{My Thoughts} – Have you seen the National Treasure movies with Nicolas Cage in them? If you have, this series appears to have the same basis. These two children Amy and Dan along with many other members of the Cahill Clan are in search of clues. Each of the clues, lead them to a part of another clue, an actual clue or just a wild goose chase. They are each trying to find the long lost missing Cahill treasure from what I have gathered.

Grace Cahill their grandmother seemed have figured out what these clues were, what they meant and how valuable they were to the family. So instead of giving our just an inheritance in her will upon her death she gave certain members of the family the opportunity to search for the clues. Amy and Dan decide that they will search for the clues, but they don’t realize just how dangerous this search is going to be for them as they are two young children that hardly understand what is going on around them. They know that they are going up against other family members and those other family members will stop at nothing to try and get just what it is that they want. They want the cues to themselves, they want the treasure to themselves. It is up to Amy and Dan to get to the treasure before the rest of the family.

The downfall to this whole treasure hunt is that the clues that Amy and Dan find are just a part of the puzzle. There are other similar clues that if other members of the family are able to find them, they too can figure out what to do next. In other words, many clues happen to lead to similar places or the same place which can make it difficult for other family members to stay ahead of each other.

Amy and Dan and their babysitter decide to do this quest together. If you like reading about adventure, near death encounters, backstabbing family members, and mystery stories you should enjoy this series. They is a lot of puzzle and problem solving that takes place within the books, you can try to solve it yourself as you read or wait and allow the characters to unravel the mystery for you. The choice is yours, but I am sure you will enjoy learning and reading about Amy and Dan’s adventures to finding their family treasure. An added bonus is that it has a lot of historical fact within the pages and if you enjoy history and or learning about it, it is an added perk to reading this series. ( )

In the first installment of what is sure to be a long and profitable series, the orphaned Cahill siblings (Amy, 14, and Dan, 11) suffer the loss of their grandmother and embark on a dangerous race to uncover the secrets of their powerful family.

This was a quick read designed to leave you hungry for more. Amy and Dan, along with their trusty, trilingual babysitter Nellie, travel to Philadelphia and Paris in pursuit of some unknown treasure. There are plenty of cliches here, along with a good dose of history, but it's fun stuff. It's like the Da Vinci Code with a bit of Amazing Race thrown in. There are the usual Harry-Potter-esque tropes too: a sorting of characters based on personality stereotypes (in this case, the four branches of the Cahill family), parentless children trying to figure out who their parents were and what their destinies are, and a Snape-ish character in William McIntyre (will he help Dan and Amy or is he a bad guy?).

You have to suspend a lot of disbelief to get into this, (for example, it's hard to believe that family members would really be so quick to try to kill each other, especially when so many of them are too young to even drive), but, again, pretty fun. ( )

DNF @ 52% - Just too unrealistic, even my kids (aged 11 & 9) lost interest in the plot. ( )

Good book for kids. Has suspense, action, history, and mystery. It's like a Dan Brown book for kids. It would be a great learning tool if it included more pictures and maps. ( )

This book reminded me a lot of some other series I've read recently—unrealistic, over-the-top action, characters that know everything they need to know to progress, and one can never be quite sure who to trust. And yet, I enjoyed it more than I feel like I should have. By the time I got to the end, I was invested. I don't normally enjoy a book where you can't trust anyone, because characters are betraying each other left and right, but I still couldn't help but start to trust a couple of the potentially treacherous side characters by the end. And now I want badly to know how it will turn out with those characters. I also can't help but want to know what the big prize is, even though I suspect it will either be ridiculous or a letdown.

I've heard of this series for a long time and considered reading the books years ago, but never have until now. I wonder if I might not have been ready for the style and tone of the book until now, since I've read a few other series with the same kind of wildly unlikely storylines—at least one of which I liked (Mr. Lemoncello's Library) and one of which I really didn't (Treasure Hunters). Now, I'm more able to let some of the things that might have bothered me in the past go and enjoy the story for what it is. I'm not sure how I'll like the change of authors throughout the series, but I'm definitely going to keep going. ( )