After a few years away, Peretti comes back to the Cooper Family Adventure series with a really interesting and atypical book in the series. This one finds the Coopers journeying to Africa after a mysterious stone several miles wide and almost two miles high literally appears overnight in a desolate area of wilderness. This is the most mystery oriented of the series and also the least intense in terms of violence or suspense or scares. The resolution to the mystery of where the massive stone came from is a kind of surprising one and, while this one was a little slow for me as a youngster, I now think it’s actually one of the more creative and interesting books in the series. Kudos for having a mysterious tribe of vicious cannibals set up to be a villainous force in the book and then having them . . . turn out to just be, you know, normal folks living a peaceful life in an isolated village. It kind of sets up for the book to go in a direction that, as an adult, you expect to be really racially insensitive and then turns that on its head in a nice way. 3 stars.
tl;dr – emphasizing mystery over thrills, this slower-paced entry in the Cooper series is actually one of the more creative and interesting books in the set. 3 stars.