Review: The Hit (AKA, I Am the Weapon. Previously, Boy Nobody. Previously, I Give Up on The Title.)

          

The Hit
Author: Allen Zadoff
Publication Date: 4th September 2014
Publisher: Orchard Books  

The explosive new thriller for fans of Jason Bourne, Robert Muchamore and Michael Grant.
Boy Nobody is the perennial new kid in school, the one few notice and nobody thinks much about. He shows up in a new high school, in a new town, under a new name, makes few friends and doesn't stay long. Just long enough for someone in his new friend's family to die -- of "natural causes." Mission accomplished, Boy Nobody disappears, and moves on to the next target.
When Boy Nobody was just eleven, he discovered his own parents had died of not-so-natural causes. He soon found himself under the control of The Program, a shadowy government organization that uses brainwashed kids as counter-espionage operatives. But somewhere, deep inside Boy Nobody, is somebody: the boy he once was, the boy who wants normal things (like a real home, his parents back), a boy who wants out.
And he just might want those things badly enough to sabotage The Program's next mission.

 

I'm going to start by saying WHY THE HELL DIDN'T I READ THIS SOONER?! Thanks for putting The Mission in the mail, Hachette. I probably wouldn't have read it otherwise, and damn, I would've been missing out.

The Hit (Boy Nobody) is both a shocking and slightly disturbing story that could or could not actually be real. You sometimes hear about it, it's something conspiracists  see and fear,  it's something that happens in a fight for War. Parents die, children get recruited. It's serious business and it's handled well and efficiently. I haven't read a book that's kept my focus like that, one that I couldn't just put down, for a while. I wasn't expecting it in the slightest.

Boy Nobody is about a boy, a nobody, whose here one second, disappeared the next. He was never there, long forgotten. A teenage boy they'd never suspect. The perfect assassin. The perfect weapon. The perfect Mission. New name. New place. New Mission. New timeline. Exist for one thing. And it reads like it. We're inside Boy Nobody's head, and we don't even know is name. We do get to know his name later, towards the life, and we have little bits and pieces of memory from his past, but other than that, we know nothing about him.

Just finishing one assignment, he gets another one, a new phone, a new town, a new backstory, a new name. We call him Ben in this mission, and that's the only things that's normal about this assignment, the time he has to complete it is considerably shorter, the target is an important one, he's to go in, kill, leave, start again. Of course, things don't go to plan, the mission changes, along with Ben's feelings for a certain character who's  not exactly who she seems either, and that's the appeal to him. It's also his unravelling now because now his assignment has changed, he's questioning, this girl is making him question what he does. Why he does it. Boy Nobody isn't moralistic, The Program that trained him, no emotions, no talkback, controlled, emotionless. Stone. Give nothing. It's was both fascinating and emotionally disturbing being inside his head for awhile, but it's addicting, I'll tell you that.

The one thing I was eh about was the romance, not the actual romance itself, but the instalove- though it's not instalove- You'll understand it if you've read it.  It was fast, Boy Nobody has only five days to complete this assignment, and with his mixed feelings for Sam -the daughter of his target, things get messy. Some conversations were a little off...especially when there's talk of feelings within one day of meeting each other. Sex is handled realistically in here, and besides that, there's a special surprise in this romance. AND IT WAS FREAKING CLEVER. I didn't realise it until right before it happened.

What I loved though, was the fact the story ended the way you didn't think it would go. It ended the way it realistically would and not a systematically  everything's fine because  it's twu wuv.

The Hit is a fast paced, chilling brutal story of a teenage assassin, that though, despite the cold way it's written, will suck you in and before you know it you've finished the book and left with wanting more. 

Rating: 5/5