Children’s Science Fiction | Litercurious.com

Litercurious Book Review

Title	Frances and the Monster
Author	Refe Tuma
Publisher	HarperCollins (August 23, 2022)
Format	Kindle, Audiobook, Hardcover, Audio CD
Pages	352 pages
Genre	Children’s Robot Fiction Books / Children’s Spine-Chilling Horror / Children’s Mystery, Detective, & Spy
Language	English
ISBN 10/13	0063085763 / 978-0063085763

AUTHOR

Refe Tuma is an author in his own right, and a Co-author with his wife. He lives in Kansas City with his family and their plastic dinosaurs.

SYNOPSIS

Frances is a super-smart scientist little girl. Her mother and father are great scientist and she wants to be just like them, only better. Raised in an overprotective environment, Frances couldn’t even leave the house. She spent her days studying and doing experiments with her mother and father. When her parents leave to go to a symposium; Frances, left on her own with just the robot nanny, finds her grandfathers secret laboratory.

Studying her grandfathers notes, she quickly picks up his experiments where he left off. She wants to succeed where her grandfather failed. She uses the robot body from her nanny to enhance the cadaver left in the laboratory. Then BOOM! The monster awakens! He goes on a rampage and escapes the laboratory and starts to terrorize the town. Frances has to catch him and bring him back. What follows is an adventure through a town she has never been in. Being chased by the local constable, Frances has to stay one step ahead of him while trying to track down and capture the monster. Can she stay out of jail? Will she capture the monster before it kills someone? The chase takes her through seedy alleyways, in the sewers and over the rooftops. Her adventure has just begun.

CONCLUSION

Frances and the Monster is targeted at kids 8-12 years old, but will appeal to most ages. It is a high paced thriller with a bit of horror; especially at the end. The prose is appropriate for anyone 8 or older, while the plot is both interesting and engaging.

Refe has done a great job with this story. I was unable to put it down and almost finished the entire book in one sitting. The last 2 chapters really threw me for a loop. The plot twist and the horror element was surprising and disturbing (in a good way).

I definitely recommend this book. If you like thrills, suspense, excitement and a little horror, then you will love this book.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Refe Tuma, NetGalley and HarperCollins for affording me the opportunity to review Frances and the Monster.

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People of the Sun by Ben Gartner — People of The Sun – Third in The Eye of Ra Series

TITLE	People of the Sun (book 3 “Eye of RA” series)
AUTHOR	Ben Gartner
PUBLISHER	Crescent Vista Press (February 1, 2022)
FORMAT	Kindle, Hardcover, Paperback
PAGES	262
LANGUAGE	English
GENRE	Children’s Historical Fiction, Science Fiction
ASIN / ISBN 10/13	B09B9FGWSW / 1734155272 / 978-1734155273

AUTHOR

Find out about Ben Gartner and The Eye of Ra Series here.

SYNOPSIS

People of the Sun is the third book in The Eye of Ra Series. Sarah and John continue their adventures in time!

Sarah is John’s older sister and together they make up a team of time traveling detectives. Their goal is to make sure that the time line remains intact. It seems that Dr. Tidewell (Sarah) and Mr. Tidewell (John) created a time machine in the year 2049. During a demonstration things go awry, and the entire audience is transported to various places throughout time; and the trouble begins!

The adult brother and sister duo travel back in time to enlist their earlier versions of themselves to help fix the timeline. If they can’t fix the timeline then life ceases to exist on Johns birthday in 2049 (the date of the presentation).

In this installment, they travel to Mexico in the year 1519 to prevent the death of Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, a Spanish Conquistador. Toci, an expert scholar in Aztec culture and fluent in English, Spanish and the Nahuatl language, is determined to prevent Cortés from conquering the Aztecs. What follows is an adventure that sees Sarah and John almost becoming human sacrifices, battling for their very lives and having to make some hard decisions about whether or not to change history.

CONCLUSION

People of the Sun is an excellent book. It has time travel, history, action, and adventure! It is filled with moral conundrums, universal impacting decisions, and morality.

Ben has done another superb job with this book. He has managed to mold history with adventure again. Just reading this book and the Author’s Note at the end, I learned quit-a-bit about the Aztecs, Cortés and the fall of an entire empire.

This book is a great read for the young and old alike. I highly recommend this series and don’t forget to read the Author’s Notes. Ben provides links to the historical references if the reader would like to learn more about the period.

I can’t wait to read about Sarah and John’s next adventure!