Monday, July 21, 2014

Aviation, Whales, and Alaskan History, All Between the Pages of Kitty Hawk and the Curse of the Yukon Gold by Iain Reading

Kitty Hawk and the Curse of the Yukon Gold (Kitty Hawk Flying Detective Agency, #1)This is a fun adventure book aimed at middle-grade readers, but I believe adults will get something out of it as well.

We have a fresh-out-of-HS heroine who gets a clothing company to sponsor her and takes off from Canada to Alaska to spend her summer whale-watching. This was very cool and I enjoyed this tremendously. As she flies around, she witnesses things whales do and I was educated by these scenes. I learned a lot, actually, that I didn't know about humpback whales, from their smelly breath to their eating habits.

BUT, Kitty Hawk's whale-watching expedition is interrupted when she takes it upon herself to make a stupid detour. I'm still trying to get my mind around the fact that a relatively smart young women took this risk. Seems implausible to me, honestly. Anyway, her detour leads her to "discover" stolen gold and gets her kidnapped. From this point on she's tied up with a rope, climbing mountains, eating energy bars, and assisting the gold thieves.

Despite my being perturbed over the fact she was so unbelievably dumb in the first place, I came to enjoy the adventure and the entire story of the stolen gold surprised me. The book is fun. The heroine spunky. I'd let a teenage daughter of mine read it.

Annoyances:
The heroine constantly talks to a little voice. I was super annoyed by this. Also adding confusion to these conversations she has with her little voice is the fact that her thoughts are in quotation marks, leading me to think at first reading that she said that out loud. Then I would remember she's speaking to that little voice in her head...

While I appreciated that Alaskan gold-rush history made into the book to educate younger readers, I do not like how this was gone about. It's TOLD through dialogue, story-tellers, throughout the story, meaning all these historical bits and stories--and there are pages of them--are TOLD and not shown. Telling instead of showing is very boring. I don't see myself reading the rest of the series if this method is going to continue. These bits are like reading a biography and I'm simply not into that.

I received this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.


1 comment:

  1. Thanks so much for taking the time to read and review Kitty Hawk and the Curse of the Yukon Gold by Iain Reading. We really appreciate it!

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