Lex is an assassin for the good guys, the British government that is. Also she is a parent, dealing blows to enemy agents during the initial scene, then scooting to the nursery to pick up her child. A unique concept, but the promise of the strong female character and mother did not come off so well in these 30 pages. The fast pace and over reliance on summaries left me disconnected.
This extract begins with the weakest part of the book, spying, these sections could have had more research. The characters use confusing spy language too, there is a Snake amongst the Rats and the Snake is a Pigeon. However, things levelled off as I stopped thinking and just followed the sensationalist story.
Some parts of this novel seemed familiar, Agent Black sounds like Captain Black off TVs Captain Scarlet, so he must be the baddie. The Agents are based in a London Underground Station, Platform 8, just like Harry Potters secret platform.
Using the underground gives them some anonymity and reach, reasonable. There is a point where Asia says that parts of the London Underground short out when people are tortured to death by electrocution. This seems unreasonable as your bad guy could get a lethal shock from relatively low voltage/amps as found in household electric appliances, these wouldn’t cause an outage on the underground.
There are some good characters, Hattie Goodswen the tall leader with a gentle voice. Cameron Clarke, the vehement USA Agent with an Axe to Grind. Pixie Nisbett, the ridiculous cheeky blonde. But they all seem to be trying to crowd out the protagonist Lex and her sidekick Jake who are muted in comparison.
The dynamic between Lex and her partner Jake could be interesting though, as they have had sex previously. Her bumbling husband and father of her child doesn’t know that she is a spy. Jake likes to womanise and take part in street fights, this self-harming destructionist attitude indicates his emotionally instability which is not indicated in his behaviour, shouldn’t they give him a psychological evaluation?
The plot is not too believable, the idea is that there is an app to allow government spies to sell their secrets anonymously. The characters assume that all spies might want to sell their secrets and so this could bring down the UKs spy network. Seems pretty unlikely that a majority of spies would trust such an organisation with the required personal information and expose their vulnerability so easily.
It really starts to pick up on page 31 when Lex is discussing her feelings and paranoias in being a parent, she comes across as a character who is into equality and Asia does really well to get across the fears of a parent, this section escalates to 4/5. If the spy parts of the novel had been written with such authority then the two opposing concepts could have married up well and it could have been believable, even with the parts about The Committee ruling the UK through a puppet government.
From this Lex should have been a strong female role model character for young adults. But earlier on she acts just like a sexist man, objectifying men with the vast array of strong broad shouldered men on hand, belittling women for their body type – ie comparing a female to a stick of pasta. This book is not my pot of tea.
This extract begins with the weakest part of the book, spying, these sections could have had more research. The characters use confusing spy language too, there is a Snake amongst the Rats and the Snake is a Pigeon. However, things levelled off as I stopped thinking and just followed the sensationalist story.
Some parts of this novel seemed familiar, Agent Black sounds like Captain Black off TVs Captain Scarlet, so he must be the baddie. The Agents are based in a London Underground Station, Platform 8, just like Harry Potters secret platform.
Using the underground gives them some anonymity and reach, reasonable. There is a point where Asia says that parts of the London Underground short out when people are tortured to death by electrocution. This seems unreasonable as your bad guy could get a lethal shock from relatively low voltage/amps as found in household electric appliances, these wouldn’t cause an outage on the underground.
There are some good characters, Hattie Goodswen the tall leader with a gentle voice. Cameron Clarke, the vehement USA Agent with an Axe to Grind. Pixie Nisbett, the ridiculous cheeky blonde. But they all seem to be trying to crowd out the protagonist Lex and her sidekick Jake who are muted in comparison.
The dynamic between Lex and her partner Jake could be interesting though, as they have had sex previously. Her bumbling husband and father of her child doesn’t know that she is a spy. Jake likes to womanise and take part in street fights, this self-harming destructionist attitude indicates his emotionally instability which is not indicated in his behaviour, shouldn’t they give him a psychological evaluation?
The plot is not too believable, the idea is that there is an app to allow government spies to sell their secrets anonymously. The characters assume that all spies might want to sell their secrets and so this could bring down the UKs spy network. Seems pretty unlikely that a majority of spies would trust such an organisation with the required personal information and expose their vulnerability so easily.
It really starts to pick up on page 31 when Lex is discussing her feelings and paranoias in being a parent, she comes across as a character who is into equality and Asia does really well to get across the fears of a parent, this section escalates to 4/5. If the spy parts of the novel had been written with such authority then the two opposing concepts could have married up well and it could have been believable, even with the parts about The Committee ruling the UK through a puppet government.
From this Lex should have been a strong female role model character for young adults. But earlier on she acts just like a sexist man, objectifying men with the vast array of strong broad shouldered men on hand, belittling women for their body type – ie comparing a female to a stick of pasta. This book is not my pot of tea.