"The Key to the Golden Firebird" A Book Review

Its been a long, long, long time (if ever) since I've done any kind of book review so bare with me, but I just finished Maureen Johnson's The Key to the Golden Firebird and felt it necessary to comment on my reading experience.

The Key to the Golden Firebird is a young adult novel by Maureen Johnson. Young adult literature is a truly difficult genre to write in. Not only are there adults perpetually judging the quality and literary technique. Most importantly though is the desired audience; young adults are at such a monumental time in their live and development. The cognitive and rational reasoning regions of their brains haven't fully developed so they are far more easily influences than their aged counterpart. Be it inspired or just as likely blowing a small nuance of the story into some kind of astronomical issue, so as an author one has to write honest and true to life characters. Maureen Johnson does this brilliantly. Every single major character in the story is flawed, they are honestly and unapologetic-ally human.

No one character is faced with an unsurvivable, unrealistic situation. Yet every single one is rife with issues problems and insecurities that are solely theirs. The stage of the story opens with a childish prank on a childhood friend and simultaneously a death in the family.The colorful cast is made up of three high school age sisters who have never really shared that fabled implacable bond of sisterhood. Instead they share grief and an unbearable burden, that ultimately causes their own self-destructions, with each sister imploding in her own unique way. Like all good coming of age stories, the phoenix motif is present, they find their way out of the dark into light, even if it is a little more dusky than it used to be.  It's a wonderful novel with just enough loose ends to leave openings for imagination and bubbling interest.

Maureen Johnson has a true gift of evoking emotions. In the three hundred odd pages she'll make you smile, ache, laugh and cry. I highly recommend The Key to the Golden Firebird to readers of all ages, not quite a modern day Anne of Green Gables, but not all that far off. Self-discovery, death, grief, adventure, and romance it has it all.