Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City

Title: Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City
Author: Kirsten Miller

What it's about: Twelve-year-old Ananka Fishbein is an ordinary girl until she meets Kiki Strike and discovers a series of tunnels under New York known as the Shadow City. Along with Kiki and four other girls who form the group known as the Irregulars, Ananka will have to help save New York from a terrible threat.

What I thought: When I first picked this book up from the library, I thought, hey, it looks like an interesting concept, but knowing my luck and the way books for teen girls are usually written, it'll turn out to be insipid and dumb. Man, I was pleasantly surprised. Ananka is a clever narrator, and she's a good choice for the job, too. All of the Irregulars are well-developed characters, really. Kiki's interesting, too, and I think it's cool that she's not the narrator, as that lets her keep her mystique. The descriptions are really vivid, too, and detailed.

Overall: Amazingly deep for something that could have been shallow and stupid.

And I'm really behind on reviews, aren't I? I have read and need to post entries for The Star of Kazan, Surviving the Applewhites, The Man with the Golden Torc, and Princess Ben. So, yeah, I'll be getting to those. Soon.