The Reluctant Assassin

A delightfully quick sci-fi adventure for middle grades (and the 12 year old in the rest of us) - WARP 1 follows young and talented mis-adventurers, Chevie and Riley through time. It's a fun read that will have you cheering for them even as you might guess what will likely happen next. Neither of these protagonists start with a particularly promising background story - both are orphans, mostly alone, doing something they don't want to do. However, they manage to overcome their experience and egos to outwit a psychotic murderer at least once in this story (not saying more for fear of spoilers). I'm pretty sure they also manage a few days with just an hour or two of sleep, which is pretty impressive without the whole psychotic murderer time traveling sort of adventure thing going on.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the series, where I'm hoping to see Chevie develop a little more nuance and Riley gain some childhood joy.

I'd recommend this one to kiddos probably starting in the 5th grade, but not those who might be squeamish about violence. There is a surprising amount of blood and guts and such for a middle grade reader - especially at the very beginning.

Short Review: An orphan from 1898 and a disgraced teen FBI agent from the present team up to survive (and hopefully defeat) a time traveling homicidal maniac. Everyone will compare this to Artemis Fowl. It is fine, but not as good. A lot more violent and a bit older reader. The characters are fairly well drawn, but the plot is basically stay alive and avoid the homicidal maniac. And that just really isn't enough to drive the book. But it was (is until May 21) free at ya sync's weekly audiobook giveaway for the summer. And it wasn't a bad listen since I didn't have to pay for it.

My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/reluctant-assassin/

Audio book DNF after 20 minutes.

Maybe I'm being too hard on the book. (Honestly, I probably am.) But after a very graphic description of how to kill someone with a knife and ‘seeing' it done my ‘surprise gore quotient' was met very early on. Add to that the annoying voice the (male) narrator uses for one of the (female) characters and I was getting frustrated.

There's also the problem that this book seems to have omniscient third person point of view - which sounds an awful lot like head hopping which gives me a headache. The final straw was the accent slippage. (Seriously, I don't care if the narrator is british or not, I just want the accent when he's reading to stay consistent for the character.)