The Spindle of Fate by Aimee Lim

TL;DR: This was good but not super memorable. I think the cover is more memorable than the contents of the actual story.
Source: NetGalley, Thank you very much to the publisher!

Plot: Evie has to travel to the Underworld who has to save her mother who may or may not be dead. The final two twists or so were fun but it’s fairly straightforward as far as plot goes.
Characters: Very thin, and I think this was ultimately my issue. Everything except Evie was very, very surface level or a shadow of a character.
Setting: The settings were never super detailed for me or well drawn, but you could definitely get a sense of place from them.
Fantasy: This primarily takes place in the Chinese underworld which would definitely be a fun new thing for a middle grade kid to enjoy if they’ve never read it! I have unfortunately so it wasn’t anything wildly new but I can see a MG reader eating it up.

Thoughts:

The Spindle of Fate is the story of Evie Mei whose mother recently died. While doing an errand for her Father in their tailor shop below the apartment she finds a talking Monkey who informs her that it’s possible her Mother may not be dead and that her Mother was also the leader of a group of magical weavers. From there Evie seeks out the group, which includes her Aunt and then proceeds into the Underworld to find and rescue her Mother.

I’ll go ahead and say the most memorable part of this for me is probably the cover. The plot is fairly familiar, I’ve seen the like in Middle-Grade books before and it’s almost always a winner, but the execution here was not my favorite. The story really relies on you caring about if Evie Mei finds her mother and it moved so quickly and Evie was honestly fairly unlikeable so I couldn’t exactly connect enough to care. In addition all our side characters were SO thin, I wish we had more. Especially of Kevin, he was a gem and I wanted so much more of him and his story.

I finished this one and though ‘Huh. Well that was neat.’ and honestly forgot about it for a few days. I can see this working well for a new middle grade reader so I wouldn’t say it’s a total miss. However, I strongly disliked the sequel setup on this one, and Evie was just not my favorite type of character with no others around her to redeem the story.

3 out of 5 Spindles