Review: At First Sight (AKA Nobody)

At First Sight
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Release Date: 1st January 2015
Publisher: Quercus Childrens
~A copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review~

A girl no one can see
A boy on a mission
A love story with a difference
What happens when an assassin falls in love with his target?
There are people in this world who are Nobodies. No one sees them.
No one notices them.
They live under the radar, forgotten as soon as you turn away.

That's why they make perfect assassins.

The institute finds these people when they're young and takes then away for training. But an untrained Nobody is a threat to their organisation. And threats must be eliminated.

Claire has been invisible her whole life, missed by the Institute's monitoring.
But now they're ID'ed Claire and sent seventeen-year-old Nix to remove her.
Yet the moment he lays eyes on her, he can't make the hit...

I'm not ashamed to admit I love Jennifer Lynn Barnes's The Naturals series, I love reading anything to do with serial killers, anything that delves into psychology and criminology, profiling. Anything. And since I love that series, I was pretty optimistic with At First Sight, which is why I'm so disappointed to say that At First Sight is an example of everything I hate in a book, I know it sounds harsh, but it is.
At First Sight (also known as Nobody) is written in third person, and we alternate between Nix and Claire's perspectives, and usually with third person it creates a barrier, lessens the chance of you making a connection and not hearing their voices. While I didn't make a connection to neither Nix or Claire. I found it okay in the beginning, it was easy to read, we did have creepy behaviour, instalove and a completely unhealthy forming relationship, but look. I can look over instalove, and the creepy behaviour made me feel a little uncomfortable (but at least there's a reason for the stalking and some of Nix's actions, since it's his 'job') so it wasn't affecting the reading all that much. And then I hit 30% where things escalate from 0-60 in a matter of seconds.

I'll get straight to the point. It may be all in the name of the job (to an extent) but Nix stalks Claire, attempted to kill her twice and failed, had a lot of other opportunities to kill her or let her die-and doesn't-kidnaps her to decide whether to kill her or not, therefore Claire finds out exactly who Nix is, what he does, what he's done, and what he's been sent to do with her. She knows he's a killer, that he's been sent to kill her, knows he's dangerous, and her first instinct isn't to run, or scream, or try to get away. No. Her first instinct is to kiss him. Nix and Claire have known each other  five minutes and they sleep together. As you do. I can't even try and sum up how I feel about that, there's honestly no words whatsoever.

It went downhill from there for me, we have lack of explanation about anything until over 50%, and even then it's all squashed in an info dump after Nix and Claire have gotten over all their inner turmoil and feeling sorry for themselves, and by then lack of interest was my problem. I didn't care about the characters or what happened to them, I didn't care about who they were or what they weren't or who and what the Society was and how deep they ran.

At First Sight has a unique premise that it didn't meet, it focused more on the brooding of the characters and an unhealthy relationship that is completely twisted but is being portrayed as romance that didn't settle well with me.

Rating: 1/5