claire cut her wrists. Five days ago, Dinah found Claire’s diary and discovered why. Three days ago, Dinah stopped crying and came up with a plan. Two days ago, she ditched her piercings and bleached the black dye from her hair. Yesterday, knee socks and uniform plaid became a predator’s camouflage. Today, she’ll find the boy who broke Claire. By tomorrow, he’ll wish he were dead. Claire and Dinah are cousins who are incredibly close, close enough that when Claire ends up in a coma in the hospital from a failed suicide attempt, Dinah knows where to look to find Claire's diary (or the computerized version of one, anyway). Dinah figures out what drove Claire to the point of suicide--a boy from the private school that Claire was supposed to attend that fall. Dinah enrolls at the school herself, determined to get...
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Storm

By: D.J. MacHale This is the sequel to SYLO where a small island off the coast of Maine was invaded by the US Navy (the US navy is called SYLO).  The main characters, Tucker, Kent, Olivia, and Tori escaped from Pemberwick and got to Portland, Maine.  In Storm they pick up another character, Jon, a doctor from a Portland hospital.  As it turns out the US Navy is at war with the US Airforce.  Over three fourths of the worlds population is dead.  Tucker, Tori, Kent, Olivia, and, Jon are trying to get to Nevada where a radio signal they picked up said to come if they wanted to fight back.  There is a lot of action and the plot moves along at a good pace.  One thing that was different from the first book was how much you found out about their relationships.  Kent is with Olivia and Tucker is with Tori.  It sort of bothered me that they were so into who was with who when they were trying to figure out why most of the world's population was killed. ...
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