Solve a Puzzle in the Past, Save New York Present
This content was originally published by JOHN STEPHENS on 11 May 2017 | 9:00 pm.
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But the Morningstarrs’ most intriguing legacy was the Old York Cipher, a series of clues buried in the bones of the city. Solve the clues and claim a great treasure. A century and a half after the Morningstarrs’ disappearance, no one has come close.
Enter Tess and Theo Biedermann, precocious twins named after the Morningstarrs, who live in one of the Morningstarr buildings. Theo has won a competition for building the Tower of London in Legos (an architect like his eponym), while Tess trots around Manhattan with a giant part-cat part-wolf, and has a tendency to imagine every worst possible situation. (“What if a great white shark swam up the Hudson River? What if a tornado touched down in the middle of Broadway?”)
But Tess’s fears prove real when their building is bought by an unscrupulous real estate developer named Darnell Slant, who plans to tear it down. The twins’ only hope is to solve the Old York Cipher, whose treasure will allow them to save their home. They’re helped by Jaime Cruz, a budding artist who lives in the building with his grandmother, and when the children discover a letter from Theresa Morningstarr which promises a clue in the Cipher, the game’s afoot.
Their journey takes them around New York and into the city’s past, both real and fantastical, as they encounter the nefarious henchmen of Slant, delve into the bowels of the Old York Cipherist Society (a group of either learned scholars or paranoid cranks), and try to parse whom they can trust. Along the way, there’s action and peril, including a scene involving a giant mechanical insect that eats dirt and sometimes people; but at key junctures, it’s each child’s individual talents that lead him or her to solve a particular element of the puzzle. The result is that the children’s victories feel won by bravery, creativity and intelligence, which makes them true heirs of the Morningstarrs.
The pleasures of the novel go far beyond the crackling, breathless plot and the satisfaction of watching the puzzle fall into place. The book is shot through with humor, both laugh-out-loud and subtle, and Ruby, whose Y.A. novel “Bone Gap” won a Printz Award and was a finalist for a National Book Award, takes delight in a beautiful, evocative phrase. “The Underway rumbled under her feet,” she writes of Tess, “as if she were walking on the back of some great murmuring beast.”
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And like a good debater, Ruby anticipates a reader’s doubts. Tess asks: How can it be that adults have been trying to solve this puzzle for a century and a half, and now three kids will be able to crack it? Or, as Theo wonders, with the New York landscape constantly changing, how could the Morningstarrs have expected that the clues to their Cipher would survive?
The answer — which promises a deeper mystery to come (this being the first in a trilogy) — is that the Cipher and the Morningstarr machines are actually responding to Theo, Tess and Jaime by providing them with fresh clues. The suggestion is that the Morningstarr creations are an early version of A.I., and that this treasure hunt will reveal that the city itself is built upon a giant living mass of machinery, waiting to be awaked.
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But for that, we’ll have to wait for the next book. Maybe there’ll even be pirates.
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