I enjoyed reading Max and the Spice thieves. It was very engaging. The characters were well developed and the scenes kept you glued to your seat as you read them. I loved the mix of magic and pirates as Max learns how special he is as he travels the seas in search of his mother. The imagery that is conjured by reading the words in the story is magnificent and the intensity of the story keeps the reader engaged. A great clean, fun and exiting story. I can't wait to read the next one in the series.

This book was very entertaining and original. Who knew that spices could be used as weapons?! From page one this book takes you on an adventure. The plot twists kept me turning the pages to see what would happen next. The backstories were well developed for most of the characters too. I did struggle at spots to understand who was who with some of the lesser characters. Lots of names that were fitting for pirates, but difficult to keep straight. I can't wait to read the next one to see what happens.

Overall it was a very interesting book and if readers like fantasy and magic this is sure to keep their attention. At times it was hard to read the “pirate lingo” with words such as “Ye, yer or “kin”, because it is not popular in the basic English language. Lots of twists and turns that I, as the reader did not see coming that kept me entertained. Though, there were so many twists and so many backstories from the characters that at times I did get confused. However, when the reader is done reading this book, they are left on a cliffhanger. If you want a story to wrap up and not wait for the second book to come out this book is not for you. I did not like how I was not fulfilled at the end because the characters were not finished on their journey and now I have to wait for the second book to come out.

This was a fun read with unique and interesting characters. There is a lot of world-building and many twists and turns that kept me entertained. It was great to have both boy and girl characters so prevalent. I think that will interest both boys and girls to read the story. I also liked how kind and compassionate Captain Cinn and his pirate crew were. I thought it was so clever to make him a chef using the spices he "procures". Max and his friends are exactly the kind of people you would want to go on an adventure with. Overall, the tone of this book was very sweet and I liked the message of not judging people by their appearance/occupation and giving them a chance to prove themselves worthy.

The book begins with the reader meeting Max, a sheltered teenager whose father has been missing at sea, embarking on a journey with his mother on a pirate ship. However, shortly after they arrive at the shipping docks, his mother goes missing. Witnesses say they saw her taken by two shadowy creatures, and Max is forced to rely on Captain Cinn, a Spice Thief, to help him find his mother. Max and the crew on the Savory Pig are caught by Prince Abed and forced to cease their search for Max’s mother. While the crew is taken to the towers as prisoners, Max meets both Anya, a spy disguised as a maid, and Linzy, Queen of Ardus. With the help of these two females, Max and the crew escape the palace and go back to sea with the help of kelpies (sea creatures) to increase the speed of their ship.It is in Max’s interaction with Anya that he learns his father is alive and has left an encrypted message for him to decipher.


Throughout his journey, the reader begins to notice Max’s skin sensitivity is more than just a reaction to wet and cold weather. Max has strong powers of his own, and begins to use his powers to protect himself and his friends. He describes it as a serpent rising within him. On their quest to find Max’s mom, the characters realize that the Twilight Army is increasing and in order to stop the Djinn from turning the dead into their soldiers, Max needs to find his mother and father, the true keepers of the Midnight Jewel. The Midnight Jewel was created by nature as a means to balance the world again.


Even though they fear their lives, Max and his team go to the Witch Queen to seek guidance and insight. There she instructs Max that he will have to go alone to find his mother, and assists by sending her harpies to protect them from the Twilight Army. War is raging all around them, but Max continues to search and save his mother from the Ice Palace. Max goes out in the ice flats alone. After being swallowed by a glass whale, he finds his father’s ship and encounters snow bears. After several confrontations and battles, Max strengthens his power in shape shifting and finally makes it to the Ice Palace to meet the Djinn leader and his mother frozen in ice.


As the ship’s crew and snow bears battle the Twilight army outside the palace walls, Max defeats the Djinn leader and is reunited with his father and mother. His father reveals he is Agus the Just...a wizard and brother of the Witch Queen. Agus soon leaves to slow down the Djinn, and Max is encouraged to continue on in his journey on the Saucy Pig.

I really enjoyed this book. I’m a homeschool parent and I read-aloud to my two elementary children daily. This is a book that would keep their attention and have them engaged in the character and plots which is why I marked it green. I also have a husband who is a sailor and I enjoyed some of the sailor dialect.

Max Daybreaker is about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. Along the way he will meet pirates, princesses, assassins and queens. This was a cute middle-grade novel full of adventure, magic and did I mention pirates?!

The story started out excellent. I enjoyed the authors detailed descriptions of food and smells. It really brought the world to life. Where it started to fall about for me was towards the end. The ending got a bit muddled for me and it seemed that a lot of story was trying to get shoved into the last few pages of the story. There were also so many characters that I started to have trouble remembering who everyone was and how they played into the story. This book is set up for a series which I appreciate. I just started to struggle towards the end because so much was happening.

I also didn’t like the character of Max as much as I wanted to. He was not well developed as I would have liked especially for him being the main character. I loved all the supporting characters but Max just seemed a bit dim. He was a sheltered child thrown into this adventure which could explain some of his innocence. However, I often found him infuriating.

Overall, this was a great novel and I’m sure middle-grade students will appreciate it and have so much fun reading it! I would recommend this novel to friends.

Max and the Spice Thieves is a grand adventure, filled with pirates, magical creatures, and friendship. This was a fun read and middle grade readers, especially boys, will enjoy it. Max is a hero that is relatable; He seeks adventure, like his ship captain father, but is denied it his whole life, until now... Max frequently questions his ability to be brave and unafraid, but ultimately his love for his parents pushes him forward. This book looks at many themes that preteens are experiencing- who they are, being different, courage, doing what is right no matter what, friendship, family and love. Ultimately this is a fun adventure story that is well written and full of action. The book keeps moving forward with one adventure after another. If you like adventures I recommend this book.

Max And The Spice Thieves is a fanciful story about a young boy and an adventure of a lifetime. We begin the book with Max and his Mother (Bettina), who are setting out on a search for his Father, Captain Nicholas Daybreaker. The Captain recently vanished and both refuse to believe the worse. Soon after they start, Bettina also disappears. To reunite his family, Max will have to navigate his magical world and the Three Seas, face periles and learn to use his own magic he didn't know existed.
Along the way, Max meets pirates, spies, a Prince, a future Queen, and a 3 eye seer, snow bears, and many more friends and foes. One of his biggest influencers is Captain Cinn, a Spice Pirate with a love of cooking and properly spiced food. He takes Max under his wing and shows Max that pirates aren't always the bad guy. You will meet Anya, a simple maid, who is actually an assassin for the Thieves Guild. These are just a couple of the amazing characters Mr. Peragine has wrote about in his book.
Max has always believed he had a health condition which leaves him unable to deal with certain weather conditions (i.e. cold, heat, snow). Little did he know that this condition was part of the magic that flowed through his body. Max will learn later that his magic is controlled by love.
The primary foe in this book is the Djinn and the Twilight Army. They are an otherworldly undead army sent to destroy. Max must battle the Djinn to save his new friends, save the world they live in, and save his parents. He must figure out where his parents are and why they are protecting a secret called the Midnight Jewel.
The first book in the Secrets Of The Twilight Djinn will leave you ready to start the next in the series.If the second book in the series was out I would have already started reading it!

It’s been a few years since I’ve read a fantasy book and I was a little nervous about this pick.

All my expectations were met with this book!

From harpies to snow bears to a witch queen, this book has it all. Max and the Spice Thieves helps remind readers of the importance of love, family, and friendship while also allowing readers to travel to a brand new world. This book is such an easy and entertaining read and I look forward to the next book in the series! It’s also such a great read for any middle schooler and can easily become the next “Percy Jackson” - like series.

Max and the Spice Thieves was an entertaining book for middle grades. The characters in the story were complex and multi-dimensional and it was a great quest for a tween seeking to find his parents and discovering several secrets along the way. There were pirates in this book, which was entertaining, but I appreciated the different take on the pirates, especially with their battles and weapons of choice. The book ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, setting up a second book to come in the series. While I appreciated the story and characters, it felt like at times it was doing a bit too much. Some storylines faded away without resolution, and others seemed a bit contradictory at points.

Readers who love a quest, magic, and the pirate life will enjoy this book and I look forward to the continued character development in the sequel.

I ADORED this book. I'm always happy to read anything about pirates and food and this book combines both of those! I thought the characters were unique and so fun. The Spice Pirate spin on typical pirates was fantastic! I really loved that Max is a kid who would love to stay in bed and read all day! The way he loved and respected his family was so sweet and I really appreciated that. The story has some exciting twists and secrets that were fun. I am glad to see this is going to be a series, because I need more of these adventures. This was a very fun read and I am so excited to share it with my kids. They are going to LOVE this story!

Thank you NetGalley and Crumblebee Books for the ARC of Max and the Spice Thieves in exchange for my honest review.

Max and the Spice Thieves was a fun and easy read. The beginning felt a little slow but got much better as the story progressed. Max was a great hero to root for and felt very believable. He had his moments where he could be incredibly brave but also had moments where he was a bit naive and made the wrong choice which made him feel real.

My favorite character in the book was probably Captain Cinn. He reminded me a bit of Captain Jack Sparrow which adds to his appeal.

While not everything gets wrapped up in this book, it isn’t an ending that leaves you frustrated since you do get a lot of answers. It is also an ending that gets you excited for the next chapter in Max’s story.

One problem that I noticed was that when it first talks about Max’s age it says he is twelve, and then a few pages later it says he is almost fourteen which left me very confused about his actual age.

This book had a bit of everything from pirates to giant wales, mystery and adventure this book will have you wondering what will happen next the entire time. All of the characters are unique and there are not many times when you forget who someone is. Overall a great story that left plenty open for the next book in the series.

When I was 5, I had my little address book where I’d written down all the people I needed to call in case of emergency. A couple of years later, I had to cook and shop for groceries on my own. At 10, I was obsessed with translating into Italian all the Latin sentences in The Name of the Rose, and I enjoyed doing my best friend’s trigonometry homework. If I try to recall memories of me as a teen, they just won’t come. I don’t think I ever acted like one. I might have never been able to be my own age back then, but I sure did love teen literature.

Even now that I’m a grownup –sort of–, I still have a soft spot for these kinds of stories, so when I was asked to read this novel, I was more than happy to accept.

So here I am, writing a review for Max and the Spice Thieves by John Peragine. I had high hopes for this book, and now that I’ve finished it I am sorry there is no Italian version I can read to my kids.

First of all, the cover is great. Look at it. Beautiful, huh?

As a teenager I spent several Summers on my father’s sailboat –I even have one tattooed on my ankle– and I tend to get overexcited when I see ships. Plus, I love how the elements of this cover, from the drawing to the font, to all the little details that come to be important throughout the novel, complement each other.

Can we also talk about the fact that the author dedicated his novel to his son? I don’t think there’s anything sweeter.

The premise is cool. Max’s father is missing and his mother tells him to get ready because they have to leave. My curiosity was piqued on the spot. I needed to follow this journey and see where Bettina was taking Max and, most importantly, why. It didn’t take long for Bettina to go missing too. Poor Max found himself all alone in a bad situation. The stakes were high, and I needed to know what was going to happen to this kid.

That’s where I met a character I fell in love with: Captain Cinn. I love his speech patterns, and I adore how obsessed he is with spices, because I’m the same. I could spend hours and hours talking about them. Since he is a pirate, I feel the need to point out there is a harbor like 10′ away from where I live. Just in case, you know.

Actually, most of the characters here are lovely and well crafted, from Piers to Anya, from Linzy to Prince Abad. I liked them all.

John Peragine‘s writing is on point and it never gets boring. Achieving such an elegant writing style is not for everybody, even more so because there’s a very fine line between elegance and purple prose. Not only he never crosses it, but I also find it refreshing that this elegance is being used in a book that’s meant for teens.


In fact, I may have let it slip in a tweet a couple of days ago that the book I was reading was practically perfect, and now I can say it was this one. Back then I had read up to 70%, and I couldn’t find major flaws.

Now that I’ve read it all, I only have a couple of issues with this story, which is way less than I expected given how much I enjoy to nitpick.

What? You want to know what bothered me? Great.

My pet peeve is that everybody seems to love Max. From Cinn to the Witch Queen, from Annalinda to Mesha, they tell Max how special he is or how great he is. Sure, his destiny is pretty special and I understand he needs to find strength to deal with it, but I found it hard to suspend my disbelief anyway: nobody can be liked by all the people they meet. Truth be told, I feel that he has to fail sometimes in order to learn. Failure is part of the hero’s journey, but there can’t be failure if you always have someone ready to help you and comfort you.

This point is especially true regarding Max’s immediate bonding with Annalinda. While I agree that it was perfectly natural for her to care for him because of her backstory, I would have preferred it if the affection was toned down a little bit. Mind that I’m only talking about the dialogues here, not the actions.

Books tend to have a looser structure and a lot less rules than screenplays. If there is one thing they have in common though is that inserting characters after the end of the second act is deemed risky. The third act is usually all about three things: a final confrontation, tying loose ends and an epilogue.

If I only take in consideration the number of pages in this novel, Max meets Annalinda and her husband around what I consider the all hope is lost moment to be: he is alone and scared, and doesn’t know what to do. Annalinda helps him in a way that allows him to reach a new potential, something that will be helpful to him when he arrives to the Ice Palace. This could have been the end of act two, the final injection of new information into the story, but it lead to a whole new opening instead. At this point, reading about new characters so close to the ending made me feel confused. I didn’t want to follow Max through another journey; I wanted him to find his family and I needed him to be reunited with the people he’d traveled with for the most part of the book. People that I had invested in emotionally for the previous three quarters of the story.

As it is, when they finally meet again it feels more like a deus ex machina than a real reunification, and this saddens me more than I can say, because I wanted to know how they’d found Max, how they’d known when to come to his rescue. I’ll be more than happy to wait for the sequel though, and I can’t wait to see what Max’s destiny will be and if Cinn will be the one to betray him.

I’ll stop now, I promise.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC of this book.
I get how other people might enjoy this book, but it just really wasn't my type of book. Something thing that I think could have been improved is the type of writing because it seemed as if it was an older or at least middle-aged man speaking, not a child. I think that overall, this was a decent book.

I had more fun reading this book, than i have in a long time. the characters were created and presented in such believable fashion. They fit into the story, and you expected much from them, and the author delivered. The world was creative and new to me, and that made it all the more fun. Thanks for helping this bad bad year end with a smile.

I was drawn to this book by the cover and its blurb and I just had to read it.

I loved reading Max's book as I read and got to know Max and be taken along for the brilliant adventure!

The characters are amazing. The use of herbs as weapons is wonderfully brilliant! This was a fantastic read and I loved ever single second of it

Max is thrust into an adventure after his mother is kidnapped, and he is forced into trusting a Spice Pirate for help in finding her. Along the way he meets new people from places far far away from the farm and Island he grew up.
"Max and the Spice Thieves" is an exciting read, perfect for the Middle Schooler, or a family read,(This adult loved it - I no longer have young ones). This story has magic, shape shifters, really nice Pirates, and evil Djinn zombie armies. I would say the violence level is tame when compared to say "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". I am looking forward to the next installment.

Max and the Spice Thieves is one of those books that pulled me in immediately. Max is one of those characters that pushes his way into your heart, and you find yourself rooting for him every step of the way. He was very well written, and I think that young kids and teens will be able to relate to him. We all find ourselves feeling stronger when it comes to our family. We’d do anything for them, and Max is no different. It made him likable and his journey to growth was realistic and spectacular.

The other characters all bring something to the story. They aren’t there as extras and don’t feel useless. They all have their own stories, own journeys, and own goals. And they are too, in their way, relatable characters. I found myself wanting to know more about each and every one of them, particularly Captain Cinn. He’s such an enigmatic character and I want to know the story of his journeys across the three seas.

The antagonists feel like a real threat. I was on the edge of my seat more than once, unable to put the book down until I found out what would happen to these characters I feel so attached to. That, to me, is excellent storytelling. I have to applaud John Peragine for this one and I can’t wait to get my hands on the sequel in the future.

The only thing I would look out for is a few typos, misplaced words, and the like. And I feel that we need to know more about Mesha, because she felt kind of bland compared to the others as she came in so late in the game.

All in all, a beautiful story.

Overall, I enjoyed the creativity of the story, but I did find it hard to follow at times because the storyline itself was a bit scattered and convoluted. Both of Max's parents go missing at different times, so he sets out to find them. At some points in the story, he's searching for his mother. Then, he shifts direction to search for his father instead. So, it feels a bit scattered at times. And then when we get into the explanations of how certain people came to be born and the sacrifices of magical power and lifeforce it took for that to happen, it seemed a bit convoluted.

There was also a discrepancy early on that left me confused for a bit. Initially, the main character, Max, says he's twelve, but then a few pages later, he says he's fourteen. Given his reaction to two young women he meets later, his age makes a bit of a difference. But more importantly, it just made it hard for me to settle into what age group the book was intended for.

That said, the story as a whole kept my attention, although it was slow to get into, and the characters were intriguing. Each had a bit of a secret beyond who or what they initially seemed to be, so we're continually reminded not to judge a book by its cover. I also appreciated the loyalty and commitment demonstrated by many of the characters.

Most of the questions raised in the book are answered by the end (although not all), and new ones are posed toward the end, which leads us into the next book in the series. I look forward to reading what happens next!

Rating: 3.5 stars