Gr 4-7-Twelve-year-old Jax and her family live in the last house on a mountain road in a small town tucked into New York's Catskill Mountains. Higher up the slope sits an abandoned structure of unknown origins that local legend claims is haunted and has hidden rooms. One day, Jax finds a beautiful dog, without tags, sitting near her driveway. She brings him home to shelter him until his owners are found. Later that night, while looking out her window, Jax's gaze is drawn to a light coming from the mountaintop, and she realizes it's from the abandoned building. Jax, an experienced hiker, and the dog she's named Mo-Mo, head up the mountain to investigate. They find a Buddhist monk and his student, who have traveled from Tibet to reopen the monastery. So begins a mystery where the purpose of the building and its contents are revealed. The result is an "East meets West" adventure with the concepts of Buddhism entwined into prophesy, symbolism, a lost artifact, art thieves, and a protective dog. Jax is an intelligent, self-reliant girl, so the frequent anxieties of her overprotective mother come across as unnecessary and do not move the plot forward. A conversation toward the end of book concerning the impact of the Chinese takeover of Tibet feels awkward and hastily included. Still, middle grade readers with a penchant for mysteries and multicultural experiences will enjoy this.- Sharon Lawler, Texas Bluebonnet Award Committee, San Antonio, TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Is there a demon hiding in a Catskills monastery? When a friendly and protective Tibetan mastiff appears out of nowhere, 12-year-old Jax names him Mo-Mo and takes him in temporarily in spite of her anxious mother's reservations. Instantly inseparable, they hike up the mountain above her house to investigate a light in what Jax thought was an abandoned building. There, they meet Yeshi, a boy her age, and his teacher, an elderly monk named Jampa Rinpoche, who have come from Tibet to reopen the monastery built nearly 30 years earlier and to celebrate the return of Rinpoche's teacher. Kimmel, author of the Dalai Lama biography Boy on the Lion Throne (2009), among other titles, creatively and effectively weaves Buddhist teachings as well as a bit of Tibetan history into the rapidly unfolding plot. Yeshi and Jax urgently search for the 11th-century statue of a protector demon called Tsiu Marpo, stolen from a monastery in Tibet, suspecting a suspicious and dangerous red-haired man is in pursuit. Mentioned in a 14th-century prophecy as "an object of unimaginable power," the statue may also contain a priceless treasure. Suspenseful and absorbing, particularly when the kids are trying to decode the language in the prophecy, the story also nicely describes how Jax carries over the lessons from her new friends into her everyday family life.A solid adventure threaded through with spiritual undercurrents. (Fiction. 8-12) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Kimmel blends Buddhist wisdom and Tibetan magic into a girl-and-her-dog tale set in the Catskills. Jax, 12, instantly bonds instantly with the huge, collarless Tibetan mastiff that appears at her family's rustic home. Shortly thereafter, she meets Jampa Rinpoche, an old Tibetan monk, and Yeshi, a friendly Tibetan boy her age; the two have moved into a long-abandoned monastery nearby both to renovate it and to look for a missing ancient statue. Jax's fascination with the Tibetans and their beliefs is complicated by a tempestuous relationship with her fearful mother, who is still emotionally traumatized by the near-fatal accident to Jax's little sister a year before. Ultimately, the arrival of a wild storm kicks off a suspenseful climax, in which Jax, the dog, the Tibetans and some unexpected allies including, perhaps, a demon take on the bad guys. Afterward, Jax and her mother have an air-clearing heart-to-heart talk, and (dog-story lovers take note) after a brief disappearance, the mastiff returns to make the resolution as tidy as it is upbeat.--Peters, John Copyright 2014 Booklist