Title: Nobody
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
# Of Pages: 400
Publisher: Egmont USA
Publication Date: January 22, 2013
Source: Library
Level: Young Adult
Rating: 2 Hearts
Synopsis
(From Amazon.com)
There are people in
this world who are Nobody. No one sees them. No one notices them. They live
their lives under the radar, forgotten as soon as you turn away.
That's why they make
the perfect assassins.
The Institute finds
these people when they're young and takes them away for training. But an
untrained Nobody is a threat to their organization. And threats must be
eliminated.
Sixteen-year-old
Claire has been invisible her whole life, missed by the Institute's monitoring.
But now they've ID'ed her and send seventeen-year-old Nix to remove her. Yet
the moment he lays eyes on her, he can't make the hit. It's as if Claire and
Nix are the only people in the world for each other. And they are--because no
one else can really see them.
My Verdict
From the synopsis I was expecting this fast-paced, teenage
assassin adventure, but what I found was a slow moving, overly complicated,
sci-fi heavy book that failed to deliver.
Nix is a nobody, a person that is looked through rather than
at, who will be instantly forgotten, someone who would make the perfect
assassin. Nix always completes his mission no questions asked, but when he gets
orders to kill sixteen-year-old Claire, he disobeys his orders. Why? She looked
at him, not through him, but directly at him. Turns out, Claire’s a nobody too.
I feel like this plot held a lot of potential that fell flat
during execution. The existence of the non-human characters like the nobodies,
sensors, and nulls, weren’t really explained beyond “some people are born
wrong.”
The story is told through the eyes of both Nix and Claire.
Having been told he was nothing his whole life, Nix has a pretty degrading
thought process, with a mantra of “You are less than air. Less than shadow.”
How depressing is that?
Nix and Claire’s relationship was not one I could relate to
or care about. I understand that they were supposed to have this deep
connection because they were both nobodies, but their attraction to one another
was just too hard to fathom. As Nix had his hands around Claire’s neck about to
kill her, she was thinking about how much she liked his touch and wished he
would kiss her. Um, hello?!? HE’S TRYING TO STRANGLE YOU, or did you miss that
part?
For a 400-page book, I felt there wasn’t enough action or
even pacing. Most of it went by really slowly and didn’t really do much to
further the plotline. I think a significant cut could have been made without
losing anything key.
For some unknown reason, I finished this book, though I’m
not completely sure why…
