Also Known As Review

This time I am going to review Also Known As by: Robin Benway.

Margaret didn’t have a conventional childhood. When other kids were fighting on the playground in elementary school, she was breaking into safes and cracking locks. Her parents are both spies and they raised her to be the same. Now, Maggie is going on her first solo mission, which is to befriend Jesse Oliver to get information about his dad. The mission gets complicated when her feelings get in the way…

This book was very entertaining. I totally thought Maggie’s safe-cracking ability seemed unreasonable for her age when I was going into the book, but I think Robin Benway did a great job of making it believable. She gave Maggie a good amount of technical knowledge about it that made it feel reasonable.

I really enjoyed all the characters in this book. Roux was probably my favorite character. She’s just enough spunky and vulnerable. She made things fun and she was full of surprises. The only thing I wished about her is that I could’ve gotten a better description of what she looked like. I couldn’t quite picture her. In fact, I really wish all the character descriptions were a bit more detailed.

Maggie was great. I loved how she talked to herself and needed to give herself pep talks. I totally am the same way and I really appreciated that she was like that. I really liked her voice in the book, which is good because the book is fully in her perspective.

My few complaints about the book are the beginning and the ending. The beginning felt a bit too much like she was going to tell us the whole story of her life. It was just too much of filling us in to get up to speed, but it gets into the story fairly quickly, so it wasn’t super bothersome. The ending felt a bit rushed. I really liked the pacing of the book before that point, but all of a sudden it speeds to the end after. I did enjoy the ending, it just seemed to all happen so quickly when the rest of the book didn’t seem to be passed quite as fast.

(Kind of Spoilers!) For some reason during all of this book, I was suspicious of the Collective. I totally thought there would be a twist and the Collective would actually be evil and Maggie and her parents just didn’t know. I mention this because that suspicion was totally wrong. I have no idea why I felt that way, but something in the writing or plot just gave me the impression of it. (End Spoilers.)

Overall, I really liked this book. It kept me really entertained and I definitely will read the next book in the series.