Reviewed by Nessa Luna on
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This has not changed my opinion on this book in any way!
When I first read the summary for this book, I kind of thought it would be a children's book (probably also because of the cover), so I was a bit reluctant to read it. Sure I've read many children's books in the past but I had realised that they weren't really what I wanted to read anymore. But I did end up saying yes and when I started reading the book I realised it wasn't a children's story at all. I actually quite enjoyed it!
This book tells the story of Kitty Hawk, a young girl who's just graduated from high school and wants to go to Alaska to study humpback whales. We follow her as she flies her own plane to Alaska and studies these animals for the whole summer. But then, she gets involved in something dangerous that could cost her her life.
I have to say, at some points there is some story telling, and though I like story telling in books, it felt a bit like an info-dump to me. Sure, the story needed to be told, but not everything all in one go. So yeah, I did like hearing the history of the Gold Rush and learn about whales but at some points I just got so bored with those stories that I wanted to skip ahead to the end of them.
There were also some minor things that didn't really make sense to me; like at one point, when Kitty had landed safely in Juneau, her friend's aunt says 'you made it', to which Kitty replies 'me either'?! (Okay maybe just a little mistake, but I just found it a really odd answer to what was said). And later on, when Kitty's in trouble, she just decides to help out these guys rather than try to get away from them. Sure they turned out to be kind of innocent in the end, but still, you don't just help your kidnappers like that. But besides that, I really liked the story. It was very well written, and lots of things were described beautifully, it kind of made me want to visit Alaska/Canada.
As for the characters, I liked Kitty. She's adventurous and very preceptive, but at some points I just didn't really understand her actions (like what I said underneath the spoiler tag). There was also a guy named Edward (whose name was revealed after Kitty stated thinking about Bella and Edward from Twilight, ha ha ha). I kind of thought he was nice, but I remembered thinking he was going to be quite important somewhere in the story. And I turned out to be right, so yay for intuition! Then there were the 'bad guys', whose names you'll find out when you read the book, and honestly I didn't really think they were that good in what they were doing. From what I understood, they planned on living out in the woods for months eating only energy bars. Don't think that's going to keep you alive, guys!
In the end, I really liked Kitty Hawk and the Curse of the Yukon Gold, and I'll certainly check out the rest of the series. I do hope there's a lot less info-dump story telling going on in the other books, and I hope that the next bad guys she bumps into are a bit smarter than these ones. Then again, these bad guys weren't really bad guys after all.
My opinion on this book in one gif:
Reading updates
- Started reading
- 3 December, 2014: Finished reading
- 3 December, 2014: Reviewed