Review: The League of Unexceptional Children by Gitty Daneshvari

Children's services includes more than just story time and picture books.  I also get to order the middle-grade books!  So my reading list just gets more and more eclectic.  It already included classic and cozy mysteries, urban fantasy, romance, traditional fantasies, the occasional nonfiction, and has now expanded to picture books and elementary school chapter books.  Which is not a problem at all.  Of course there are classic kids books that I still love rereading - Avi, Roald Dahl, M.M. Kaye, Patricia Wrede - but there are a lot of really good authors writing for kids and young adults today.  And really, "it's for my job!"  :)

This week's read: The League of Unexceptional Children by Gitty Daneshvari

 

 

My Rating: 2.5 of 5 (between It's OK and I Liked It)

 

Plot Summary (courtesy of Goodreads):

Are you average? Normal? Forgettable? If so, the League of Unexceptional Children is for you! This first book in a hilarious new adventure series is for anyone who's struggled to be noticed in a sea of above-average overachievers.

What is the League of Unexceptional Children? I'm glad you asked. You didn't ask? Well, you would have eventually and I hate to waste time. The League of Unexceptional Children is a covert network that uses the nation's most average, normal, and utterly unexceptional children as spies. Why the average kids? Why not the brainiacs? Or the beauty queens? Or the jocks? It's simple: People remember them. But not the unexceptionals. They are the forgotten ones. Until now!

Comments:

Well, they do say that spies shouldn't be like James Bond, but blend into the background instead.  Why couldn't average, nondescript children be used the same way?  And with that idea, Jonathan and Shelly find themselves roped into saving the United States when a security breach at the White House ends up compromising all existing agents in the field.  The newest members of the League of Unexceptional Children have to learn the ropes and save the world all at the same time!

Somehow the adventure never really clicked with this premise, though.  It's not that this is a bad one, but it just doesn't come together somehow.  There are some great mysteries and adventure stories for this age group (heck Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys are both in this same section of our library).  So it is possible to have some exciting adventures or suspenseful mysteries and still be suitable for a middle-grade audience.

The characters are kinda weak.  Granted, Shelly and Jonathan are supposed to be nondescript and forgettable, but thankfully, they do grow up a bit with their successful mission.  Shelly got kinda irritating after a while, honestly; she's a chatterbox with no filter on her stray thoughts popping out of her mouth.  Sometimes a bit funny, but sometimes a little tiring.  The adults are more caricatures of old adventure/spy story characters than actual characters - the boss talks like a film noir cop, for example.  The morbid nurse is just a little weird, personally.

The humor worked pretty well, though - best part of the book in my opinion.  While the whole book is a take on society's focus on Exceptionalism, there are parts that are laugh-out-loud funny.  There were just absurd moments, straight up slapstick - the League's messaging system via produce, for example.  My favorite bits were the satirical points about living in Northern Virginia, though.  Having grown up in Virginia myself, with family on the Maryland side of DC and several good friends in suburbs in NoVa, I've visited the DC area enough to be familiar with the suburbs.  And as mentioned, with friends living there, I got some insider commentary on life in Woodbridge or Stafford or some of the other DC suburbs.  The Stepford mentality seems pretty accurate, and made for a very funny (for me) backdrop to the kids' adventures.

As an adult reading this, it was a so-so book, but middle school students who feel that they themselves are pretty unexceptional might enjoy it more than I did.  I know that I don't fall into that particular demographic - no longer a middle-schooler and never having been an Unexceptional (definitely more of a Brain).  But, someone who feels themselves to be very average might enjoy that aspect of the story, giving the book a little bit more of spark than what I felt for it.  I definitely wouldn't discourage anyone from reading it, but it wouldn't be my first recommendation either.

It is the first book in a series (there's one more out now, and another due out in the fall), so here's hoping that the author can find her footing a little more solidly in this world through the subsequent books.  There are well written parts of the story, and some very sly humor, but not quite enough pieces coming together to really click for me.  A shame, when it's such a fun idea.

Overall Thoughts:

This is a cute book with a fun premise, using a network of the average and nondescript children for espionage and adventure.  It was pretty funny, but it missed on the suspense and adventure side of things.  Yes, it's possible to be all of the above - a funny story with adventure and mystery too - but the suspenseful side never really clicked together, and at times it felt more rushed or forced than anything else.  I wanted to like it, I really did, and it's not that it's a bad book, but it's not great either.  It's fun, a quick read, but not really memorable.  In it's own way, unexceptional.