I received a free copy of this book from Abrams&Chronicle/Amulet in exchange for an honest review.

Genie Lo is a normal Asian-American teenager. She’s dealing with school, best friends and parents who want her to exceed in everything, all the while worrying about what else she needs to do to get into a great college. Then Quentin Sun arrives and tells her he is the Monkey King, she is his famous weapon and they need to defeat a horde of demons that’s about to descend upon them.

This book was amazing, and everything I didn’t know I needed. It managed to bring a kick-ass female character, Chinese folklore and a whole lot of great laugh-out-loud funny. Genie Lo is such a refreshing character to have in a book - she’s smart, sassy, diverse, strong and just amazing at everything okay! But she works at everything too - it doesn’t come easy to her, except extending her arms like Stretch Armstrong but that’s a whole other thing.

I genuinely feel like I learned a lot more about Chinese folklore from this book. I know of Greek myths, and Celtic folklore (obviously) but I knew nothing about Chinese folklore until reading this. I am vaguely heard the term “Monkey King’ before but never knew what it actually was about. I am a lot more interested in Chinese folklore now and would love to read more books based around it.

The actions scenes in this book were great - I throughly enjoyed all of them. Some of them were a bit fast or they would start, and then the next chapter would have a time jump and i would be disappointed because I wanted more of a fight.

I really loved Genie’s friendship with Yunie. I would love to see more of it in the next book though, and maybe more of Yunie in the know if Genie eventually tells her what’s going on. I loved Quentin as well, what wasn’t to love about him.

I had a right LOL at the end though, with the doubles and their feelings for each other.