Cryptid Hunters
The Cryptid Hunters series, Book 1
Roland Smith
Scholastic
Fiction, MG Adventure/Fantasy
Themes: Cross-Genre, Cryptids, Dinosaurs, Diversity, Wilderness Tales
***+
Description
Thirteen-year-old twins Marty and Grace O'Hara seem like polar opposites. Marty's bold to the point of recklessness, a constant headache to
the headmaster of their Swiss boarding school, while bookish Grace is shy, prone to fainting spells when frightened and nightmares she can never
remember. Despite their differences, they're deeply devoted to one another, as they have been ever since their parents sent them overseas to
school. But a helicopter crash in the Amazon changes everything. The O'Haras are missing, presumed dead. A relative they've never heard of, Uncle
Wolfe, fetches them from Switzerland to his home on Cryptos Island, off the Pacific Northwest coast... but there's much more going on here than
meets the eye, and secrets on Cryptos that none of the strange grown-ups on the island will tell them.
It turns out Wolfe is a cryptozoologist: a seeker of hidden animals, unknown to science. His chief rival is popular nature show host and
conservationist Noah Blackwood, whose global wildlife parks serve as a cover for his illegal hunting and poaching operations. Just as Marty and
Grace show up, Wolfe rushes off to the Congo, trying to beat Blackwood to the elusive Mokele-mbembe, a small sauropod-like cryptid... a chase the
twins inadvertently find themselves in the middle of when they get dropped with a cargo capsule into the deadly African jungle.
Review
I found this for a buck at a clearance sale, and was actually considering putting it in the cull pile: books I've bought on impulse but don't
expect I'll get around to reading. But I decided to give it a quick try... and found myself unexpectedly drawn in. Marty and Grace start out as
collections of middle-grade tropes: he's impulsive and fearless (except a somewhat pointless fear of ghosts), always getting into trouble yet
somehow getting away with it, while Grace has a list of fears into the triple digits and clings to her battered stuffed bunny like a lifesaver
despite her prodigious intelligence. Other characters generally align with genre expectations, as well. Yet somehow it manages to click together
into a compelling tale of adventure and mystery and peril, and they all (save the baddies, naturally) manage to become somewhat more rounded
characters as the story progresses. Some too-convenient plot elements and lingering clichés, plus some significant loose threads
deliberately left dangling at the end (it is Book 1 of a series, after all) just barely held it back in the ratings, but on the whole it was an
unexpectedly fun adventure. Younger readers, particularly those looking for a good, red-blooded yarn with real danger and few false punches, will
likely enjoy it more. I'd consider picking up Book 2 if I found it cheap enough... and this time, it won't go to the cull pile.
As a closing note, one of the reasons I considered passing on this was the generic cover. I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover,
but let's be honest: we all do it, and if covers weren't important, publishers wouldn't invest so much time and money designing them. They're the
first impression one has of a book, after all. This one, however, has almost nothing at all to do with the story inside: it shows an iguana, what it
claims is a Velociraptor, and a baboon, while the closest the story itself manages is a green mamba snake, a distinctly non-Velociraptor cryptid,
and a bonobo ape. The story deserved better representation, here.