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A review by mirable
Katana by Cole Gibsen
4.0
Booklist review:
Rileigh Martin is a skater girl, not a fighter, but when she is attacked by three men, a strange voice in her head tells her what to do, and she takes them all down. She begins to have dreams about Kim, a mysterious martial-arts expert, who explains that Rileigh is a samurai warrior—his soulmate, Senshi, reincarnated—and that she is awakening due to grave danger. Rileigh doesn’t believe any of this, but several more close calls lead to reluctant belief. Gibsen’s debut is plot driven with fairly well-developed secondary characters, although Rileigh’s best friend Quentin’s immediate acceptance of her awakening feels somewhat contrived. The novel flirts with the damsel in distress cliché, but Rileigh harnesses her power and becomes the hero of her own story. Torn between an eerily familiar past and an unknown future, her journey toward transcendence in contemporary St. Louis alternates with Senshi’s story in fifteenth-century Japan, making for an action-packed page-turner tempered with slow-burning romance. Grades 7-10. --Charli Osborne
Rileigh Martin is a skater girl, not a fighter, but when she is attacked by three men, a strange voice in her head tells her what to do, and she takes them all down. She begins to have dreams about Kim, a mysterious martial-arts expert, who explains that Rileigh is a samurai warrior—his soulmate, Senshi, reincarnated—and that she is awakening due to grave danger. Rileigh doesn’t believe any of this, but several more close calls lead to reluctant belief. Gibsen’s debut is plot driven with fairly well-developed secondary characters, although Rileigh’s best friend Quentin’s immediate acceptance of her awakening feels somewhat contrived. The novel flirts with the damsel in distress cliché, but Rileigh harnesses her power and becomes the hero of her own story. Torn between an eerily familiar past and an unknown future, her journey toward transcendence in contemporary St. Louis alternates with Senshi’s story in fifteenth-century Japan, making for an action-packed page-turner tempered with slow-burning romance. Grades 7-10. --Charli Osborne