Tokyo Heist by Dianna Renn is about a sixteen old girl named Violet. She is excited because her father is painting a mural for Kenji and Mitsue Yamada in Tokyo, Japan, and she gets to go with him. In Tokyo, with her father working for the Yamadas, Violet spends time with her best friend, Reika. Her extraordinary vacation turns upside-down when an invaluable sketch by Van Gogh, owned by her father’s clients, is stolen. With Reika, Violet pursues the search for the missing sketches and the accompanying painting. As the enigma expands, Violet isn’t sure who she should trust. Read the rest of the book to find if Violet can find the painting and save the Yamadas.

I liked this book because it perfectly infuses manga (Japanese comic books) with a real life art mystery. Readers who are interested in manga should read this book to get a little insight to it. One thing that I really did not enjoy was Violet’s fantasizing about her own manga series, which sometimes, in my opinion, got a little boring. Otherwise this novel has the perfect components of a thriller novel; action, mystery, a little romance, and adventure.

-Anmol K., 7th grade