Avatar: The Rise of Kyoshi
This is the second serious book that I’m making my daughter read, and it comes right after we finished watching the Netflix adaption of Avatar, the Last Air Bender.
The rise of Kyoshi is the story of the Avatar Kyoshi (2 avatars before Aang). It goes into her origin story, and the trials and tribulations of how she became the Avatar, and how she attained her Avatar hood after many many challenges.
Its sufficiently similar enough to Aang’s story, but at the same time, vastly different. The author manages to give you the sense of what life was like 200 or so years before Aang’s time, and yet, things are not so different that you get lost. Familiar trappings are all around, like Ba Sing Se is still there. The Earth Kingdom is forever in chaos, and the Fire Kingdom are all full of pricks, and etc etc. You have air bisons ferrying Air Nomads around, and the world is in chaos because the Avatar has not been identified yet.
The story begins with an avatar identification test, where the Earth Kingdom sages are trying to figure out who amongst them is the next avatar. Its been almost a decade since the last avatar, a water tribe person named Kuruk had died, and thus far, no one in the Earth Kingdom has been identified.
We pick up the story with the companions of the last avatar, Kuruk, trying to help identify and hopefully train the new Avatar. We see the earth sage Jianzu, and the air nomad, Kelsang, along with their fire bender trainer, Heiran try to find the avatar. Eventually they identify a boy, Yun, as the avatar because of his prodigious earth bending ability. The readers know that can’t be right, as we know it is Kyoshi, so at least half the story goes through this issue where Yun is the avowed Avatar, but somehow can’t bend the other elements yet, and then we have Kyoshi, who is a servant girl, ungainly tall, and can’t seem to bend a lick (because she can only bend big things, or bend things bigly, but cannot bend anything smaller than a small continent). This eventually resolves itself, and we also find out who the main antagonist of the book is.
The rest of the book is Kyoshi coming into her own, her discovery of her own compaions, and how they defeat the antagonist. Your standard Hero arc.
The story is interesting in that there are some twists and turns that are a little unexpected, but nothing too much to upset the young adults that this book is targeted at.
The reading level is definitely at around the 7th or 8th grade level, with readers below that needing to use a dictionary (or adult) for words or expressions they might not know yet.
My daughter was kept entertained during this reading, and even if it took 6 weeks, was still a worthwhile endevaor because she had more vested interest in the book and avatar world at large.
4*. The author did a great job of giving you the sense of the avatar with a brand new good story.