A YA spy caper centred around an American teenager on a European school trip. (Question: do American public high schools go on European trips? I’ve only ever heard of private schools doing it. And the main character’s family seems too working-class to have paid for it themselves. Whatever, it’s transparently a pretext to get the parents out of the way.) Nothing in this novel is remotely credible – unlike, I guess, the entire Fleming oeuvre? For some reason it’s more noticeable when the protagonist is into comic books and has never been kissed – but the events all tumble into each other in the usual inexorable way of the genre, so if you give the setup the benefit of the doubt, the rest of it follows.
There was, in fairness, more of a body count than I expected. Possibly a desensitized post-Hunger Games YA readership demands realistic levels of violence in its ludicrous espionage fiction. It’s not, however, what you would call long on female characters: all the bad guys, without exception, are of the menacing male muscle persuasion. (I want you guys to know I wasn’t trying for alliteration there, it just happened.) The writing, it should be obvious, is not great. The best I can say is that it wasn’t always offensively bad. It’s self-evidently a novel written by a spy-novel fanboy in a fit of enthusiasm, which is basically why I’m also dreading the JJ Abrams Star Wars movies.
Also, the kid’s name is Brian, which is not a name I’ve ever known anyone to have who wasn’t a middle-aged dermatologist. I know logically that most Brians were kids once, but I lack any empirical evidence of it. Additionally, I think I must have seen a film where someone with a speech impediment kept saying the name Brian, because whenever I read it, I heard “Bwian”. It did not diminish my reading experience.
I have no interactions with any teenagers apart from Sim’s sister Mary, and the only books I know she reads are for school, which is now over: which is to say, I have no idea what today’s kids actually want in a novel. However, I want to give them credit for demanding better than this. If a child is old enough to read something with this much violence in it, she’s old enough to pick up some Le Carre and do the thing properly. (Go for the early Smileys first, that way you’ve got a sense of the stakes and supporting characters when you get to Tinker, Tailor.) This is just forgettable mush to fill in some time between birth and death.