From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
This novel for middle-graders was light and entertaining and a decently enjoyable read. It took off at a great pace and was highly entertaining, but toward the end I have to say that it seems to lose track a bit and began to flounder, and the ending itself wasn't exactly thrilling, but overall I found it a decent read for the intended audience.
The story is of Chaya, a young girl who is an accomplished and shameless thief, but she uses her spoils to help out people in her local community. She finds she's bitten-off more than she can chew though, when she actually steals jewels from the queen herself, and ends up accidentally getting her best friend jailed as the thief. She rescues him and makes her escape on the king's prize elephant, and the adventure gets wild!
There were a few minor issues I had with the writing. Amazon's Kindle process is well-known for turning books into kindling. Why people continue to support Amazon and its practices, I do not know. I guess capitalism has a lot to do with it. As an example of what I mean, at one point I read this:
"You can see him, and then we’ll leave." He kept 53 looking at her from time to time."As you can see, the page number (53 in this case) is incorporated right into the text. Kindle will not convert text properly unless it's the plainest vanilla. You cannot have headers and footers in your book when you let them convert it. Trust me, if Amazon's Kindle can screw up your text, it will gleefully do so. And you sure as hell don't ever want to let them kindle your images. This is one of many reasons why I refuse to publish with Amazon or have any truck with them or their Goodreads website.
There were other problems, such as misplaced backgrounds for the chapter header numbers. There was another example of kindling here, where a whole line was mashed together:
you.” Aroundthemthementalkedandlaughedandmunched their food,I also read some seemingly anachronistic text, such as, "He’s been fired, Chaya." which not only sounds way too modern for the story setting, but you don't 'fire' a military guard! At another point I read,
"Orders?" said Chaya. "From whom?"Some writers cannot get out of their own way, it seems! I know that 'whom' is technically correct here, but no one actually says 'whom' anymore in real life, unless they're really pretentious. That just jumped out at me as being inauthentic, especially since Chaya isn't exactly a language scholar!
But these are relatively minor quibbles and while you cannot cure a kindling of a novel, many of the issues hopefully will have been fixed in the final published version. The important thing is, like I said, that I enjoyed the story, the earlier parts and the beginning of their jungle adventure more than the last, I dunno, third or so? It seems like the king's men had a much easier time of tracking Chaya and co. in the jungle than reality would support, and I could have actually read a whole novel about Chaya's thieving exploits, but overall this was fun. I really liked Chaya. She did become a bit of a boor at times in the jungle, but despite her failings she was a strong female character and I'm all for those. I enjoyed this story. It was fresh, different, and entertaining for the most part, and I commend it as a worthy read. I'll be keeping an eye open for future Nizrana Farook novels.
