Thirteen-year-old Elma Quill\u2019s family isn\u2019t like any other\u2014people believe that her grandfather Jonathan is crazy, her mother, Patricia, has recently come back from the dead, and her father, Jason, is missing. In a quaint Victorian farmhouse in Oklahoma, Patricia calls a meeting so that Elma can hear the full story of her family\u2019s treasure, though Jonathan has a different name for it: \u201cMore like my curse. Or rather, our\u00a0curse. Our family curse.\u201d He has been entangled in a search for a treasure that began in 1963, when his dying mentor, P.R. Simms, bequeathed him a secret tome called The Codex. This journal contains clues stretching back to when the famous author Washington Irving hid chests containing mysterious gold coins in the prairie. As is the case with Wheelbarger\u2019s narrative, with its timelines that overlap and intersect, the history of this treasure (\u201cthe Draco Hoard\u201d) is not as straightforward as one might expect. Competing organizations resort to desperate experiments, spy missions, and even kidnapping to beat everyone else to the booty. Among the outlaws, Spanish cultists, and Soviet agents on the treasure\u2019s trail, it may be up to Elma to restore balance and save the world from exposure to a highly dangerous substance that can bend time and space. This debut novel, a tie-in to an augmented-reality experience, is an exciting adventure that plays on themes from films like National Treasure and Indiana Jones franchises. The narrative\u2019s constant time-skipping is not overly confusing until the last quarter of the book, but it still may be excessive for some readers. The ending is abrupt but satisfying after a gripping buildup. Anderson\u2019s pen-and-ink illustrations at the head of each chapter are sophisticated and timeless, standing in stark contrast to Giordano\u2019s flatter, AR-inspired icons that appear occasionally within the text.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thirteen-year-old Elma Quill\u2019s family isn\u2019t like any other\u2014people believe that her grandfather Jonathan is crazy, her mother, Patricia, has recently come back from the dead, and her father, Jason, is missing. In a quaint Victorian farmhouse in Oklahoma, Patricia calls a meeting so that Elma can hear the full story of her family\u2019s treasure, though […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3899,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3898"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}