I waited two months to get my hands on this book. Constantly when I tried to check it out from the library, someone else had already checked it out before me. It just built up my expectations for this book, and the hope that it was going to be something spectacular and awesome. I hoped that the characters would be phenomenal and well-developed, the plot surprising and creative, the writing interesting and fresh. 
 Turns out that the only thing that this book had familiar with any of these words, was a creative plot. But then again, the 39 Clues series follows a similar pattern. 
 Perhaps this is where my great sadness and semi-hate for this book originates. 39 Clues. 
 Last year, a bunch of my classmates in school were freaking out about the 39 Clues series. It was like a phenomenon that spread from one student to the next, all of them checking out all of the 39 Clues books just to try and read them. It was pretty hard to check out those books from the library at that time, let me tell you. 
 Even then, I read three of the books, and didn't have the eagerness to finish. I'll be trying again sometime, though. When that is...well, you can see how low The Maze of Bones is on my to-read list right now. 
 But they were enjoyable. The 39 Clues series was different, creative, and I enjoyed the global aspect of it. It was good to know the rivals, and although they were portrayed a lot like villains, I saw that there were different sides to them. The main characters were developed well. There was humor! The humor succeeded in making me laugh! The characters' pasts were intriguing! And this is all stemming from a series whose books are only a hundred-ish pages long. 
 None of this, unfortunately, holds true in The Forbidden Stone. Perhaps I shouldn't have waited two months and just dumped it, had I known what a boring journey it would be. 
 This took me an ENTIRE WEEK to read. Granted, that's because I had so few opportunities to actually, you know, read it, but that's mostly because it annoyed me so much. 
 Tony Abbott tried to make the story center on four main characters--five if you count Wade's dad. Unfortunately, this fails, because NONE of the characters get ANY character development WHATSOEVER. 
 Except for the villain, Galina Krause. And even she got, like, a smidget? There's something that's going to happen to her in six months. Do we know what? No, of course not. All we know is her past, and that she...well, she's a standard world domination villain. And she could have been two-dimensional! 
 The main characters, Wade, Darrell, Lily, and Becca, are infuriating. We hardly know much about them at all. Abbott never reveals to us the past of these characters, and if he does, it's not much. He's hiding something, clearly. But he should have given it away by now! After all, the first book in a series is always meant to develop characters and build the world, right? 
 It does build the world. But I found a whole 2% of character development in this book. 
 And you know what 1.5% of that character development comes from? Krause. The other 0.5%? Becca, at the very end. That's IT. 
 The four main characters, along with Wade's dad Roald, are very bland. Wade is...well, he's Wade. I would call him a __-year-old boy who's fascinated with stars here, but we don't even know his AGE! That's when you know it's bad. And we can't tell what his age is, either. As far as we know, he's eighteen and hasn't gone to college yet, or is seven, and has skipped a few grades. Has the answer been hinted at all in the story? No. Because screw those tiny details that MAKE UP A CHARACTER'S ENTIRE BACKGROUND! We don't need that. All we need is CHARACTERS! 
 Perhaps we should look at this tad bit of advice: 
 Strong characters can carry a weak plot, but weak characters can't carry a strong plot. --Anonymous 
 Abbott, apparently, overlooked this very important advice when writing The Forbidden Stone. Or, you know, he twisted it the other way around. 
 Darrell is completely comic relief, and no matter how much Abbott tries to conceal it, it's obvious. Which brings up another issue of this book I'll get to in a moment. But back to Darrell. He freaks out about spies. And spouts "jokes". And he's Wade's cousin! Yeah, that's all there is to poor Darrell here. 
 And Lily is just frankly annoying, both as a character and as what she does. 
 Let's look at her computer and her tablet for a moment, shall we? 
 Unless this takes place in the distant future--which it probably doesn't, given from the technology we've seen, but heck, does it tell us? No!--Lily SHOULD NOT be able to use internet or anything to do with internet in foreign countries without Wifi. And her phone wouldn't be able to do this, either! Because guess what? Your phone ain't got no data in foreign countries. Don't believe me? Drive to Canada with your iPhone 6 and see for yourself. Because you can't even CALL in foreign countries without Wi-Fi! 
 But she does. She uses Google Maps. In Germany. 
 And we can PRETEND that's on her phone. But we can't PRETEND that she is Googling stuff up in a taxi/bus/train/whatever! ON HER COMPUTER, it blatantly states! And, as I'm pretty sure is common knowledge, computers don't got no wireless. Who knows? She might have hacked a wifi network in Germany or something. 
 Possibly the only character of the bunch that I found tolerable was Becca. She's a reader! You've got to love her! But she's, what, twelve, and has learned...five foreign languages? Is that right? I know people who are younger learn languages better, but my father came from China to America. He spoke Chinese first. He has been in America for nearly 30 years now. And his English STILL isn't perfect! 30 years later! If Becca can learn five foreign languages in twelve or so years, that's just plain unrealistic. Unless she's Einstein. Which she isn't, clearly. 
 That's just the characters. But Abbott tries so hard to be humorous, it's actually kind of laughable. The humor is so stupid and dumb in this book. It doesn't make you laugh. It makes you groan! And that is NOT a reaction you want when you're trying to make a joke. 
 I also found zero plot twists in this entire thing. Zero. That's right, zero. Perhaps there would have been a plot twist if it had been revealed what would be happening to Galina in six months? Maybe we could actually USE a double agent? No? Okay... 
 But let's be real here. We NEED a part where we are actually surprised. Is there such a part in this book? No. Never. 
 I think Abbott just tries to mimic Riordan and other author legends of middle grade adventure so much that he starts to forget about other things. All that is important in this book is the chase and relics, I guess. And perhaps that's all we need in the end. Adventure, chases, and relics. 
 ...I will credit this book for having a slightly creative plot. But the 39 Clues has such a similar plot and surpasses this book in all ways possible that you should really take that over this any day. 
 Other than that, I give up. 
 This is possibly my longest review to date. Sorry for all the words and characters you had to read. I just had to vent about this thing, and I couldn't hold it in. And there are STILL things I want to say about this 400-page long disappointment!