A Review for Nobody by Jennifer Lynn Barnes + US/CAN Giveaway

Posted by Donna
Release Date: February 22nd, 2013

Finished Date: February 5th, 2013

Publishers: Egmont USA 
Source: For Review

Format: Kindle

Pages: 400
Buy:  Amazon US / The Book Depo / Barnes & Noble
 

There are people in this world who are Nobody. No one sees them. No one notices them. They live their lives under the radar, forgotten as soon as you turn away. 

That’s why they make the perfect assassins.

The Institute finds these people when they’re young and takes them away for training. But an untrained Nobody is a threat to their organization. And threats must be eliminated.

Sixteen-year-old Claire has been invisible her whole life, missed by the Institute’s monitoring. But now they’ve ID’ed her and send seventeen-year-old Nix to remove her. Yet the moment he lays eyes on her, he can’t make the hit. It’s as if Claire and Nix are the only people in the world for each other. And they are—because no one else ever notices them.

The Review: 3.5 Stars! 

Nobody follows the life of Claire and Nix. Claire has been invisible all her life, people don't take notice of her and people seem to forget all about her. She walks the halls of school going through day to day life, knowing no-one cares for her - even her parents have to remind themselves that she's there. It's a sad life for her. Then we have Nix, another Nobody but he's a dangerous Nobody. Nix makes the best assassin because no-one can see him and when the Institute gets wind of Claire's presence, they give Nix the job to take her out. But when Claire and Nix meet, something happens and suddenly they have each other....

I'm going to put this straight out there, Nobody is a strange read - one that I struggled to get into to start with. The story is told in a third person narrative and each chapter is based on either Claire or Nix and there quite small - too small in my opinion. It was very hard to get a grip on the story or what's going on and it wasn't until about 25% that I   started to enjoy and understand the story. I felt that the whole Nobody/Nix/Institute needed explaining more and a little bit better. What was also hard to get into was the way the story was wrote, it's almost lyrical;

"I'm the killer. I am death to all I seek. I am Nobody."
Nobody.
He said it like he meant it. Like he believed it. Like it was the reason for the shadows in his eyes and the scar across his neck.
Like this boy - this beautiful, insane, gun-toting boy- could possibly understand what it felt like to be truly invisible. To not matter. To anyone. Ever.

but once I got used to this, I found the story started to flow a lot better. 

Now the characters, there not  the most well developed characters I've read about and honestly, I put that in my little negative column to start with, however, once I started to understand the story, I found this wasn't a negative at all, it was actually a positive. With the characters being Nobodies they have no life, no love, no joy, no nothing. So to have had them them well developed it would have been a fault, because their personalities wouldn't have fit the story. I believe the author did a great job portraying just how unloved these characters were. 

In all, I did enjoy Nobody. It was certainly different from any other story I've read and despite the rocky start I had, it did become a compelling and interesting read. However it's a story that I don't think will be for everyone but I'm glad I read and enjoyed it. 

Giveaway!

* The giveaway is for one hardcover copy of Nobody and the new paperback release of Every Other Day, which pubs on the same day as Nobody 

* US and Canada only

*  Ends Feb 18th 2013

a Rafflecopter giveaway

About Author: 

Jennifer Lynn Barnes (who mostly goes by Jen) was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has been, in turn, a competitive cheerleader, a volleyball player, a dancer, a debutante, a primate cognition researcher, a teen model, a comic book geek, and a lemur aficionado. She's been writing for as long as she can remember, finished her first full book (which she now refers to as a "practice book" and which none of you will ever see) when she was still in high school, and then wrote Golden the summer after her freshman year in college, when she was nineteen. 

Jen graduated high school in 2002, and from Yale University with a degree in cognitive science (the study of the brain and thought) in May of 2006. She'll be spending the 2006-2007 school year abroad, doing autism research at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

http://www.jenniferlynnbarnes.com/