Duncan just wants to color, but when he opens his box of crayons, he finds only letters.  The letters are hilarious and from his crayons. They all quit! Duncan finds a solution for them all to be happy. 

Lexile Measure: AD730L

I would use this in the classroom with a writing/coloring activity. There would be pictures of all of the crayons and the students would trace the names of each color and then color the crayon the correct color. 

Kali and Trace make a really good team! I enjoyed getting to know Kali on her own and even enjoyed her initial interactions with Trace, who was a bit high and mighty. There was a bit of silly tension between the two as they worked out their always fluctuating relationship but I can forgive them that.

Kali’s young enough to have doubts about her abilities on her first real espionage mission. Still, there were situations that I thought her training would have readied her for, like nudity in the guards change room, etc. So, I did do some small eyerolls. After all, what good is a spy that gives themselves away by blushing over a bit of casual nudity? Kali totally redeemed herself with her knife skills.

Leaf, Kali’s sister who is being held hostage, has her secret skills too – she’s talented with the crystal healing magic, a Whisperer. Alas, this talent can get a person killed. Even though she has such a small role, I liked her character and want to learn more about her.

Crown Prince Wil and his sister Violet are very different from each other. Kali is charged with protecting Wil, so she has to traipse around with him, and also Trace. Meanwhile, Violet is an introverted young lady who has severe doubts of her self-worth. She is also caught up in deep grieving over the recent death of their mother. While I didn’t particularly like her character, she gave us a window into a dangerous and manipulative religious group.

Next to Kali, Trace becomes my favorite character…. yes, it’s a tie between the two of them. While the plot and characters start off simple, we get a little layering later in the tale, with Trace especially. He’s got plenty of secrets and hidden skills. Kali eventually grows a bit after she makes a bad mistake that leaves her injured.

The story never lagged for me. Plenty of action interspersed with spy stuff kept me engaged. The tale does end on a cliff hanger so I hope Book 2 comes out on audiobook very soon. 4.5/5 stars.

The Narration: Hayden Daviau gave a really good performance with this narration. Her male voices are believable and she had distinct voices for all the characters. I especially liked her waspish, peeved voice for Leaf while she tries to attend to Kali’s injuries. She did a great job with the emotional scenes as well. 5/5 stars.

I received this audiobook as part of my participation in a blog tour with Audiobookworm Promotions. The tour is being sponsored by Alex Lidell. The gifting of this audiobook did not affect my opinion of it.

Are you online and ready for global smart card and database genealogy for virtual travelers? Here's how to search family history for nations bordering the Baltic Sea, the Balkans countries, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.The nations listed in this guide (all faiths) include Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Armenia, Assyria, Greece, Lebanon, Syria, and many other lands in the Middle East, the Balkans-Croatia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Eastern Europe-Hungary, and more.

Collecting details about people is moving toward smart card technology and its offspring. The new wave in genealogy is authentication technology. Authentication begins with new-wave technology used to gather population registers.Compare the new technology to the old method of door-to-door census taking, tombstone tracings, and city directory publishing. No, genealogists are not using smart cards this year, but smart card technology is being used to compile population registers in Europe.

The future holds a new wave of technology used for authentication for banking transactions being applied to other areas. Currently this technology is used for collecting details for population registrars such as census taking.The application for research is of interest to family historians, librarians, and governments.

It's already in use by private industry for electronic authentication.Family history is now about intelligent connections, whether it's a population registrar, census detail, or electronic identity for banking. Smart card genealogy began in 1998 in Finland with governments seeking to put census and population registers in an electronic form that would be available to researchers, and these applications are going global.