Word: mazes
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...Clues is a series of novels about two orphans named Dan and Amy Cahill. At the start of the first book, The Maze of Bones, just now appearing in bookstores, their beloved grandmother Grace has just died, and all the far-flung members of the Cahill family have gathered round to hear the reading of the will. They are treated to the astounding revelation that the Cahills are in fact secretly the most powerful family in the world. It turns out that just about everybody important in the history of modern civilization - Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Harry Houdini - was actually...
...hardly a new approach - young-adult series have often been written by multiple authors under contract, ever since the Bobbsey Twins. The Maze of Bones is by Rick Riordan, a former middle school history teacher who is the author of the best-selling Percy Jackson series, and who also helped flesh out ideas for the other books in the 39 Clues series. "They were very secretive," Riordan says. "They did nondisclosure agreements. I felt like I was working for the CIA!" Riordan's involvement with Amy and Dan will end when Maze goes on sale Sept...
...there's also a disadvantage. The post-author approach gives The 39 Clues a synthetic, focus-grouped quality. It's nothing you can easily point to. It's just the absence of anything risky or anything strange. The Maze of Bones is scrupulously smooth and generic and meticulously calculated to appeal to everyone and offend no one. As the product of a corporate hivemind, it isn't stamped with the signature quirks of a single distinctive authorial sensibility. If it were a baby it wouldn't have a belly button...
Which brings us to the second, more unusual aspect of The 39 Clues: those "multiple stages of discovery and imagination" Spielberg mentioned. When you buy a copy of The Maze of Bones, you'll find a pocket in the inside front cover that contains a pack of six trading cards. If you like them, you can buy more - there are 355 cards in all - and trade them with your friends. The cards come with various points and clues and puzzles on them, in a system so complicated you would have to be 13 years old or younger to understand...
...ingenious new methods to outwit the Border Patrol. Hundreds of aliens who used to wade the river are now trying to cross it on the bridges, with the help of phony documents; the INS reported a 300% jump in bogus papers. Recently, a group of young men discovered a maze of underground drainage culverts off the river and threaded their way through the dark, slimy reaches, emerging through manhole covers in downtown El Paso. A few were apparently running drugs, but others were intent on nothing more sinister than getting to gardening and handyman jobs on the American side...