Book Review: New Lands by Geoff Rodkey (Chronicles of Egg #2)

Stars: 5 out of 5

Pros: Great story and characters brought to life with great writing

Cons: Only if you haven’t read book one

The Bottom Line:

Continues story

With more great twists, characters

Pages just fly by

Explore New Lands with Egg

Do not start reading Egg’s adventures here.  Really, I can’t emphasize this enough.  While I am about to go on and praise New Lands, you don’t want to read this book yet.  Emphasis on yet.  Trust me on that.

The reason I say that is because this book is a continuation of what came in book 1.  Author Geoff Rodkey does a good job of filling in the back story as we go along.  I seriously doubt you’ll be lost if you jump in here.  However, it will spoil some surprises and plot points from the first book.  You really don’t want to do that.  But once you’ve read the first book, you’ll be racing to find out what happens in this one.

Egg and Guts are heading to New Lands in an attempt to follow the map that Egg has memorized to the location of the ancient treasure left hidden years ago.  However, they are warned that the people of Pella Nonna, the city in this continent, will kill them on sight because they are a different race.  Worse yet, if they somehow survive that, they will need to journey into the parts of this land inhabited by the Natives, some of whom will also kill them on sight.  Will they be able to survive long enough to get the help they need in their quest?

The book starts strongly and never really lets you go until the end.  There was once or twice when I thought things might be getting slow, but just then a twist comes and the plot was off in another new direction.  As a result, I never wanted to put the book down.  Who cares that I’m above the target middle grade age group, this was a fun adventure with plenty of twists along the way.

You can couple the great story with great characters.  Egg is a flawed but charming hero, and I really enjoyed spending time with him.  The returning characters (and there are several besides Guts) are equally as well developed and grow as the book progresses.  We also get several new characters.  One becomes an important part of the story, and she gets developed pretty well.  The rest are developed enough to serve their purpose in the story.

All this is wrapped in a conversational first person narration that flows off the page.  It was easy to get lost in the story, which makes it perfect for the target audience.  There are also bits of humor thrown in to spice things up.

Remember how I said that I never wanted to put the book down?  That actually still applied when I hit the final page.  There’s a bit of a cliffhanger that happens then, and I am quite anxious to find out how it is all going to play out.  Fortunately, the final book in the series is set for release in April of 2014, so I won’t have long to wait.

So what are you waiting for?  If you are new to Egg’s world, hunt down the first book and enjoy.  And once you’ve read that, have New Lands ready to go because you’ll want to read it as well.

NOTE: I won an ARC of this book in a contest.  The review is still my own.

This is my entry in this week's Marvelous Middle Grade Monday.