Pub Date May 13 2025
Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine | Ballantine Books
General Fiction (Adult) | Mystery & Thrillers
If you are curious about my review for this 2025 book, read below after description
Description from the publisher.
A brilliant, eccentric teenager must solve a series of puzzles left behind by her dead father in this debut that features codes, riddles, and a plot that ingeniously mixes fact and fiction.
When seventeen-year-old Arizona’s mother goes missing on a family trip, Arizona tells herself not to worry. Until she finds her family’s Airstream ransacked—and the ominous note on the counter. Incredibly, impossibly, her mother has been kidnapped.
Even more bizarre are the terms of the ransom: The kidnappers believe that Arizona’s dead father took some sort of great secret to his grave—and to get her mother back safely, Arizona must now uncover it for them.
If Arizona were a “normal” teenager, she’d have no idea what to do. Luckily, Arizona’s anything but normal. Like her father, she’s more comfortable with books than with people, and inordinately fond of puzzles, codes, and riddles—and she soon realizes that the trail begins with a cipher that points her West, to the peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Her dog Mojo at her side, Arizona sets off in the Airstream to uncover the truth and pursue her mother’s return on her own terms. Yet her journey grows far stranger than she could have imagined, as she finds herself cracking codes and solving riddles, poring through pages of ancient texts, poking through forgotten corners of U.S. history, and uncovering mysteries hidden in plain sight in the Western landscape—all on the hunt for an impossible, centuries-old prize.
Even as she races to stay a step ahead of her adversaries and wonders at her father’s hidden life, she begins to realize that navigating the outside world on her own isn’t as terrifying as she thought—and finding other people who understand her isn’t so impossible after all.
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My review
4 stars
A sharp, high IQ, introvert on the spectrum, and with her levels of anxiety, a clever seventeen-year-old just lost her father (a great cartographer) in an "accident," and her mother is kidnapped. It's up to her to decipher all the codes so she can save her mom. Arizona accepts the quest ( to different locations to perform different clue-finding action activities, such as diving) on this time-sensitive and high-stakes thrilling adventure for fans of treasure hunting, action and thrilling movies, and books. I relate to many aspects of this character, such as her misophonia and her lack of social skills, but she is fearless, and she lets some people in who prove to be a great help. Her dog Mojo is a loyal and fun companion. He doesn't like word puzzles, but he keeps her company. There are lots of amazing references to classic books (lots of Lewis Carroll's poems to decipher, ancient mythology, math, alchemy, geometry, and astronomy) and some references to pop culture, too. We get great detail into her process of deciphering the codes, not just mention that hours later, she did it (extensive nerdy details into it, we get access to the source material). Fun complex codes. Awesome to discover what the title means.
This character is a great homage to the thought that we should read everything and learn as much as possible.
My favorite sentence ( I read an arc, so I won't quote directly, but it's something like this in my own words. Anger isn't healthy to keep for a long time or any time at all.)
Thank you netgalley for the arc.
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