Goodreads summary:
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 ever notices them.
My review:
I've really enjoyed some of Jennifer Lynn Barnes's other books, so I was hoping it meant I'd like this one. Unfortunately, I just couldn't get into it at all. I couldn't stand Claire or Nix, and the insta-love made me want to gag.
Claire has got to be one of the most depressing protagonists I've ever read about. She has zero self-esteem and thinks she's totally pathetic. I get that this was important to the plot, but it just made her terribly unlikeable as a character. For example, when Nix breaks into her house to kill her, she starts thinking about how attractive he is.
He's a random stranger pointing a gun at her head. And yet this makes her happy because no one ever notices her. So she starts swooning over his "blue eyes, so light that she wondered if they glowed in the dark," and declares, "he was the most beautiful boy she'd ever seen." And yes, all of this happens while he's holding a gun at her.
Frankly, I thought it was creepy. The romance only got worse as Nix and Claire decided to run away together. Nix decides he's in love with Claire, but he can't be with her because he's an assassin and he's too dangerous for her to be around - "He didn't deserve her, and now that she knew that truth, she must hate him." A good portion of the book was filled with melodramatic statements like that, and it just ruined the story. Not to mention that by the end of the book, Nix says, "You tamed me, Claire. I love you, just so you know."
Um, they barely know each other. Yeah, sorry, that's not love.
Thankfully, there was some action in the last half, but by then I was so bored that I really didn't care what was going on. Although this has a cool premise, it just didn't live up to my expectations. The melodramatic characters simply had no self-esteem, and the insta-love and romance was borderline creepy. I'm not interested enough to continue with this series.
My rating: 4 out of 10 (2 stars)
~ The Bookworm
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