by Helen Phillips
ages: 10+
First sentence: “So here we are in this shaky little airplane high above the jungle which is kind of (very) scary.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

Madeline (only her family and close friends call her Mad) and Ruby (Roo, to her older sister) are sisters whose father is the Bird Guy: he will go anywhere to study birds. So, when he gets invited to Central America to track a bird that has supposedly been extinct, he jumps at the chance.

He was only supposed to be gone a month. But 10 months later, he still hasn’t returned, and there’s this guy, Ken, from the corporation La Lava, who keeps hanging around. And there are what Mad calls “the Creepies”: feelings that they’re being watched. And, finally, the Very Weird Letter from their dad to Roo. All of this prompts the girls and their mother to head down to La Lava in search of their father. But little do they realize the complicated mess they’re walking into, or their role in helping their dad escape.

I have mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand, the present tense bugged me (it always does), but there also felt like there was something off. Perhaps it was because it was written in present tense, and the reader figures things out along with Mad and Roo. Perhaps it was because our main character (in my opinion) is the least interesting person in the book. Perhaps it was this weird mix between science and “magic” (anything magical was explained away by science, yet sometimes the coincidences were a bit… much).  It was never enough for me to want to put the book down, but it was enough for me to not entirely embrace it, either.

That said, by the end, Phillips had won me over (albeit tentatively) to her world, and I wasn’t sorry I put in the effort to get there.