Book Review: Steel Trapp, The Academy

"Being right wasn't nearly as important as doing right....”



I have been a bit lax in my book reviewing, and my blogging.  I have a few book reviews for you, and a few other things to write about.  So, prepare for some blogging in the next few days.  But first, book review!




This is apparently the second in the series. I didn't know that.  So, I read it first.  Steven "Steel" Trapp and Kaileigh Augustine have been recruited to an elite private school. Steel doesn't really understand why, because he says he's not smart, he's just good at school because of his eidetic memory. Kaileigh is great at languages. But maybe they want their skills for a little more than learning Latin and algebra.

This book is written by one of the co-authors of the Peter and the Starcatchers books, Ridley Pearson, and I can see who wrote the parts of Peter and the Starcatchers that I didn't like.  Every once in awhile, I would feel like, in this and in Peter and the Strcatchers, that the exposition had taken over the story.  The story line had adventure, and yet, it didn't always feel that way. This book was close to 500-pages, and yet I felt like the adventure hadn't really started until page 300 or more.  It shouldn't take you that long to set-up your plot.  I feel like he has a writing style that could work so much better for a different genre. Apparently, he really cut his teeth on detective mysteries.  I could see it working well for that.  But for an adventure series?  No. 

Also, I have no idea how to pronounce Kaileigh.  I thought it was Kaylie/Kaylee/Caley/you know at first. I don't even like that name anyways, because it works for four-year-olds, but doesn't seem like a full-grown, educated, mature, accomplished woman.   I find myself pretty good and figuring out how to pronounce whackerdoodle spellings.  I work at a children's hospital in 2014.  And parents are getting weird.  And then it's in Salt Lake City, and Utah is the Capital of Bad Naming Practices.  However, throughout the story Steel took to calling her Kai. And that made me think that it was possibly supposed to be pronounced "Kylie."  Which has all of the grown-up name problems of Kaylee anyways. 

In the end, I just think that his writing style was not suited to this genre.  And maybe I should have started with the first book.    Two stars for this adventure series installment. 

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