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Batu is just an ordinary kid in present-day Almaty, worried about bullies, school, and his mom's new baby...until the day he meets Aspara, the Golden Warrior. Aspara steps straight out of Batu's notebook cover--and out of Kazakhstan's past. Aspara has been waiting hundreds of years to be summoned to the human world and to finally get his chance to search for the Golden Cup, a magical talisman sent down from the heavens. When the Golden Cup was lost, Aspara watched as many of his friends and family were killed or disappeared. Craving adventure and a sense of purpose, Batu sets out with Aspara and his own friends to find the Golden Cup, plunging them into an adventure through a world where myths come alive. But there are others looking for the Cup, and they'll do anything to make sure the kids fail. Will Batu and his friends make it out alive (and make it home in time for dinner)?… (more)
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A glossary at the back of the book does provide some information, occasionally those definitions were paragraph length though, so by the time you flip to the back of the book and take in that dry paragraph, and then locate the place where you left off again, it’s kind of pulled you out of the story and I found myself wishing that whenever there was a wordier definition, maybe that information could have just been incorporated into the prose in a non-clunky sort of way.
It wasn’t just the glossary that sometimes felt disruptive to the flow, the overall structure did as well, there was less an arc to this and more just a pattern, often a brief bit of action followed by everything kind of stopping so someone could share a story or folktale, and again, like with those lengthier definitions, I wondered if maybe the stories/folktales couldn’t have been more woven in so it might have felt less like I was being told and more like I was being shown.
I did like that this friend group wasn’t perfect, they had a tendency to squabble with one another which has a ring of authenticity to it, but I thought there could have been a whole lot more emotion than there was, whether that was in reaction to the fantasy elements that were so new to these kids who for the most part took it all oddly in stride or when lives were in danger, people go missing, etc., and there just didn’t seem to be as much concern or feeling or whatever as you’d expect in such heightened circumstances.
Lastly, like many first books in a series, this does not wrap up in a particularly satisfying way, there was a meandering quality throughout the novel and it just never did find its way back to really taking care of the mission introduced in the set up.
I received this book through a giveaway.