Keeper of the Lost Cities by Shannon Messenger

Keeper of the Lost Cities by Shannon Messenger
Series: Keeper of the Lost Cities, #1
Source: Bought
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: October 2, 2012

Twelve-year-old Sophie Foster has a secret. She’s a Telepath—someone who hears the thoughts of everyone around her. It’s a talent she’s never known how to explain.

Everything changes the day she meets Fitz, a mysterious boy who appears out of nowhere and also reads minds. She discovers there’s a place she does belong, and that staying with her family will place her in grave danger. In the blink of an eye, Sophie is forced to leave behind everything and start a new life in a place that is vastly different from anything she has ever known.

Sophie has new rules to learn and new skills to master, and not everyone is thrilled that she has come “home.”
There are secrets buried deep in Sophie’s memory—secrets about who she really is and why she was hidden among humans—that other people desperately want. Would even kill for.

In this page-turning debut, Shannon Messenger creates a riveting story where one girl must figure out why she is the key to her brand-new world, before the wrong person finds the answer first.

Keeper of the Lost Cities was an odd change for me. As you guys know, I'm really more of a contemporary gal, even in MG. But I tried it, because it looked interesting-- admit it, that cover is so adorable. It looks kind of like a mix of City of Ember and I don't know, something else that I can't remember right now.

It was completely different, though. Keeper of the Lost Cities was about the elves, which I thought was a unique idea. I liked the capitalization on all of the powers of the elves and the lost cities, but I felt like there was more potential that wasn't really carried out. Not very much has been done with elves, and the author had the power to really make them her own, but she didn't really. Fortunately though, the plot kept me interested.

It was very slow in the beginning-- the first two-hundred pages were the slowest, because nothing was really happening. I mean, things were happening of course, but it was all happening so slowly that it was hard to pay attention. Fortunately, it picked up around the middle, where it became interesting and fast enough to keep me glued to the pages.

I liked our main character, Sophie. She seemed like a really sweet kid and she was pretty funny, but she wasn't all that remarkable. She could have had more development, but I look forward to reading more about her-- she has some great potential ahead of her. All in all, Keeper of the Lost Cities may not have been all that I had hoped, but that doesn't meant that it was terrible. It sounds like I liked it less than I did.