The Queen Jade - Yxta Maya Murray

The library is such a magical place. Where else can you stumble on great books and then take them home and read them for free? I came across this book because the sequel has the same name as another book I am going to read in March, and as you know I can't read a series out of order, so I had to start at the beginning with this fantastic adventure story.

And what a great find this was. As if it's not enough that we get a cool adventure complete with missing family members, ancient puzzles that need solving, jungle treks, treasure hunts, and etc., we also get a great story that centers on women. Yes, women stepping out of the "wet blanket"/"exists solely to create 'conflict' by hampering a man's desire to have fun and excitement" role and actually initiating and participating in adventures - what a concept!

The story moves along at a good pace, the writing is great, and the characters are multi-dimensional. If you're a fan of a certain overrated author who writes (poorly) about this type of thing, you should love this book. Highly recommended.

Side note: the jade in the title is actually blue (see a beautiful example below), so I am going to use this for my "blue" category in the Color-Coded Reading Challenge.

I hope nobody minds my using this image, I "borrowed" it from the Internet