Review: Everything you remember is a lie
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 7, 2014
If you don't know what happened in book 1 of this sequence – don't worry about it. Because neither does our heroine. She has the power to read minds, but despite that she has been living a quiet and idyllic life with her grandmother in an island paradise, until she learns that everything she remembers is false – that her memories have been rewritten by mysterious individuals who have unclear aims, but who clearly want her in their clutches. So our teenage heroine goes on the run with a thoroughly untrustworthy but good-looking young man – whose mind she cannot read.The events of the first book are gone from our heroine, and she spends much of this volume on the run, confused, and unsure who to trust. Even people who ought to be trustworthy, such as family members, are not automatically dependable. And every step she takes seems to lead to betrayal.Mind Thieves is an enjoyable action-adventure book for young adults. It has much the feel of the Alex Ryder novels or the new Tomorrow People TV series. The writing is good, and Cameron, the central character, feels thoroughly believable. She has moods, gets angry, and does stupid things on occasions for entirely understandable reasons. The other characters tend to be uniformly good-looking and sexy, and to some degree the features of the novel are somewhat typical of the formula for spy fiction and young adult dramas (dubious authority figures, untrustworthy secret organisations and men in black), but all the elements go together well and make for a fast-paced and entertaining read.The book ends, not much to my surprise, on a cliff-hanger – and there are two more books to follow. But if they're anything like this one they're easy to read and carry the reader on to find out what is going to happen and who Cameron can really trust... if anyone. And the book has an interesting philosophical  core – if we are the sum of our memories, what happens if you cannot trust what you remember?