Cathy's Ring
Concluding the saga begun in Cathy’s Book (2006) and continued in Cathy’s Key (2008), this final volume has the heroine dodging assassins, plotting against vindictive ancients, and fretting about her future with her immortal (ex-?) boyfriend. Her voice is a delightfully glib balance of emerging hipster cool and teenage über-drama, and the margins are again littered with her slick doodles and droll scribblings. While the culmination of the adventure and the final showdown are fairly rote, what saves this is its strong pop-culture sensibility, located somewhere between Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Good, shallow fun. Grades 8-11. --Ian Chipman