BookNook — Young Adult book reviews
2.5 Stars
Mind Games was an okay book, but I was hoping it would be a lot better. The book isn't nearly as intense or action-packed as I thought it would be.
I think the problem with this book is that Fia is actually crazy. I went from liking her, to disliking her, to understanding her, to still disliking her—but maybe a little bit less. She just always sounded so.. jittery when she talked. And she has this really annoying habit of repeating a word or phrase three times. It drove me completely nuts.
"Okay," I say, closing my eyelids because they are heavy, heavy, heavy.
I can't tap, tap, tap my fingers because...
I know how to twist it just so to pop-pop-pop it right out of the socket.
Sometimes I sleep here. Sleep, sleep. I'll sleep now.
But then we slowly begin to realize why she is this way. She's actually a bit crazy. She's just so broken, tortured, and traumatized by the things that the 'school' makes her do: murder, kidnap (almost), and steal. She had already committed her first murder before she was fifteen. The trauma has slowly broken her down until she is more an empty shell than a person. It still made her an annoying character, but at least I understood why.
Mind Games was also lacking in the world building. We know that people with exceptional powers are being kidnapped or lured to this school to be trained. We know that the really good ones are kept to be used for corporate espionage, but that's all we ever find out. We have no idea what they're actually doing, or what the results of their actions are. We don't know what kind of benefits the mysterious 'leader' is getting or what purpose the tasks/murders/thefts serve.
In some ways, the execution of this book almost made it feel like a really long prologue. The book alternates between present day and the past (slowly building up to present time). The flashbacks are meant to help explain why Fia is so broken and tortured. But ultimately, that was the entire book. The whole book wasn't really about uncovering corporate espionage or putting a stop to it, it was just about figuring out why Fia is such an angry, soulless girl. It wasn't horribly boring for me to read about, but by the time the book ended, I felt like the story was only just getting started.
Overall, Mind Games is missing a strong, exciting, central plot. There's too much telling of history and what happened weeks/months/years in the past, and not enough progression in present time. Maybe the books later in the series will be more interesting. As I said, when it ended, I felt like things were just getting started. Hopefully that means the later books will have less background story and more heart-pumping excitement and confrontations.