 Hi everyone, my name is Steph, this is Kid Lit Joy, and welcome or welcome back to my channel. Here on this channel we celebrate kids, middle grade, and young adult books. All kinds of books, it is wonderful. And today I'm here to review Paper Dragons, The Fight for the Hidden Role, by Siobhan McDermott. This was a title that was sent to me by Heshet for review, so thank you very much to them. I was really intrigued by this one. I'm loving seeing so many middle fiction titles that are coming out that involve a lot of mythology from different cultures, and so I was intrigued to see how this one went. And this one does weave in lots of really fantastic ideas. So I'll read you the blobe, it says, an extraordinary destiny unfolds. Twelve-year-old Xi Jing has always been an outcast until she receives an invitation to Hock Wah, an underwater school that offers her the chance to become immortal and to finally belong. There she battles in hair-raising dragon boat races, meets age-shifting tutors, and competes in thrilling trials. But there are rumors of a growing dark force, and students who fail the trials are disappearing. Can Xi Jing uncover the truth before it's too late? So this book really starts off in Xi Jing's hometown, where she is very much the outcast. The woman who took her in as a baby has left, and so the rest of the town are trying to get rid of her, and they bully and threaten her to a great degree, and she's trying to gain entrance to Hock Wah. And we find out at the start of the book that she hasn't made the cut, until she hopes to find something that has gone missing, and suddenly she ends up making her own invitation to the city. And this causes a bit of an upset because each town usually only sends one person as a representative to the underwater school, and now this year her village has two people attending. But she proves her worth at every stage, she competes in all of the trials and challenges, and what was really interesting about this one, because it is like a magic school kind of story, except this magic school is underwater. All of the people participating in the trials are at different ages and from different groups that have come in at different times, but they all compete in the same trial, and it just, you know, they just compete in the next trial in their cycle, which I thought was really cool, because it's not like we're starting at the brand, at a brand new year, everyone starts at the point where they enter. The entire concept was really cool, I love the description of the underwater school, and sort of the magical components that go into it, including jellyfish messengers who are awesome, and also the dragon boat race sequences are really fun and very exciting. The missing students plot was intriguing and is threaded through the narrative, but from the time that Shijing arrives in Hokwa, and we get a lot of world building in this book. The one thing I will say is there, see, there felt like there was a bit of an inconsistent pace at times with the book. There are long chunks of the text where we are getting a lot of world building or just building up relationships with characters, so the action is few and far between, although the last third of the book is fairly fast-paced and action-packed, as things really start to kick off and take place, so that's not uncommon in the first book in a series. As I said, there are a lot of really cool concepts in here, like the tutors who are immortal, but they're immortal because they can change their age, so they can appear at any age, and if they get startled, many of them tend to revert to their more child-like self, and then age up again. So that was really cool and really interesting to learn about, and also trying to understand and unpack Shijing's history and background, and why she's able to do some of the things that she can do. It does play around a little bit with the chosen one trope in that she's obviously there for a reason, and she has power that people were not expecting her to have. While I found the pacing to be inconsistent at times and parts of it to be fairly slow, it was still intriguing enough to continue, and I'm curious about the next book in the series, and to sort of see where the story takes us, because we do get a slight resolution to one of the main problems in the book, but obviously it opens up the door for other complications in further books. So thank you very much to the publisher for the review copy. If you want to find out more about it, I will leave links to where you can check out more information about the book down below. In the comments, I'd love to know if you have read this book, or if you're planning on picking it up. Otherwise, feel free to share a dragon emoji down below to let me know that you're here. I hope that we're on the world just staying safe and healthy, and I will see you in my next video. Thanks so much for watching. Bye everyone.