By Rebecca Roanhorse
Nizhoni has always seen monsters nobody else can see. Two days after one of them takes her father, she learns she is descended from the Diné heroes who hunt them.
Nizhoni Begay is in seventh grade in Albuquerque, and she keeps seeing things. A teacher whose shadow is wrong. A stranger who isn't a stranger. Everyone has decided she's just being dramatic. Then her father brings his new boss to her basketball game — Mr. Charles, oil and gas, expensive suit — and Nizhoni looks across the gym and sees exactly what he is. Worse, he sees that she saw. The next morning her father is gone, and the note he left says Run. So Nizhoni takes her little brother Mac and her best friend Davery and goes. The road they end up on is the one the Hero Twins of Diné story once took: to Spider Woman, who will help for the price of four gifts, and then up the Rainbow Road through four trials to the House of the Sun, to ask for weapons that can kill a monster. The Holy People keep turning up along the way, disguised as ordinary, irritating adults.
Just finished Percy Jackson and wanting more of the same? This is the easiest next step. It's the fastest of the Rick Riordan Presents adventures and the least frightening, and it does the thing your child came for: an ordinary child at an ordinary school turns out to be descended from heroes and has about a day to get good at it. What's different is where the mythology comes from. The Hero Twins, Spider Woman, the House of the Sun and the four trials on the way up to it are Diné stories people still tell, not ruins from somewhere far off. Nizhoni's Albuquerque is a real modern city with a Navajo family in it eating breakfast before school. Nizhoni herself is good company: prickly, brave, jealous of her clever little brother, and completely sure she's right when she isn't.