Avatar: The Shadow of Kyoshi
This is the second book in the Avatar Novels, and it follows up immediately upon the events of the first book. Avatar Kyoshi, now a little more comfortable in her avatarhood sets out to right the wrongs of the world. The novel starts out as she tries to root out corruption in the Earth Kingdom and it demonstrates how much more powerful she is now than when we first saw her in the first book.
Then she gets summoned to the Fire Kingdom, where she has to mediate a dispute between the various clans of the Fire Kingdom and she gets swept up in the politics of the Fire Kingdom before they were truly unified.
You don’t really see the antagonist of the novel until about halfway through, and the first half of the book was mostly just world building the Fire Kingdom. This book is not quite as good as the first one in that you do not get to see a lot of the interesting characters (the flying opera company) until about the last 3rd of the book. So you get a lot of Rangi, a lot of Heiran, and a lot of Kyoshi bumbling around. She’s much more powerful in this book, but also still as clueless as the first.
One thing you do find out is that, much like the Last Airbender, all Avatars feel like they should know everything, when the truth is, they are all trying to figure out stuff. In all 3 of the Avatars we’ve met so far, Aang, Korra, and now Kyoshi, you kinda go “wow, maybe there should be a school for avatars or something”, because the underyling theme is that “avatars, they have a ton of power, but they’re still human, and they all kinda suck because no one really teaches them what they have to do”. Aang is probably the most unbelievable after all this, becuase he really had no one mentor, and he was just 14 and yet he still knew more than Kyoshi or Korra who actually had more mentors/teachers/better circumstances.
All in all, this book is still worth reading because it got my kid reading more. =) 4* for that reason. If your kid likes the Avatar universe, they’ll be glad to read this.