He was the perfect assassin. No name. No past. No remorse. Perfect, that is, until he began to ask questions and challenge his orders. Now The Program is worried that their valuable soldier has become a liability.Â
And so Boy Nobody is given a new mission. A test of sorts. A chance to prove his loyalty.
His objective: Take out Eugene Moore, the owner of an extremist military training camp for teenagers. It sounds like a simple task, but a previous operative couldn’t do it. He lost the mission and is presumed dead. Now Boy Nobody is confident he can finish the job. Quickly.
But when things go awry, Boy Nobody finds himself lost in a mission where nothing is as it seems: not The Program, his allegiances, nor the truth.Â
The riveting second book in Allen Zadoff’s Boy Nobody series delivers heart-pounding action and a shocking new twist that makes Boy Nobody question everything he has believed.
 ABOUT ALLEN
Allen Zadoff is the author of the new thriller series, The Unknown Assassin which earned starred reviews and has been optioned for a feature film by Sony Pictures and Will Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment. His YA novel, Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can’t Have won the Sid Fleischman Humor Award and was a YALSA selection for Most Popular Paperbacks of 2012. His second novel wasMy Life, the Theater, and Other Tragedies, the story of a techie hiding from life after a family tragedy. His third novel Since You Left Me is set in Los Angeles and tells the story of a religious school student who doesn’t believe. He also wrote the memoir for adults, Hungry:Lessons Learned on the Journey from Fat to Thin.
Allen is a graduate of Cornell University and the Harvard University Institute for Advanced Theatre Training. Visit him on the web at www.allenzadoff.com.
Jaime’s ThoughtsÂ
I Am the Mission by Allen Zadoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I Am The Mission is book 2 in the Unknown Assassin Series and I was introduced to book 1 last year when a few of my friends told me I had to read this amazing, boy narrated, spy thriller. If you’re looking for romance, you’re not really going to find that here, so don’t say I didn’t warn you! In book 1 we learned a bit about our ‘boy nobody’ and things happened that I can’t even tell you about because then it would spoil the whole experience. I actually listened to the audio of this book (which I thought was excellent by the way) and I felt like it was the perfect way to experience the story, especially the way we are in Boy Nobody’s head … I definitely recommend trying it out, and in fact I think because of the way Zadoff writes the story, it worked much better for me than reading the actual book.
Anyway – Rather than tell you anything specific about the story, I’ll tell you a few reason you need to read this series.
The action is kick-ass. Zadoff doesn’t hold back and when I say that this boy is an assassin… he’s truly an assassin. That means he isn’t just talking about killing people, he’s doing it. From beginning to end this story has twists and turns you won’t expect and as our narrators life starts to unravel from the things he learns along the way, you’ll feel like you’re right there experiencing it with him.
Boy Nobody… you probably wonder why I’m calling him that, but that’s exactly who he is. He was thrust into this life and has accepted it, never questioning things until … until things happen that I’m not going to tell you about. BUT he’s so perfectly done in both of these books – he’s coolly detached and unemotional about the tasks he is assigned, but you can feel the changes in him from the start of book 1 to the very end of book 2 and I can’t wait for the next book in this series to find out more about him.
The story itself is unique. I love a good male narrator and this one is done really well in my opinion. Now, add to that, the plot revolving around the fact that he’s a teenage assassin who didn’t necessarily choose this life, and he’s struggling with who he is, who he was and who he should be… and you have something If found.
I love that Zadoff gives us a full story in each of the books but we also get an additional overarching storyline that is moving along at a nice pace. If you’re looking for something a bit darker and definitely a lot more violent than the typical YA you’ll find out there, this series will have you on the edge of your seat in suspense and so totally engrossed in the story that you won’t want to put this down.
Thank you to Little Brown & Netgalley for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest thoughts!
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