Review: The Stolen (The Nine Lives of Chloe King)

She argues with her mother. She occasionally skips class. And she alternately crushes on two totally different boys.
But Chloe King is by no means your typical teenager. The girl can scale buildings and see in the dark. Sometimes, at night, she even likes to leap from rooftop to rooftop. Yes, Chloe has the instincts and ability of a cat. And that makes her unique indeed.
It also makes her a wanted woman.
Because the Order of the Tenth Blade does not deal kindly with people like Chloe. It stalks them. Preys upon them. And wants many of them -- like Chloe, for instance -- dead.

Yet again, I was disappointed. I'd hoped the series would get better, but if anything it got worse.

I hadn't noticed it in the The Fallen, but Thomson has a real issue with continuity. I finished The Fallen and picked up The Stolen in the same motion, so when the first book ended in Chloe's house and the second book make it clear that it picked up right where the first book left off on now she was in some strange bedroom in a mysterious house I was startled. I kept flipping back and forth trying to figure out how she got there until I finally decided that either the author forgot where she left off or she didn't like it, couldn't go back and change it in the last book, so she just "fixed it." Like the reader wouldn't notice. It was insulting.

The ideas were fresh and new, but the story itself was a little dull. Again there were great details, but when it's all details that doesn't always mean a lot. I kept waiting for something to happen, but it never did. There were a few times were something could have happened, but nothing.

The nail in the discontinuity coffin for me was in the second half of the book where all of a sudden Paul smokes. Over 300 pages, and this was the first I ever heard of it. Just kaboom. First he's a regular guy, then a nerd, then a slacker, then a border line goth, and now a smoker? And each time a new aspect of his identity comes into play it's like all of the other aspects vanish, and that's all he is.

Is it possible to get whip lash from a book?


I want to read the third book to follow through on my quest to discover what the TV show got canceled before it could reveal, but I don't know if I can take another book like the first two. And I doubt the world needs another review like this one floating around in cyberspace.

-Aaron