AMERICAN GIRL: New KAYA Mystery

I was extremely excited when I learned Kaya was getting a new mystery. (Josefina, too.) It's been 11 years since Kaya got a mystery. Her first and until now only one came out in 2005.

Sadly, this book was not worth waiting for.

The main plot is that Speaking Rain wants to be more independent, and this is expressing itself in her wanting to ride a horse on her own. She even dreams about it. And then the girls hear the legend of the Ghost Wind Stallions and discover a silver stallion in the woods near where their horses stay. They keep the stallion a secret, something that seems a little out of character for Speaking Rain, because this is a dangerous secret. And their secret-keeping gets them into various mishaps involving their bitchy, judgmental, newly-arrived aunt.

I have two major problems with this. First, we already have a secret horse story in Felicity's series. It's her most well-known story even. And the things Speaking Rain does are ridiculously dangerous. She gets thrown, but in reality, she probably would have been injured a lot worse than slightly banged up. She's lucky she's alive, because she was reckless. The lesson seems aimed more at Kaya learning not to be careless, but it's Speaking Rain who actually needs this lesson, because she's the one doing something on the danger level of Tall Branch's late husband. I don't like this new character for Speaking Rain, because she's too reckless and too selfish, things she should have learned from Kaya's experiences not to be. She also suddenly into horses like out of nowhere.

Second, the character of Tall Branch poses a lot of problems. After being bitchy for 2/3 of the book, she finally reconciles with Kaya and explains that her husband's carelessness got him killed, so she's basically very overprotective and bitches at people when they do careless things. This would be fine if she didn't BITCH at them and instead spoke patiently and courteously. Constantly snapping at people is not going to teach them anything except that you're a nasty bitch. And some of the things that made her snap were total accidents. Then her horse disappears and she blames Kaya, saying the Stick People took the horse thanks to Kaya's carelessness, which is awfully harsh and terrible of her. She apologizes for this at the end, but it's not enough, in my opinion. Almost worse however is Kaya's mom, who lets her sister get away with acting like this. She doesn't stick up for her children directly to her sister. She just lets her be an ass to them and tells them privately to try to not let it get to them. But where are those words when the Stick People incident happens? Nowhere. All this behavior teaches is that you can't rely on grownups, even your parents, to stick up for you, even when it's totally deserved. Yes, Tall Branch is still grieving, but that gives her absolutely zero right to be as rude and disrespectful as she is.

So between Felicity Rain and Tall Bitch, I ended up struggling to get through this thing. I'd actually almost rather continued to go without a new mystery for Kaya, because this was the worst Kaya book and one of the worst mysteries, if not THE worst.