The end of book #3 felt like the end of a major story arc. We have moved on from the original premise of this series, which involved Michael Vey just trying to save people he loved from the Elgen and maybe even stop them, but since all they really did was cripple the Elgen, they are still a menace that someone has to deal with. Though there is a question here about whether it has to be Vey and his friends or not, it's clear from the fact that this book exists that it will be them. I thought this book would feel like a tack-on, but it didn't. Some advancements are made and the stakes are still high.

Some of the things that bothered me about previous book are still in effect, like the clichés inherent in a YA story and the stereotypes of the strong, alpha males and the females who love shopping and cute things. This time, the pairing off of guys and girls that I noticed happening so cleanly in the previous books becomes much more obvious. And there seems to be a very heavy focus on food this time around, as pretty much every meal or snack was described in detail. Maybe it was like that in previous books, too, but if was, I didn't notice. And something happened that I can't give details on to avoid spoilers that at first caused me to shake my head and think of it as a flaw in the writing, but I soon realized that this was a much more realistic view of a teenager's maturity than what I had been bothered by in the previous book. So in a way, it's still a flaw, because the character has been shown to be better, smarter, more mature, than what is displayed here, but I prefer this to the way the teens handled a death of their own in the previous book that just felt so unnatural to me. Though this certainly isn't a deep series, I have enjoyed the stories along the way and find myself able to overlook the little annoyances to want to keep going. ( )

:) ( )

Good book, although it's starting to get a bit repetitious. ( )

Michael, Taylor, Ostin, and the rest of the Electroclan head to Taiwan in search of nine-year-old child prodigy Lin Julung, or Jade Dragon, who the Elgen kidnapped for Hatch's army of electric children.

The fourth book in the Michael Vey series. The war continues between the Electroclan and Elgen. ( )