"Masterminds" by Gordon Korman

Why, why can't we have an idyllic, crimeless town/city/enclave/whatever without it actually being some sort of dystopian plot? Why is the plot always "the utopia is secretly evil" and not "evil threatens the utopia"?

While I vastly prefer the latter, I don't actually dislike the former as much as the above paragraph suggests. I think it's a tad overused, but it does work. Which is good, because this book is one of the first type of plots-that-involve-a-utopia.

Speaking of plot. Masterminds is about five kids who live in the town of Serenity, New Mexico. It's idyllic and peaceful, unlike the outside world with its alien concepts of "poverty" and "fighting", and nobody even knows the words for bad things like murder. Pretty much the sole employer in the town is a factory that makes traffic cones.

It is, of course, also all a lie. The tagline "A perfect life. A perfect lie." on the cover kind of spoils that. It's actually |a giant nature-versus-nurture experiment|: our five protagonists are |clones of notorious (and fictional) criminals|, and the people running this |illegal experiment| are trying to |see whether raising them in an environment entirely free from bad influences will make any difference in whether or not they turn out evil|. The protagonists may also |have superpowers, but if they do, nobody's superpowers have properly manifested yet by the end of this book. I have, however, made a joke about| potato soup.

Yes, it's kids versus adults. Not my favorite trope, but it's not a deal-breaker for me. And the kids are thirteen, which last I checked is not twelve.

For people who have been raised in an idyllic, crimeless town, these kids take to stealing things and sneaking around and general skulduggery very quickly. They're really not beating the |evil mastermind| allegations.

This suffers a bit from being the first book in what was clearly always intended to be a series, so it ends a tad early for my tastes, leaving a bunch of plot threads unresolved. It takes almost the entire book just to |get out of the town|. (Though if I recall correctly The Giver also took almost the entire book to do the same, so I can't complain too hard. But The Giver also never gave me feelings of "this is getting boring, can we please move on with the plot already.")

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for some violence.

3 stars.

(Endnote: The way the title is formatted makes me almost want to call it MasterMinds instead.)