Keeper of the Lost Cities: The Frustrating but Mildly Entertaining Elf Book Series

        

        Sometime somewhat recently I decided that there’s a point in your life where you have to stop reading Harry Potter on repeat and start something else. It gets a little bit predictable after your 8th time… 

Anyway, my cousin’s friend told my cousin to read Keeper of the Lost Cities, and then my cousin started it and liked it and told me to read it. So I did. And it was okay I guess.

What is it about? 

Keeper of the Lost Cities is a middle grade fantasy series about a girl named Sophie who is a senior in high school as a 12 year old and lives a normal life (other than being a senior in high school as a 12 year old). Oh, and also, she is a telepath and can read people’s minds. And she’s never told anyone that. 

During a school field trip to a museum one day, a boy named Fitz shows up and tells her she’s an elf, takes her to this whole other world (not really, the locations where the elves live are hidden around earth and elves transport around using crystals to light leap). But anyway, Sophie has to leave Humanland, get her family’s memories wiped of her existence, and start living with an adoptive family of elves. She doesn’t know who her biological parents are. She finds out she was placed with the humans for some sort of project that no one really knows much about, but Fitz and his dad and brother have been looking for her for years. 

Sophie has a lot to learn and feels like an outsider (because she is, but also she has brown eyes while all the other elves have blue eyes). She has to go to a new school and learn how the world really works, because apparently almost everything the humans have thought they knew about science is wrong (which is why it is possible to light leap to travel around I guess?). Almost all the other elves have abilities like Sophie’s telepathy, and they usually get their abilities when they’re about 12-15. Sophie got hers when she was 5 though, after an accident that she can’t really remember.

The not-so-good parts

Throughout the series, Sophie learns more about herself and the project she was a part of, and fights against the bad guys with her group of friends. However, I thought it got pretty repetitive, going on missions, not figuring out much, getting captured, over and over again. I think it could be faster paced with more revelations, and the author could have made the series 5 300 page books, but there are 11 books, many of them more than 700 pages. So far. The series isn’t done being written and I feel like there’s a LOT of things that haven’t been resolved so it might not even be very close to being done…

Also, I don’t really like Sophie. She can be extremely oblivious and she ignores some of her friends sometimes. She also has a disturbing nervous habit of pulling out her eyelashes, and she pulls a few out most chapters. I don’t know how she still has eyelashes after 11 books…

And I know that this series is meant for somewhat younger kids (8-12 yrs), but some scenes and characters are meant to be funny but are just really cringy. I’m sure even if I was 10 I would be cringing during a lot of the “funny” moments.

The good parts

I’ve talked a lot about the things I don’t like about the books, but I said it was okay, so you know there has to be some good things. I think some of the characters are pretty complex and well-written. Also the whole elf-separate-world was written well and it felt like a real place while I was reading. The school felt real, and the elves eat all these different strange foods which made the place feel more unique. It also kind of reminded me of Harry Potter. The elves in Keeper of the Lost Cities have Prattles, which are boxes of nutty caramel candies that come with a Prattles Pin of a different creature (there are creatures like alicorns and flaredons and imps living in the elf world). Reading about Prattles made me think of the chocolate frog cards from Harry Potter, and the whole kid-living-with-humans-has-

someone-visit-them-and-tell-them-they-belong-in-a-different-world felt very familiar (in a pretty good way though).

If you like fantasy, you might enjoy the Keeper of the Lost Cities series. It’s fun and mostly well-written, though some parts are better than others.

-Janny