The Language of the Birds by K.A. Merson (2025)
If I wasn't so completely captivated by this book's main character, 17 year old Arizon I would've rated this book far lower than 3 stars.
Neurodivergent, brilliant and homeschooled after a painful childhood of schoolmate taunts, Arizona soaks up knowledge as she travels around the country with her parents....(via their Airstream camper). But then, amid the breathtaking landscapes of the Sierra Nevada mountains, her dad dies in what looks like an accident and her mom's kidnapped by people seeking a lost secret of antiquity.
The kidnappers leverage against Arizona is to use her spectacular analytical and mathematical mind to discover this eternal secret's hiding place. With her beloved boxer Mojo in tow and with a new found friend (a first for the socially awkward 'Az') she embarks on a 'Da Vinci Code' type quest to uncover the mystery and free her mom.
As much as I loved seeing Arizona cope with the real world during her Sherlock Holmes-ian hunt, the book lost me as it buries itself (and Arizona) in mountains of geometric riddles puzzles and lengthy impenetrable poetry packed with equally convoluted clues. For puzzle lovers, this sounds like a Godsend, but readers with minimal interest in this stuff may find themselves flipping through those pages with only a bare glance at them. (And there's a whole lot of that to flip through.....)
Arizona's adventures, which take her everywhere from scuba diving to ghost towns to Hoover Dam, are indeed both exciting and informative, a clever mixture of Dan Brown novels and the "National Treasure' films. But sorry, those endless pages of puzzles and poems functioned like (to me, anyway) cholesterol constantly clogging up the flow of the story.
A mixed bag, for sure. Loved Arizona, but I wish the author could've found ways to make the clues more digestible and entertaining, instead of like a textbook for a college course everyone tries to avoid.
3 stars (***) and that's strictly for the unstoppable 'Az'.
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