Rick Riordan has been one of my favorite authors ever since I binge read all of his books in 3 weeks at the beginning of 2020 (yes, of course I’ve re-read them multiple times since). So when I got news that he was writing a new book I was beyond excited! I couldn’t wait for it to come out. The plot seemed riveting; we were finally getting a book with a female protagonist and it was inspired by the legendary 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea! I was so excited to get my hands on a copy. You can imagine my excitement when I got it for Christmas. I started reading it, and I was immediately engrossed and hanging on to every single word.

 I won’t give spoilers because I think that you should experience the joy of reading Daughter of the Deep. The story follows Ana Dakkar, a 9th grade student at Harding-Pencroft  Academy. She is the Prefect of her House, Dolphin, which means that she is a natural born communicator just like dolphins. She has an older brother named Dev Dakkar, who is in the House Shark which is home to natural born protectors/fighters. They are trained in weapon use, combat and logistics. At Harding-Pencroft there are 4 Houses: Dolphin, Shark, Cephalopod and Orca. I’ve already told you about people sorted into Dolphin and Shark let me tell you about the rest. 

Cephalopods are natural engineers. They enjoy hard mechanics, innovating, and other things generally like that. People from House Orca enjoy biology, more specifically medicine, and they specialize in medical care and the general field of medicine.

 Now back to our main character Ana Dakkar! Something I found really cool about her was that she and the other people in her graduating class at the school all learned to speak Irish so they could speak to each other in secret without anyone understanding. Irish is a scarcely spoken language. Overall, I thought this book was amazing as is everything Rick Riordan writes. It was easy to read and I absolutely loved the whole world created in the book! I highly recommend this book to all readers!

by Liesl-Ann Vaz ’25, Contributing Writer

25lvaz@montroseschool.org