If you're in my Summer Reading Program group, you may find this title familiar. It's in my giant bag of book picks for the 4th and 5th graders. While trying to coerce one of my more fickle readers into picking something from my gargantuan bag of tricks, I couldn't pass up this read...and it was worth taking home.
Samantha Sutton has wanted to be an archaeologist like her Uncle Jay for her entire life. And when he finally gives her, and her annoying brother Evan, the opprotunity to go on a real archaeological dig and help out, she's as excited as could be.
Once at the dig site in Peru, an ancient temple in the Andes mountains ("as ancient to the Inca as the Inca are to us"), Samantha finds out that some weird things attributed to "El Loco" have been happening at the dig. With suspicious running high against one of her Uncle's prize (though seriously rude) student, Samantha knows she has to figure out who is really behind the destruction of the dig sites, and theft of important artifacts.
I found Samantha to be a likable enough character, although some of the language in the book made me feel like this was "written down". I also didn't like the way her parents were portrayed as the kind of people who don't know (or care...) about the difference between archaeology and paleontology --especially when archaeology runs in the family. (If you don't know the difference, let me enlighten you: paleontologists deal with fossils, archaeologists deal with people/cultural artifacts...and that's the easy definition; there are some blurred lines, but not many). I also really...really...really dislike books that insert a foreign language into a book; especially when they don't translate sentences you need to understand to get the drama! I am hopeless at languages (ironic, huh?). I took a semester of Spanish in college...and my professor didn't encourage me to sign up for another semester of it --which I was fine with. I have a lot of patience for foreign books to be translated into English.
Other than that however, it was an engaging read --and the first in a series. There is one copy available in the MORE system, which is currently in my bag 'o books but if you ask nicely, I'll let you check it out.
So, that's what I've been reading, how about you?
-S
