Kiki Strike
The Kiki Strike books are a series of action/mystery/adventure books written for young adults by Kristen Miller. It centers on Ananka Fishbein, a teenage bookworm whose curiosity leads her to discover an underground city with a troop of delinquent Girl Scouts.
As of November 2020, the books in the series are:
- Inside the Shadow City (2006)
- The Empress's Tomb (2007)
- The Darkness Dwellers (2013)
The following tropes are common to many or all entries in the Kiki Strike franchise.
For tropes specific to individual installments, visit their respective work pages.
For tropes specific to individual installments, visit their respective work pages.
- Acquired Poison Immunity: One of Dee Dee's concoctions gives you this.
- Boarding School of Horrors- In the second book, Ananka's parents threaten to send her to one if she doesn't get her grades up. But, it's a lie to scare her into doing it.
- Beneath the Earth: The Shadow City, of course. The website demonstrates all the research that went into making it viable.
- Beautiful All Along
- Big Applesauce
- Brilliant but Lazy: Ananka.
- Brutal Honesty: Why the girls think Oona is rude.
- Cute Bruiser: Kiki herself.
- Cute Clumsy Girl: Dee Dee Morlock.
- Deadpan Snarker: Oona Wong.
- Defrosting Ice Queen: Luz Lopez.
- Delinquents: Luz makes illegal weapons, Oona forges and is a master computer hacker, and Kiki is a thief. And they're Girl Scouts.
- Everything's Better with Princesses : In both the literal and figurative, highschool social stature sense. The book notes that there are so many deposed Eastern Eauropean princesses that no New York high class social circle would be complete without one.
- Evil Princess: Sidonia.
- Fiery Redhead: Luz Lopez.
- Girl Scouts are Morally Ambiguous: Or at least too fond of illegal or questionable activities to fit in well, which is why Kiki seeks them out at the beginning of Shadow City.
- Hands-Off Parenting: Ananka's parents.
- Heroic Albino: Kiki Strike.
- Hot-Blooded: Luz Lopez.
- Mad Scientist Laboratory: Dee Dee has one.
- Master of Disguise: Betty Bent.
- Mineral MacGuffin: The ring Kiki has to steal.
- Mysterious Past: It's hard for Ananka to tell who or what Kiki is because she won't let on.
- Nerd: Ananka
- New Transfer Student: Kiki Strike.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Oona pretends to not understand English so she can spy on her salon-goers' secrets.
- The Obi-Wan: Verushka, Kiki's royal bodyguard.
- Orphan's Plot Trinket: The inscribed ring.
- Penny Among Diamonds: Subverted, see Scholarship Student down below.
- Perfect Poison: Death by allergy... almost.
- The Plan: Sidonia... and then Kiki pulls one on her.
- Ruritania: Pokrovia.
- Scholarship Student: Subverted; At her school, where there are a lot of scholarship girls, Ananka is the outsider because one of her relatives left the family money that can only be spent on education and nothing else. Ananka is neither rich nor a good student (though her low grades are because she's bored.)
- Secondary Character Title: Kiki Strike is the Waif Fu-practicing leader of the Irregulars, but protagonist Ananka narrates.
- Sixth Ranger: Iris.
- The Snark Knight: Oona switches on and off with Ananka for this.
- Talkative Loon: the captives.
- Truth Serum: Inverted in that the said chemical actually is worn to make you seem trustworthy, not make the wearer of it tell the truth.
- The Stoic: Kiki Strike.
- Waif Fu: Kiki is practically the size of a small child and can take out grown men.
- White-Haired Pretty Girl: Kiki
- Wrench Wench: Luz Lopez.