World of Adventure 17 – Curse of the Ruins

Gary Paulsen's Curse of the Ruins is a fast adventure mystery for 10 year olds about three kids whose holiday goes wrong before they've even left the airport.

What happens

Katie Crockett and her twin brother Sam have flown out to join their dad on his dig at some cliff-dweller ruins. Their cousin Shala has come too. Dad was meant to meet them off the plane. He isn't there.

Instead a thief snatches Katie's bag. She chases him through the terminal, which gets all three of them arrested! The hotel says Dad checked out days ago. Then somebody hands back Katie's bag with the lining sliced open. What were they looking for?

The squabbling is half the fun. Sam is only ten minutes older than Katie and never lets her forget it. Katie refuses to be told anything by anybody. Shala is the calm one who keeps pointing out the clues the other two miss (and he's usually right).

There's also Pepe, a boy who knows everyone in town and charges a dollar for every scrap of information. He's cheeky and funny. Sam's wallet has a very hard week.

A heads-up for grown-ups. This one has real peril in it. Katie is grabbed in a market with a sack over her head and her wrists tied. The men threaten to kill her and tell her something terrible about her dad. Later there's a gun. The three main characters are also teenagers, so it reads a little older than the shelf.

It also shows its age in how it describes people. Pepe and his relatives are mostly there to hustle tourists, and an old Native American man is simply called "the old Indian" for much of the story. You might want to talk that through with your reader.

If your reader likes their adventures scary and loves a treasure-map puzzle, they'll probably zoom through it. If they're sensitive to kidnapping or threats against a parent, maybe wait a while.

What to read next

Want another from the same series? The Treasure of El Patron has Tag Jones running a bait shack on a Bermuda beach and dreaming about the Spanish gold his diver dad was sure was out there.