Inside The Shadow City

I took a chance on Kirsten Miller's Kiki Strike Inside the Shadow City because, firstly, the cover was colorful and illustrated enough to catch my eye on the shelf. Secondly, once I walked closer, because of the phrase "Shadow City". A story that was going to involve exploring a forgotten place beneath New York City, full of casinos, bars, and opium dens sounded interesting. I doubt I'm the target audience, but it sounded like it could be a fun adventure story, and if it wasn't quite what I expected, I still enjoyed it.

Ananka Fishbein narrates the tale, starting with how she woke one morning to see a small person climb out of a large hole across the street from her home, where there used to be a park. Ananka investigates the hole, and finds a room with a trapdoor leading farther down, and a book called Glimpses of Gotham, which describes a world beneath 19th Century New York of tunnels and shops catering to most every whim a person could have. Eventually, Ananka is brought into a group created by one Kiki Strike, and consisting largely of other girls drawn from various Girl Scout troops, each with some useful skill for exploring the underground world. So they're like the A-Team, or The Losers, or whatever band of misfits, each with an array of skills, you'd prefer to reference.

The first third of the book is getting the gang together, and exploring. The middle is more focused on the rest of the girls' concerns about Kiki, what she's up to, what she's hiding, whether she's trustworthy. The end deals with why Kiki was really interested in the Shadow City, and it's more action-oriented. I had thought it was going to focus more on their adventures exploring the Shadow City, coming into conflict with traps, or mazes, or still living inhabitants, or whatever. Like the portions of Indiana Jones movies where he explores ruins or temples. It wound up feeling a bit more spy thriller, a touch of a Hardy Boys mystery thrown in. It was still quite engrossing, since Miller spent enough time on the character's to make me care about them, and flesh out their particular obsessions at least a little. Some of the explanations I thought might go a little far, to the point of oversimplifying the difficulties the characters would have faced, but it worked more than it didn't.

The story moves quickly, since Miller (or Ananka if you prefer) has no problem quickly moving past chunks of time where there's not much happening in the character's lives, for whatever reason. Since Ananka's telling the story it works, since it figures she might quickly explain why they weren't exploring, then skip on to the next relevant point. No reason to focus on the day-to-day inanities. The end of most chapters have a brief guide to various skills that may come in useful, such as "How To Take Advantage of Being a Girl", or "How to Tail Someone". I think Ananka mostly learned these during or after this adventure, because she doesn't put many of her suggestions into practice over the course of this story. She's miserable at actually tailing people unnoticed, for example.

Another story of their adventures has been released subsequently, and I'm curious how Miller wrote that one, since a lot of the conflict in this story revolved around Kiki's attitude and secretiveness. She knows a lot about the people she recruits, but keeps a lot about herself under wraps, and can be as abrasive as Agent Gibbs from NCIS, or Batman during his Paranoid, Condescending Jackass Phase in the late '90s-early '00s. OK, she's not as bad as Batman, but she comes close. Anyway, by the end of the story, she's opened up, the rest of the crew understand her better, so that would seem to be a potential conflict well that dried up.