Author: Stan Lee
Publisher: Disney Press
Rating: WORTHY!
Illustrated by Andie Tong
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
Erratum:
p51 "He's one of us know..." should be "He's one of us now..."
p51 "We keep tabs of Maxwell..." should be "We keep tabs on Maxwell..."
Today is the last day of my alphabet December reviews, with a double 'Z' brace of books. I'm done! Never again!
This novel (not a graphic novel, but a novel with some graphics) was available for both Adobe Digital Editions and the Kindle and I looked at it in both. The Kindle edition was problematical because the first part of each chapter had text which was grayed out and difficult to read as Kindle grey scale text. In the ADE version, I could see why - that text is on a red background. Also what are full-page illustrations in the ADE are very small images in the Kindle and so lose a lot of their impact. Other than that, both editions looked fine.
The story - which is evidently book one in the inevitable series - begins with Steven Lee, who is on a tour of a museum in China. Steven is Chinese-American and he's thinking that the tour guide is at best distracted, and at worst out of her league, when strange things begin happening. He and the tour guide, Jumanne (not her real name!), are the last to leave the room they're currently in, but as he is leaving, he hears a scream. The tour guide seems to become a different person at this point: focused and purposeful as she disappears through a hidden door. Asking himself, "What would a superhero do?" Steven follows.
He's rather surprised to find the Jumanne's clothes at the foot of a long flight of stairs, but not as surprised as he is to discover, when he reaches a balcony down there, a guy down below who is apparently being imbued, one-by-one, with the powers associated with the twelve signs of the Chinese zodiac: Dog, Dragon, Goat, Horse, Monkey, Ox, Pig, Rabbit, Rat, Rooster, Snake, and Tiger.
The guy's name is Maxwell, and he's the bad guy and so is of course, a dragon. It turns out that Jumanne and Maxwell's assistant, Carlos, are both aligned against Maxwell, and Steven is actually a candidate for taking on zodiacal powers himself! He's a tiger. Carlos has no such affinity, but is an excellent side-kick. Jumanne, whose real name, it turns out, is Jasmine, also happens to be a dragon.
There are two free mini-books on BN & Amazon, each of which offers some details of the characters (six on each side), and offers about six chapters of the Zodiac novel as well. It's the same six chapters in each book, but one book details the good guys: Dragon (Jasmine), Goat, Pig, Rabbit, Rooster (Roxanne), Tiger (Steven), the other the bad guys: dog, horse (Josie), monkey, ox, rat, snake, plus Maxwell on the dragon). Maxwell wanted to absorb all the powers - something which is supposed to be impossible- and then dole them out to minions whom he could control. He claims he wants to make the world a better place, but Jasmine's crew doesn't believe him.
Once the initial confrontation is over and the zodiac device has been split, Jasmine, Carlos, and Steven take off across the world tracking down the young people who have somehow managed to pull down the various spare zodiac powers that Maxwell hadn't yet claimed for himself. Given that they're complaining they don't have large financial backing like Maxwell does, how they manage to commandeer passage on a container ship and then flights to Paris and other places, I have no idea!
'This is very much a middle grade story. It isn't aimed at adults. As such it wasn't that entertaining for me, but it wasn't bad, and I can see how young kids would find it engrossing, so I'm going to rate it positively. The art-work by Andie Tong, which served more as dividers between chapters than anything else, was very good, so all-in-all, not too bad of an effort, but not very demanding or engaging for more mature readers.
