Muchamore can write action.There's no doubt about that. And he knows how to choose a compelling plot; the idea of back street gene enhancers holding the world to ransom is very intriguing and throws up a lot of questions around morality and ethics. Unfortunately, the execution leaves something to be desired in this case.
The first time skip kind of makes sense; nothing much was going to happen in the interim anyway. The second surprised me. After that they were just jarring. I couldn't connect to the characters, because every time I got to know them we skipped some time and they'd changed in the interim. The events we'd missed were always neatly filled in, the plot didn't suffer, but the emotions did. There was no real connecting story, unless you count Charlie's sister, who barely featured in several of the sections. Instead there was The Prologue - Now SNor Is Around - Now It's Killer T - Psych, It's Something Else - Now Everything's Over Very Abruptly.
It's not a bad book by any means; I kept reading to see what happened next, and I'd read more set in this world. But from Muchamore, I expect a lot better.
The first time skip kind of makes sense; nothing much was going to happen in the interim anyway. The second surprised me. After that they were just jarring. I couldn't connect to the characters, because every time I got to know them we skipped some time and they'd changed in the interim. The events we'd missed were always neatly filled in, the plot didn't suffer, but the emotions did. There was no real connecting story, unless you count Charlie's sister, who barely featured in several of the sections. Instead there was The Prologue - Now SNor Is Around - Now It's Killer T - Psych, It's Something Else - Now Everything's Over Very Abruptly.
It's not a bad book by any means; I kept reading to see what happened next, and I'd read more set in this world. But from Muchamore, I expect a lot better.