Review by Horn Book Review
In the final installment of the trilogy, rumors of an alliance between evil Serpent King Sesha and the Demon Queen result in protagonist Kiran and friends, including the newly crowned Raja Neel, forming a resistance group of demons and humans to save the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers. Kiran leaves the Kingdom Beyond and travels across dimensions back to her native New Jersey, on a mission to rescue Neel's brother Prince Lal, aided by helpers: a bird, a gecko, and a gender-nonbinary tiger. But ever since Neel's coronation, Kiran has noticed something odd: reality is mixing with elements and characters from familiar tales, mashing stories from different cultures together (Pooh and Piglet appearing in a scene from a Bengali nursery rhyme, for instance). New Jersey brings further confusion: Kiran's parents have rejected their Bengali identities, and her best friend and her worst enemy have swapped places. But encounters with mythological Greek and Norse figures confirm her suspicions: she is in a different reality, and baddies have formed the Interdimensional Multivillain Anti-Chaos Committee to "destroy diversity" and collapse the multiverse into a singularity ruled by Sesha. DasGupta tackles metaphysics along with ideas of prejudice, colonization, erasure, and the importance of narrative complexity. Exploration of multiple realities also allows Kiran's development in recognizing her own biases and prejudices, in the Kingdom Beyond and in her life as a Jersey middle schooler. Ariana Hussain May/June 2020 p.123(c) Copyright 2020. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In the third installment of DasGupta's bestselling series, 12-year-old demon slayer Kiranmala and her friends must stop her father, the Serpent King, from collapsing the parallel dimensions of the multiverse into one in a nefarious plot to destroy its diversity.Having saved Prince Neelkamal from her father at the end of Game of Stars (2019), Kiran must now save Prince Lalkamal, Neel's brother, trapped in a New Jersey tree. But as Kiran traverses the multiverse, things get strange(r): When her auto-rickshaw collides with a pumpkin, the old woman who tumbles out turns from the woman from a well-loved folktale into the story's ferocious tiger. The "story-smushing thing" keeps happening, and when a wormhole lands Kiran back in New Jersey, she returns to parents who are "colonized beyond repair"they keep referring to her as "Karen" and rejecting her bicultural Bengali American identity. In line with its predecessors, this adventure is characteristically action-packed and funny: DasGupta riddles the text with in-jokes and puns, and her verbal gymnastics are wink-winks to readers who are fluent in Bengali or Hindi and/or familiar with South Asian culture. But this book is also the most ambitious of the trilogy. Not only does it draw inspiration from Bengali folklore, South Asian and American pop culture, and metaphysics, it also reinforces seamlessly and with righteousness the series' central themes: that stories are powerful, and that many stories are necessary to imagine a just future.An eminently satisfying closer to a thoughtful, complex, and very funny adventure series. (Fantasy. 10-14) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
