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A review by sreddous
Golden Gate by James Ponti
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
James Ponti is a genius of a middle-grade storyteller. His books are complex and detailed and take younger readers seriously. It's great to feel the RESPECT that his prose has for all readers but especially younger readers. I like this series a lot as an adult and especially would have liked it as an elementary- and middle-schooler.
This second volume continues the high-energy fun of the first City Spies book. There are a lot of actually pretty emotionally-mature dialogue scenes and it's nice to watch young characters sort through their insecurities and have self-awareness and reflect on their behavior when they can. The end scene is fast-paced and the action is tense. I couldn't really predict how many of the twists would go -- I found myself making some guesses, but the way things turned out is still believable and well-set-up.
Overall, though, I think some restructuring would help this book. A few too many times IMO, a really cool revelation and/or twist happened offscreen, and we just get a debriefing of what happened -- it happens more than once or twice that Brooklyn puts together some big notes and findings about the mysteries but we the reader only really learn about it once she's already done it and she returns to tell us in dialogue what she did. This wouldn't be too bad since technically this book is framed around Sydney and some of her insecurities, but actually, Sydney's insecurities aren't really the focus of too many chapters, so it's hard for that framing to make up for the "after the fact" stuff that other characters do. So overall I found myself thinking, "Aw, I wish I could have seen you do all that cool spy work" a few times in this book, and I think if some of the other exposition-y stuff was trimmed there'd be more room to see super cool spy stuff actually unfold.
Overall, this series is a ton of fun -- distinct characters, emotional connections, interesting settings.
This second volume continues the high-energy fun of the first City Spies book. There are a lot of actually pretty emotionally-mature dialogue scenes and it's nice to watch young characters sort through their insecurities and have self-awareness and reflect on their behavior when they can. The end scene is fast-paced and the action is tense. I couldn't really predict how many of the twists would go -- I found myself making some guesses, but the way things turned out is still believable and well-set-up.
Overall, though, I think some restructuring would help this book. A few too many times IMO, a really cool revelation and/or twist happened offscreen, and we just get a debriefing of what happened -- it happens more than once or twice that Brooklyn puts together some big notes and findings about the mysteries but we the reader only really learn about it once she's already done it and she returns to tell us in dialogue what she did. This wouldn't be too bad since technically this book is framed around Sydney and some of her insecurities, but actually, Sydney's insecurities aren't really the focus of too many chapters, so it's hard for that framing to make up for the "after the fact" stuff that other characters do. So overall I found myself thinking, "Aw, I wish I could have seen you do all that cool spy work" a few times in this book, and I think if some of the other exposition-y stuff was trimmed there'd be more room to see super cool spy stuff actually unfold.
Overall, this series is a ton of fun -- distinct characters, emotional connections, interesting settings.