This was not a book for me. I was not a fan of the characters or the plot. I think this just a case of my type of book.

it was a fun read with interesting characters and a fun plot. I think it works as a young adult read and I had fun reading it.

Now I am far away from the age group that this is meant for.

But I thoroughly enjoyed this.

It was well paced with plenty of action throughout.

The characters were engaging and it certainly left me wanting to read more.

Series Info/Source: This is the first book in the Ninja Girl Adventures series. I got a copy of this from NetGalley to review.

Story (2/5): I read the first 25% of this book and then stopped reading it. The first chapter is a mishmash of confusing action scenes and probably should have just been left out. We then move on to what happened a year ago to get our characters to where they are at in the first book. In the next chapter we have the author accidentally swapping the sister's names. Marci is the younger and some sort of genius, Mindy is the oldest and a trouble maker. Then in a scene in a lawyer's office Marci is supposedly writing the name of some boy she's crazy over and Mindy is trying to hack into the TV....I actually went back and reread the first chapters a few times but then was completely confused by which sister is supposed to have which personality..it was weird.

Aside from that the story basically appears to be about the sister's fighting against an evil uncle over the ownership of their missing father's corporation. Yes, there are ninjas too but they were just finally introduced around the 25% in mark. It took way too long for them to be introduced and I have absolutely no interest in reading about corporate ownership struggles.

Characters (3/5): Moira is the main character and acts way way older than her age throughout. She was okay but I really wasn’t drawn to or engaged with any of the characters I met here. Also why in the world would you make all of your main characters have names that start with the same letter and are five characters long? Just to show they are sisters or something?? It’s confusing to your readers and annoying, making it very hard to keep track of who is who.

Setting (3/5): The book is set in New York City, but is a fairly generic city setting for the portion I read. It takes place mostly in their house and Moira’s father’s office building.

Writing Style (2/5): Between the plot, which held no interest for m,e and some of the weird editing errors I decided to set this aside for now. I don't really have the patience for it and was struggling to stay interested. I am giving it three stars since I only read the first quarter of the book and am it giving it the benefit of the doubt that it got better. I am curious about all the five star reviews though since at least the first part of this book is pretty unpolished.

My Summary (3/5): Overall I didn’t like this. The premise was silly, there are inconsistencies throughout the story, the characters are hard to keep track of, and it just wasn’t written well. I am giving it three stars since I read so little of the book. Not recommended.

When I first read the synopsis for this book, I thought it sounded like a really interesting middle grade/young adult read with a new twist: ninjas and sisterly love! This is not a subgenre I generally go for, but I thought it sounded fun. Unfortunately, the story really wasn't that interesting to me; it just fell a bit flat.

After reading the first two chapters, I was ready to quit. I had already encountered two story continuity issues, which I really don't deal well with, and I was tempted to drop the book completely. However, after seeking advice from friends, and taking a couple days to think about it, I decided to give the book a second chance and at least try to finish within the time frame I had left before the book would expire from my NetGalley library, which I did.

The first continuity issue I encountered was that the main character, Moira, is supposed to be the middle child, but within the first chapter, when describing her relationship with her guardian, Uncle Mort, it says that "he always offered Moira coffee because she was the oldest." It is possible that referring to her as being the oldest is meant to be some kind of inside joke, but it only came across as a confusing error.

The next chapter talks about the older sister, Mindy, and how she has been skipping school and generally getting into trouble with her friend "Aubry," but then on the same page, it suddenly starts referring to the friend as "Amy." It is, of course, possible that there are two different friends, but the text just sounds like there is one friend whose name changed in the middle of the page.

Aside from these errors and some grammatical stuff, the rest of the book seemed technically sound. It is very dialogue heavy, and uses 3rd person omniscient POV. Personally, when I read a book with this POV, I prefer for there to be separate chapters using each character's voice. This book just passes to another person's perspective fluidly. Yet, we only get another person's perspective once in a while. For the most part, the story is just following Moira in third person. In my opinion, I think it might have been better to not include the other perspectives, or to have rewritten them to fit third person limited, OR to have inserted a short chapter here and there, where necessary, to share that person's perspective.

There were also times when a "punchline" of the story was unnecessarily reiterated. The main example being, near the end of the book, when Moira is facing off against Uncle Jiro and he gets away. They follow his blood trail and discover it was an illusion, then go back to where he was injured to see the real trail leading away to the elevators. Moira then goes on the explain exactly that back to Aiko, who obviously knows what has happened because she pointed out the illusion to Moira in the first place.

In conclusion, I did not enjoy reading this book. I found the character names of the sisters too similar and was often getting confused about who was who. If I'm honest, I didn't really like any of the characters all that much. I found Uncle Mort to be an irresponsible guardian. I really couldn't understand why Moira acts like a parent to her siblings when she is the middle child, and only 14? It really bothered me that a 14 year old child would be present at her 15 year old sister's disciplinary meeting at school. Not only that, but this 14 year old is missing school to "take care" of her siblings, when there is a supposedly capable adult guardian around?! And I do get that it's supposed to be a "chosen one" kind of trope, where Moira inherits her father's business because the other girls aren't interested, and then she becomes a ninja because that's also part of the family business/history and makes up the backbone of the story, but... How unlikely is it that a parent would leave his entire fortune and business to the middle child, when that child is only 14 years old? I also think it is unfortunate that the final chapter leaves off with a cliffhanger indicating that there is more to come.

I don't know if there are planned sequels, but this book should really just be a standalone novel.

I am usually very generous with my ratings, but I really don't feel I can give this one more than 1 star.

I received an advance reader copy of this book through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

Ninja Girl Adventures is a middle grade novel with a fourteen-year-old main character. This book falls into the upper middle grade range due to the MC’s age – it also has a more mature plot than standard middle grade as well as less emphasis on humor.


Moira Mackenzie and her sisters Mindy and Marci have experienced too much tragedy in their young lifetimes. After their father’s death in an airplane crash, their uncle Jiro shows up and wants to take over the company the sisters’ father founded. What the girls don’t know is that they are the descendants of a line of ninjas. Moira will need to use every bit of inherited ninja skills if she’s going to keep her uncle from taking over the company and hurting the people she loves.

I gave Ninja Girl Adventures four stars. It is a good and worthwhile read, but I just didn’t love it enough to give it the fifth star. Boy readers will love the action and adventure aspects of the story, and girls will find several strong female characters who have important roles to play in the story.

This was an ebook that rubbed me the wrong way from the off. I had some real problems with it. The first chapter launches right into an action scene and cuts off at the end of the chapter with a sword swishing through the air, but we know that Moira, the middle sister of the three the story is purportedly about, is not - as a main character - going to be killed in the first chapter. So, for me: no cliffhanger really - certainly no dramatic tension. I don't like that in books, nor in movies, nor in TV shows. It's just annoying, if not infuriating.

That wasn't what bothered me though, nor was it the fact that this is yet another series launcher, meaning that this is really a prologue, nothing more. There was nothing on Net Galley, nor on the book cover to indicate this though. If there had been, there is a good liklihood that I would not have asked to review this. I know authors like to write them and publishers love to publish them because they can be cash cows, but that will never be my motivation, and even that aside, I'm not much of a fan of series. To me they're lazy and derivative, being essentially the same story told over and over with precious little added to try and leaven or freshen the volumes.

What bothered me to begin with is the fact that I detest flashbacks unless they're done well, and to me there's nothing worse than launching into a story and then slamming on the breaks and bringing it to a screeching halt, before grinding it into reverse and backtracking. I thought that maybe it was just the next chapter so I began skimming and I realized: no, it's the entire novel that's backstory! The action part doesn't start again until chapter 25 (out of a total of some 27 chapters!). The first part of that late chapter acknowledges how appallingly long it's been since then, by essentially repeating word-for-word the last few paragraphs of chapter one!

To me this is bad writing. It's a huge no, and it turned me right off reading any more of this novel. That's not the only problem (and I'm not even going to talk about the common misuse of apostrophes in the book description!). For me I thought the ninja portions of the story might have imparted some life-lessons for young children based on that lifestyle, but this didn't seem much to be the case.

Originally ninjas were nothing more than spies - the James Bonds of their era which was around the fifteenth century (with possible roots running earlier and influence later). They learned stealth techniques and covert behavior, but were considered dishonorable precisely because of all this sneaking around! From what I could see of this story (and here again, I did not read it all) it seemed that it was much more focused on the mystical - which was never a part of the 'ninja code'. They had no magical powers (no one does!) and did not shapeshift into animal forms. A much better parallel for the Ninja life would have been to have drawn one with the resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War Two.

But even there you would have issues because, being of medieval times, Ninjas had no firearms. They were all about swords, knives, and other inventive metal weapons such as shuriken which were employed. Note that shuriken referred not just to the 'star disks' that are so fondly used in movies featuring these characters, but also to a variety of small weapons known collectively as shuriken. The thing is, in modern times, ninjas would have to be exceedingly skilful otherwise they would simply end-up being shot to death, so to present these behaviors and try to update them makes little sense - unless of course you had planned on using their methods to teach life lessons which doesn't really seem to have been employed much here.

On top of this the sisters, other than, of course, the super-heroic Moira, are kidnapped and yet nowhere does there seem to be any real effort at a police investigation. They're bypassed in favor of ninjas! I get that this somehow has to happen if the planned story is to be told, but to remove it so far from reality with so little justification doesn't get it done for me.

While it's never a good idea to teach kids to go outside the law, for the sake of a good story you can get away with it if it's done well and you can also somehow justify it, but as far as I could tell, that doesn't even seem to have been attempted here. It's just, 'oh, the hell with the police, let's take the law into our own hands', and I've seen that cliché too many times tossed in like bacon sprinkles on a salad in the forlorn hope that it will somehow improve limp lettuce and soggy tomatoes, and it doesn't. When you add this to the overdone trope of the black sheep of the family, of the poor ability to recognize who's behind the evil, of the bypassing of the law, of the improbable heroic rescue, it's too much. You have to ask what's really new here and how have these behaviors been justified, and the answers seem to be: nothing much and not at all. For me that's a serious negative.

One final problem is that the story is presented as one about sisters ("sister power at its best"), which I was ready to enjoy, but the truth is it's really all Moira. The other two sisters combined garner for themselves nowhere near as many mentions as Moira does, and Moira did not strike me as a very appealing character, to be honest. In view of all of this, I can't commend this as a worthy read.

If reviews could include the exploded brain emoji, this book reviewer would include three of them. I was completely mind blown. I absolutely adore the vocabulary and the culture in the book.
Moira's courage and maturity are entirely admirable. She makes such a wonderful example for young ones who read the book.
The way she handled the bullying and encouraged her sisters is simply incredible for one so young.
Frankly, not so many adult books are as enthralling and wonderfully written as this.
Melissa Wilson and Phil Elmore are such inspiring authors.