"Enders (Starters #2)" by Lissa Price, 2014

"Enders (Starters #2)" by Lissa Price, 2014

With a promising start and a great setup from the previous book in the series, the book still manages to somehow fall short from delivering its potential. The novel quickly fell apart about a quarter of the way in and never really recovered.

From the previous book (Starters) , we are left with our protagonist, Callie Woodland, escaping evil mind-swapping services provided by Prime Destinations and the "old man" who heads the institution.  In the midst of her adventure, she gains the trust of the elderly woman Helena who rented her body and eventually inherits half of her vast estate. The riches she acquired allows her younger brother and herself to live in the lap of luxury.

In this sequel, somewhat appropriately name Enders (because this ended my desire to read another book in this series), Callie sets off to identify the "old man" in order to put and end to his reign of terror over her loved ones and to find a way to remove the chip from her head.

Along the way, she finds Helena's granddaughter, Emma, who
eventually leads her to reunite with her father whom she thought was dead.

With our expectation and buildup of the Emma subplot from the previous book, it was a bit of a disappointment to discover she is just a vain, impatient, unlikable character who gets her head popped off (blown up) senselessly.

In the end, Callie is recruited into a "CIA" or some other government black ops group for the chip in her head that allows her to be remote-controlled and for the modification of the chip that bypasses her morals and ethics, allowing her to kill.


The problem I found with this book is that the characters seem to behave outside of what is expected

of them based on how the author wrote and developed the characters.  For someone who has been living on the streets and very street-smart like our heroine Callie Woodland, I would expect her to be clued-in and didn't do obviously stupid things (i.e., getting mugged in a bad neighborhood while driving her nice fancy car when she went on an errand of distributing sandwiches to the poor).

As if the inconsistent character behaviors weren't enough, useless antics are thrown in for good measure. An over the top carnival-like show of "shoot your father" and topped off with a government black ops group recruiting Callie at the end added to the incredulity of it all.

My rating ★★☆☆☆ (2 out of 5 stars) - It was ok.