Theo Tan and the Fox Spirit
by Jesse Q Sutanto
Intermediate, Middle School     Feiwel    320 pp.   g
5/22    978-1-250-79428-4    $16.99
e-book ed.  978-1-250-79430-7    $9.99

Theo Tan is more into gaming than studying his Chinese heritage and learning to access his qi—that’s his older brother Jamie’s thing. But after Jamie pulls Theo aside one morning for a mystifying conversation about computer game quests, and then dies in a car accident, leaving Theo his fox spirit companion, Kai, and a coded notebook full of clues, Theo determines to find out what his brother was trying to tell him. His search leads him to the “Know Your Roots” summer youth ­program conducted by Jamie’s former employer, Reapling ­Corporation, purveyor of the “cirth” that everyone uses to power their magic, but Theo can’t pass the stringent entry exam. Clever Kai helps him cheat to get in, but doing so tilts Kai away from spirit and toward demon, and now the two guards of the underworld, Ox Head and Horse Face, are eager to drag her down to Diyu. Chinese cosmology (and to a lesser extent, Indian cosmology, since Know Your Roots features both) star in this Riordan-esque adventure set in an alternate San Francisco, where magic is prevalent but so is prejudice (Theo refuses to speak Mandarin after being teased in kindergarten; his reconnection with his heritage is one of the story’s strengths). Readers dependent on their own technological devices might take a lesson from the book’s message about finding resources within—or perhaps they’ll just enjoy this engrossing mystery set among ancient Chinese spirit grudges and modern-day corporate malfeasance.

From the July/August 2022 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.