Book Review: The York Trilogy

The York Trilogy by Laura Ruby

• The Shadow Cipher

• The Clockwork Ghost

• The Map of Stars

Maybe it’s cheating to call the York Trilogy one of my favorite books of 2020 since it’s actually a trilogy, but it’s my book review, so I’ll bend the rules if I want to. Anyway, it’s the three books in combination with each other that rang my happy reading bells, so it would be misleading to call any one of them alone my favorite.

The York Trilogy is by Laura Ruby, who I think is one of the great underrated YA/middle grades authors of our time. The story begins with The Shadow Cipher, continues in The Clockwork Ghost, and concludes with The Map of Stars. 

The stories are set in an alternate version of New York City that’s just a little bit better than our version — there’s still Hamilton and the Marvel franchise, but there are vegetarian restaurants everywhere. Climate change isn’t a problem. People practice sustainable living as the norm. There’s almost a complete absence of any kind of racism or sexism. And there’s even a sort of Native American United Nations that actively participates in national and international government.

It turns out the big difference between this reality and ours is two people: Theresa and Theodore Morningstarr, twins who emigrated to the United States from Germany in the late 1700s. The Morningstarrs were geniuses, inventors and idea makers, and the totally transformed first Manhattan, then the United States, then the entire world with their technology and philosophy. In this New York, everybody knows the Morningstarrs — they are two of the most important people in human history. They’re also famous because they left behind a secret puzzle — with clues hidden throughout the city they helped build. People have tried for centuries to solve it, but even though some clues have been discovered (and some even solved), no one has even gotten close to the big solution.

Tess and Theo Biederman — named by their grandfather after the famous Morningstarr twins — have been thinking about the Morningstarr puzzle their whole lives. Their grandfather has dedicated his entire life to trying to solve the puzzle, so when they discover a secret clue hidden right in their very apartment building, they realize that there’s more than one version of the puzzle out there. 

The Biedermans team up with their neighbor Jaime, a comic book artist whose mom, a theoretical physicist, died in a terrible accident, and the three of them become best friends as they try to solve the cypher. Unraveling the clues takes them all over the city — into the history of New York, the Morningstarrs, and the United States in a series of puzzles that’s really delightful, right up until the surprising — but absolutely pitch perfect — conclusion.

I read this book at a time when I really needed to believe that one person, or a few people, could make a real difference — could make the world a better place. I would have loved this series for giving me that feeling alone, but it was also a deliciously tangled mystery, full of complicated people and challenging puzzles and the possibility of building community in unexpected ways. It is a series rich with big complicated ideas and nuanced distinctions — you have to pay attention if you want to keep up. I was surprised and delighted by it, and I bet you will be, too.

(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.)

---