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Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2017So, our heroine, aided by a motley crew of companions, battles secret monsters in order to rescue a kidnapped child. Have you heard that one before? I have. But, we've been recycling plots since the first reed brush hit the first papyrus, so the real question is - what has author done with this? To my mind the answer is - quite a bit.
Our heroine is middle schooler Kelly. She needs to make money for camp and so she advertises herself as available to babysit, despite having no experience in that regard. How hard could it be? Off the bat she ends up headed to the lower end of the school social order, (babysitter? how tacky), and she gets impressed into babysitting for the child, Jacob, of her Mom's imperious boss. The usual sitter, Liz, isn't available. The kid's a terror, but more to the point, the kid is terrorized by nightmares. When those nightmares turn out to be real, and kidnap Jacob, Kelly calls for help from Liz, and we're off to the races. It turns out kids' night terrors are real and that there's a secret society of babysitters whose job it is to protect kids from night monsters.
From there we get multiple levels. On one level we get the whole babysitter society history. Up front, we have a quest to rescue Kelly's kidnapped charge from monsters. Then we get the Liz backstory. And we get a crew of supposed school "losers" who are actually heroic babysitters. Plus, we get some school crush/clique drama. Wow. Busy, busy, busy.
The best part is that the author keeps a pretty firm hand on all of this. Kelly is not a whiner or lameo. She rolls with the punches and always rises to the occasion. None of the plotlines are heavy handed, (including even the school daze stuff). We don't go through reams of tedious exposition on the history of the babysitter society. Everything is well paced and the tale, (which is actually pretty long for a middle grade adventure), zips along nicely. As a bonus, there are some pretty sharp, or edgy, or at least intentionally ironic, observations that punch up the narrative and let the author wink a bit at the alert reader.
So, the upshot is that this was a well crafted, nicely plotted, fast paced, sometimes amusing and sometimes gripping, action fantasy that I thought elevated the premise and rewarded the reader. A nice find. (Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)
