Lodestar: Keeper of the Lost Cities, Book 5 by Shannon Messenger

Rating: Needs Parent Supervision

Reading Level: Late Elementary, Middle School

Sophie and her friends continue to battle with intellect and superpowers, trying to uncover secrets to a suspected murder, and a plot suspected to overthrow the elven kingdom.

Possible Concerns:

• Torture. A teenage boy is kidnapped and tortured with burns. He escapes but is incoherent.
• Double Agent. Keefe enters into the bad guys’ team. There is a trust issue as he gets deeper into their organization.
• Intimacy. The main character continue a love triangle (square) with herself and three devoted, yet decidedly different boys. Sophie navigates one “best friend,” one “cognate” (cognitive soul mate), and one “rogue antithesis.”
• Crushes. There is a still some talk about crushes, boys, and fluttering hearts. There is a near kiss, interrupted just in time.
• Telepathy/ Mental Superpowers. Reading minds, transmitting messages and inflicting pain and love. There is a lot of talk of energy and weird fantasy stuff to do with searching and healing minds.
• Body humor. There are jokes about poop, etc.
• Fantasy. Alicorns, goblins, elves….

Some middle grade/ middle school readers who enjoy fantasy could read these books without being too deeply harmed by them, as long as the reader knows that (1) All the mental telepathy stuff is fantasy, and (2) Christians operate from a different worldview: Our authority and morality comes from God and following our heart as it submits to the will of God, not from “following our heart” in a worldly sense that doesn’t acknowledge an authority outside of our feelings and our limited knowledge.

See my reviews of other books in the series.