About the Book
In Serwa Boateng's Guide to Vampire Hunting best-selling author Rick Riordan presents best-selling YA author Roseanne A. Brown's middle grade debut about a pre-teen vampire slayer with a strong helping of Ghanaian folklore.
For most kids, catching fireflies is a fun summer activity. For twelve-year-old Serwa Boateng, it's a matter of life and death.
That's because Serwa knows that some fireflies are really adze, shapeshifting vampires from the forests of Southeastern Ghana. Adze prey on the blood of innocents, possessing their minds and turning them into hulking monsters, and for generations, slayers like Serwa and her parents have protected an unknowing public from their threats.
Serwa is the best adze slayer her age, and she knew how to use a crossbow before she could even ride a bike. But when an obayifo (witch) destroys her childhood home while searching for a drum, do Serwa's parents take her with them on their quest to defeat her? No. Instead, they dump Serwa with her hippie aunt and cryptic-obsessed cousin in the middle of Nowheresville, Maryland "for her own safety." Now, instead of crossbows and battle armor, she's dealing with mean girls and algebra, and for the first time in her life she doesn't have to carry a staff everywhere she goes, which is . . . kind of nice, actually.
Just as Serwa starts to get the hang of this whole normal girl who doesn't punch vampires every day thing, an adze infiltrates her school. It's up to her to whip some of her classmates into monster-fighting shape before all of them become firefly food. And when she uncovers a secret that upends everything she thought she knew about her family's role in the slayer vs. adze war, Serwa will have to decide which side of herself--normal girl or slayer--is the right one.
After all, seventh grade is hard enough without adding vampires to the mix.
My Take on the Book
If you are a fan of stories such as Rick Riordan, this is a book that you will love. The book has amazing characters that really connect well together. I also appreciated that the book brought in Ghanaian mythology. I can say I knew nothing about this, but the book does a great job of allowing the reader to learn more about and appreciate this. The characters are not perfect, but instead the author has added in flaws to Serwa and other characters. She lets Serwa make mistakes and it is these flaws that makes her and other characters relatable. The book inserts tough topics from microaggressions to discrimination to other forms of overt racism. The book was fast paced and in the end it sets up the reader to be excited for a sequel!
----------------------------------------
New to the Divadom or to Dad of Divas Reviews?
Please Subscribe to my RSS Feed! Subscribe in a reader
Questions? Drop me a line at dadofdivas@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment