Catherine Jinks

Child prodigy Cadel Piggot, an antisocial computer hacker, discovers his true identity when he enrolls as a first-year student at an advanced crime academy.

Evil Genius

Kirsten Simkiss

** spoiler alert **
           This book was a train wreck of bad intentions. I saw the twist that Thaddeus was his father coming from a mile away, considering how it's often mentioned that Cadel doesn't look a thing like Dr. Darkkon. That being said, it is an entertaining read. The voice of the characters are good, the pace is pretty decent, and the character growth is good.

One thing that bothered me about the book were the comments about their autistic professor. I know autism presents in a lot of ways and I realize this particular person was probably supposed to be a severe case of autism (because let's face it, everyone was an extreme of one thing or another in the Axis Institute), but Brendan shutting down entirely because of a math problem? Come on. He's not a super computer. People just don't go into catatonic states because of an equation. And the other professors being annoyed he was paid the same amount as they were because he was autistic? I understand the teachers were highly ridiculous people themselves, but that's some bullshit.

Another thing that bugged me was just how quickly characters were written off. And I'm not talking about the train wreck of events at the end of the book - I mean just in the middle third. Cadel's classmates drop like flies and it's just accepted. Like... there's no follow up. They die and that's that. One classmate gets kidnapped as a subject for human experimentation and no attempt is made to save her so she dies. It bothered the hell out of me that these kids would die and no one would really bat an eyelid about it later on in the book. Some characters would die sometime off the scene and they wouldn't be mentioned again. And some characters who lived were used as tools toward the end, but seemed remarkably irrelevant in the grand scheme of things looking back.

I did like Cadel's growth from computer guru to actual person over the course of the book. I liked his love interest, Sonja, and wasn't really surprised that she was young like he was. I half expected her to turn up as one of his classmates, honestly, though she wasn't exactly a super villain.

Overall, I'd give this book three and a half stars (if I could). It was good, but I definitely didn't love the book.

Evil Genius

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