Shadowland: Book III of the Brotherhood of the Conch
Grade 5-8–Returning from an unsuccessful mission to contact a hermit living in the Himalayan Mountains near Silver Valley, 15-year-old Anand finds that his home has disappeared, along with his magical conch. With the help of a powerful mirror, he and his friend Nisha travel to a distant future, arriving in a land devastated by pollution and class warfare. Navigating the slums and the metropolis, the teens learn that the scientific miracles are achieved at the expense of magical objects, and the draining of the conch will also destroy Anand's village. They forge an uneasy alliance with one of the scientists and embark on a mission to reconcile the future and restore the past. In this conclusion to the trilogy, Divakaruni continues to explore the values of honesty, family, and responsibility. Readers are likely to find his narrative heavy-handed, with a strong moralizing tone. The characters are robotic in their behaviors, but they are only there to deliver lectures on the author's core values anyway. Both action scenes and suspenseful moments are competently done, but there is no sophistication within those passages. Dialogue is choppy at best, and may be too advanced for the targeted audience. Fans of the series will appreciate Anand's adventure, but new readers will be puzzled by the relationship between the young Healer and the mystical conch.–Chris Shoemaker, New York Public LibraryCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.