★★★☆☆ Charlie in extremis

Charlie Thorne and the Lost City

Stuart Gibbs

As Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation ended, twelve-year-old supergenius Charlie Thorne had found Einstein's Pandora equation, which apparently will allow folks to make nuclear weapons in the garage. Einstein, not trusting mankind with this sort of power, had hidden the secret away behind a series of hidden messages with coded clues. The final message, the one containing the equation, was destroyed when Charlie found it, but not before she could glimpse and memorize it. Charlie, having no more faith in humanity than Einstein, is keeping Pandora secret. Charlie managed at the end of The Last Equation to barely escape from a fire, which she allowed everyone to believe had killed her. Her brother CIA agent Dante Garcia and his partner Milana Moon know that Charlie is likely to have escaped. Any number of intelligence agencies now know that Pandora exists. Thus Charlie's brain is the sole repository of the most valuable secret on Earth.

I'm not going to say much about the first 70% of Charlie Thorne and the Lost City. It is a by-the-numbers supergenius child spy book. (Wait, is "supergenius child spy books" now a literary genre? Apparently it is. "Child spy books" are definitely a thing, perhaps thanks to Harriet the Spy, which is, strictly speaking, barely a child spy book at all. Stuart Gibbs himself is a master of the child spy genre with his Spy School series. Many child spy books center on unusually gifted children. For instance, Ben, the hero of the Spy School books, is especially good at calculations. So, yeah, "genius child spy book" is a Thing.) In the first two-thirds of The Lost City Charlie basically runs rings around various adults who are trying to use her. She's always two steps of everyone else, and she is, not to put too fine a point on it, BORING.

Charlie is at her best when she makes mistakes. When she reaches the lost city, (Wait, there's a lost city? The publisher's blurb doesn't mention any such thing. Yup, there's a lost city -- it's right there in the title.) she discovers that she made a huge mistake, and things get interesting. The last few chapters are action-packed and exciting -- by far the best part of the book.

Gibbs finishes up with some world-building. He establishes a foundation for as many future Charlie Thorne books as he feels like writing. He also leaves behind some friends, villains, and not-quite friends who seem likely to be recurring characters in the books. And he hints that the next book is going to involve Cleopatra. (I'm not counting that as a spoiler, because you already know that the third book is called Charlie Thorne and the Curse of Cleopatra.)

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