Keeper of the lost cities. Some of you all may be familiar with the name, likely having read it in elementary school or middle school. I too was once like you, having been gifted the book by my grandparents and choosing to keep reading the series anyways out of sheer boredom. Since I was a young boy at the time, I didn’t really see all the odd choices the author made because I was more concerned with the trivial plot holes and trying to figure out what would happen next so I could feel smart.

You might be thinking; “Well Toya, Thomas, Tomathy, what’s so wrong with these books?” A lot. To be concise about it I’ve categorized the three main issues I have with the books. The way it depicts beauty, actual eugenics (I’m not even joking), and overall confusing plot. I also really dislike the characters, but we can get into that last since it’s just shoddy writing and more of a personal gripe.

1 – Plot (can I even call it that?)

The first book in my opinion is the best one, while still full of tropes at least it has a vaguely clear idea of what it’s trying to be. Sophie is secretly an elf without realizing, goes to elf school and struggles to fit in, discovers some strange things afoot, is kidnapped and then escapes, thus setting up a sequel. 

I truly wish I could say the sequel was good, but it only gets worse from here on out. Each book declines in rationality, and they don’t really make any meaningful commentary on the things going on. 

The second book they find an alicorn and like fix her elf powers. Third book they fight bad guys, things set on fire. Both are pretty boring. And then, the fourth book. 

Hoo boy, the fourth book. Long story short, gnomes are discriminated against by everyone and the main characters get banished. I’m going to go into more detail about the gnome thing later on, but it’s bad.

The fifth book is really boring and for some reason the main character gets to go to a world leader meeting that’s blown up?? It’s hard to feel bad about it being blown up when it had literally the least subtle foreshadowing known to man.

Sixth book has a lot of human experimentation, they have to save Atlantis—it’s really all over the place.

After that, in the seventh book, the trolls hatch evil babies, and the alicorn gives birth, which is a weird sideplot thing that I don’t want to get into. The rest of the books are almost entirely focused on the love triangle thing going on. 

Essentially nothing that happens in the plot makes any real kind of sense. Also, it’s pretty boring in my opinion, considering each book is about 500-700 pages and I really just do not care about any of the things that happen. This series has way too many books, it’s too slow paced, and very easily could have ended at the third or fifth book. Seriously, it genuinely does not need to be AT LEAST ELEVEN DANG BOOKS. 

2 – Eugenics (and other concerning things)

The way this series talks about eugenics is so weird. It’s treated as bad sometimes, but only if it negatively affects the main characters? They also have some questionable moral decisions.

According to Britannica, eugenics is described as “The selection of desired heritable characteristics in order to improve future generations, typically in reference to humans.” In the past there have been certain groups that acted upon that, an example from the 1930’s is how Nazis venerated the Aryan race and sought to eliminate all other races in Germany.

In the books, they have this matchmaking system, in which you’re given 500 matches with other elves. Now, it’s not 100% necessary, but if you date someone not on your list, you are shunned. You are socially pressured into dating specific people, and not only that, but non-ability users can’t be matched with ability users. 

Non-ability users are also discriminated against and work in a different place to the ability users, kind of a separate but equal sort of mentality. They also don’t have access to higher level education (essentially elf college.)

Additionally, they have an expectation that you will only have one kid, because the more you have, the weaker their powers are believed to be.

Whilst not nearly as severe as the example from earlier, it still promotes the same kind of ideals in elven society. Also, the shame cast upon those who defy the matchmaking system is a form of action in of itself. All of this would not be an issue if the books addressed the issue in a direct and head on way, rather than ignoring it almost entirely to focus on the comically evil villains and sort of squashing the discussion. 

If you’re going to have a eugenicist society in your books, at least make some form of meaningful commentary on it, and have it be more important than just a background plot. It saddens me to see, especially in a book typically intended for middle schoolers.

There’s also this weird thing they do where the elves take age by conception? They actually say in the book “life begins at conception” which is likely anti-abortion messaging from the author. The issue is that this is a book intended for children. I’m not saying that children shouldn’t be taught about abortion, but they should get to choose for themselves how they feel about it and not be taught how to feel about it through a biased source.

Finally, because in the books elves are essentially immortal unless they are killed, there are a bunch of really, really old elves (1000+ years old). Except they make it a point to actually say “Oh yeah uh someone who’s 300 can date someone who’s 100, age gaps aren’t as big a deal to elves.”

I’m sorry, WHAT? Why is this something that you feel the need to add in your book??? Just make the characters date people their own age, you do not need to add this. It’s pretty weird at least to me that a grown adult is putting this in a book intended for children. It’s just a weird take in general?

All in all; this book, which yet again I remind you is intended to be for children, has some really concerning messaging. 

3 – Beauty ideals (along with racism)

Man. What if I told you that this book is about a bunch of stereotypically beautiful people who practically all have blue eyes? Because it is. I don’t necessarily think there’s a problem with that in of itself, but the way this book talks about beauty definitely needs to be studied. 

All elves have blue eyes, and here’s the real kicker—the main character has brown eyes! She’s so different and unique and gets bullied for it, sad face. This story actually makes me want to claw my eyes out sometimes. 

In the books, they describe the elves as looking ‘perfect’ and a lot better than humans. They specifically say that they didn’t have acne and were skinny. 

What’s wrong with having acne?? I genuinely cannot fathom this take. These are TEENAGERS we are talking about here. This is also a book that on average, people read when beginning or going through puberty, i.e., when acne tends to be most common. All this stands to do is make its readers feel insecure about themselves. Especially since no one person has a ‘perfect body’ or face, because there are so many different kinds of faces and body shapes. Obviously, everyone can have their own preferences, but what one person finds attractive can be entirely different from another person.

Additionally, athletes, who are strong and typically considered by the media as a ‘perfect body’ have different body types among themselves and often are not considered skinny. 

The two asian main characters, Linh and Tam Song, are described so badly you could almost mistake it for a satire. Their names are a mix of random East Asian names from Vietnamese to Chinese to Korean, even though those are very different countries. Their specific ethnic inspiration is never clarified.

When they’re introduced, the main character describes them as straight out of a ‘kpop or anime’ which are from two entirely different countries yet again, and also just not a normal thing to say.

Their house, which is supposed to be a beach house, is drawn more so as an Asian temple? Everything about them is a stereotypical ‘exotic’ ideal of East Asia, and reminds me quite a bit of orientalism. They have a bit more plot involvement than the black characters, but you can still tell that they’re very poorly thought out.

There are literally no important black characters. You could argue Wylie, but he has literally no role, and his father is catatonic for most of the series. None of the POC characters have any particularly interesting personalities, and there isn’t much growth or character arcs. It’s like the author put them in solely for brownie points and forgot to make them actual autonomous people with goals and aspirations aside from helping the main character.

It’s finally time for me to talk about the gnome thing I mentioned whilst talking about the fourth book. So the gnomes are described as having ‘dirt colored skin’ and do unpaid labor for the elves. Their homeland had previously been destroyed by ogres and so they didn’t have anywhere to go except to the elves. They do essentially all of the planting and cultivation, and in ‘exchange’ are allowed to live alongside the elves.

The book says that they aren’t forced to do the work and tries to convince you that they enjoy doing the work, but it’s more likely that they’re doing it out of fear/obligation.

The ogres in the fourth book end up releasing a plague that only affects gnomes after trying and failing to force the gnomes to work for them instead. We later learn that the elves had KNOWN about the plague and had purposefully not told the gnomes under the guise of ‘protecting’ them.

After the plague is solved by one of the gnomes sacrificing herself, they go back to working for the elves, and it is never meaningfully mentioned again. 

I have a lot of problems with this, to say the least. How this managed to be approved for publishing in a children’s book I have no clue. This is essentially just a glorification of slavery, yet again falling under ‘it’s bad when the bad guys do it but it’s okay when we do it’. The book flat out ignores the pressure the gnomes likely felt to work for the elves, and makes no commentary whatsoever.

4 – Main Characters (romance is dead)

These books take love triangles and hit you over the head with them over and over until you are three feet in the dirt. There isn’t anything particularly wrong with that, It’s just done especially poorly.

The main character makes a joke about love triangles at some point, and it’s infuriating because they are doing the EXACT SAME THING. At least be self aware enough to know that it isn’t funny when you’ve just had to read 600 pages of the most soul sucking cliches known to man. 

Sophie: She makes me so mad, I hate her. She is so obtuse it’s not even funny. She shouldn’t get to be the main character. Give me someone interesting PLEASE. She’s always talking about how she’s not like other girls and she hates dresses, and literally does not understand that she is actively putting other women down. She’s always propped up by the writing—but don’t worry guys, she’s not perfect she tugs her eyelashes!!

I’m 99.99999% sure this is just the author’s self insert. Blonde hair and brown eyes, where have I seen that before? Oh yeah, that’s coincidentally exactly what the author looks like. That honestly makes sense, considering how much Sophie is coddled by the narrative and the book tries to force you to like her.

Keefe: Faux depth, also kinda annoying with it. I feel bad for him since he has pretty sucky parents, but dating your best friend’s ex isn’t cool dude. 

Fitz: A solid character, at least in the later books. He’s not a good person, but he at least has some depth. He has anger issues and is somewhat abusive, but of course the book doesn’t touch on that. While none of these are necessarily cool or even good character traits, he’s not boring at least(?) My standards for this series are so low, my god. 

The rest of the ‘main’ characters don’t really get enough screen time for them to be called that, but I think I’ve complained enough for one day so we can just move on.

Villains: Comically evil, maybe the real villains were the elves who condoned eugenics the whole time. I don’t know what else to say about them, essentially the main villains either have no reasons other than wanting to be evil, or a really stupid backstory.

5 – Things the series did well (very few)

The way this series approached death was interesting to me, I’ll give it that much. Since elves are essentially immortal, aside from being killed or severely injured to the point of death, not many ever actually die. People who have family members or people close to them die are seen as odd for mourning or grieving, since many elves just don’t understand what it’s like.

In many ways elves are incredibly privileged, in ways that are (in my opinion) annoying and stuck up. However, the world of the elves is incredibly flawed, and that much is shown well through the narrative. You can tell the author intended a few parts of it, but the rest are largely accidents.

While I do wish the series went a bit more into how a world without death might be like, and what effects it has on everyday people all around, I don’t think that will be happening. I choose to give credit to the concept, though messed up from the get-go it had a few good roots that were unfortunately corrupted by the environment.

I remember reading this when I was ten or so, and giving up on finishing it multiple times before forcing myself to go back and finish it. Then once I was done I went back to reading Geronimo Stilton and Percy Jackson, which I enjoyed much more. 

Even writing this article I had to take multiple breaks, because these books genuinely make me lose brain cells. Looking back on the books with the retrospective of having read it as a kid, I have concerns about the morals in this book that I did not catch when I was younger. The author deliberately made the choices about what happened in the series, and that’s important to recognize. 

I’m sure there are some people out there who like these books, and that’s okay. I just personally think if people want to buy books their money could be better spent on something else. It’s also important to mention that this isn’t an attack on specific people, or even the author, but a criticism of the writing and plot.

All in all, I would advise avoiding this series if possible, but you’re free to do whatever you would like. My friend would like to say that the gnomes are better, but he has not read the book so take that with a grain of salt.. Remember to take care of yourself!