(Gosh, that sounds familiar!) Sik meets a series of gods, goddesses, and ancient heroes including Ishtar, Nergal, and Gilgamesh. They fend off the thugs, but soon a plague travels across the city. A girl named Belet shows up and helps him out. Sik doesn’t have any idea what they are looking for. Then their restaurant has a break in and the robbers tear it apart looking for something. The main character, Sik, is a 13 year old who helps his family run their restaurant in New York. If, like me, you are a bit rusty on the story because you haven’t read it since college, May I suggest this recap: The only character I’d heard of was Gilgamesh. This story contained a ton of mythology I’ve never read before. One of the reasons I love reading RR books is that I get to learn about other cultures and their mythology. Then we marvel at what those “primitive” people accomplished, when we should marvel at our nearsightedness for forgetting such skills. Centuries later, we discover what that the ancient Mayans and Egyptians had mathematics and abilities to build with incredible precision. It was amazing! History came alive and I learned the value of learning history to see how each generation has stood on the shoulders of the previous one to make advancements.

I held in my hand a thing that was 3,000 years old, made by a real person. The professor (and archeologist) brought fossils for us to hold and Egyptian statues. We looked at Egyptian history, the Assyrians, Babylonians, and touched on Eastern History. Then I took ancient history and learned to view history outside the lens of the US. We never looked at anything in BCE at all. It seemed to be nothing but the study of war. All through school I didn’t care for history class.

City of plague god