Kids: Masterminds

Warning: Post Contains Spoilers!

Review By: Dilan Mehta

This is a great book of Gordon Korman's that I have just read. It is about Eli, Amber, Malik, Hector, and Tori. Eli bikes to the edge of the city with his friend Randy, but suddenly gets very sick fast and has to get picked up by the mysterious Surety, the police force of Serenity. He stays in the hospital for a bit and then finds out that Randy is leaving Serenity. Serenity is where they live. It's supposed to be a perfect place to live. It's an ideal community, with no crimes, no poverty, no murders, etc. They value hard work and honesty. When Randy leaves, he's supposed to be going to help his grandparents on a farm. Later, when Eli finds a secret note that Randy left him, he says he's actually going to boarding school, and that something very screwy is going on in Serenity. And something is. Eli shows the note to his father, who has him take pills that make him forget about the note. Eli doesn't take them and realizes that his father is trying to wipe out his memory of the note. The kids find out that the plastic factory isn't actually making orange traffic cones. They sneak into the building and find that the building has real Wi-Fi and internet, to block them from knowing about anything bad. They sneak in and find out that they have been monitored from the day they were born. Everything they ever did was there. After they escape, they find out that the entire community of Serenity is a lie. 11 of the kids are cloned from criminal masterminds, and their parents are just scientists. This is part of an experiment called Project Osiris. The question was, is someone born bad, or can they be good if raised in the right environment? The kids are lab rats. Felix Frieden, Eli's dad, controls all of it. His real name is Felix Hammerstrom. The five make plans to escape the town and promise to rescue the others after. They take out the satellite dish on top of a truck that generates the barrier which makes them feel terribly sick, and in the process, Hector supposedly dies, but probably comes back. The kids meet up with Randy, who isn't part of Osiris, just a regular kid, and the book ends.

 This was a really good book, I can't wait to read the next one!