Review: I Only Made it Six Books into the Alex Rider Series (Spoilers).

A few years ago, I was given the Alex Rider series after I had asked for it as a Christmas gift. Why did I ask for it? Because it was recommended by Rick Riordan on his website, and I was still going through my Percy Jackson phase and thought that Riordan could do no wrong. It took me a while to get to reading it, but when I did, a quickly lost interest and got bored due to the repetitiveness of the series.

#1: Alex

Something that you should know right off the bat is that Anthony Horowitz (the author of the Alex Rider series) has written two other books based off of Sherlock Holmes and three based off of James Bond with the permission of Ian Flemming. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Alex Rider is pretty much a teenage James Bond and is great at pretty much everything even though we have little to no explanation for how he knows how to do these things. For example, one of the first scenes that we get in the first book, Stormbreaker, shows Alex jumping off a flagpole through an open window and into his dead uncle’s office where he finds some information that launches him into becoming a teenage spy for MI6. This also makes some of the training scenes illogical since if Alex can do that, why is he having a hard time with some of the other things, like defending himself when in another earlier scene, he beats the crap out of some bullies using karate moves? It makes him look like the male version of every female protagonist in a dystopian YA novel from Y2K; a self-insert character for tween/teen guys in a James Bond type setting, and this never changes.

#2: The Villains

The villains are your predictable, cartoonishly evil spy-novel bad guys and this is only made worse by the terrible dialogue that would be worthy of being in a fanfic written by a child. The villains are all supposed to be these super geniuses capable of destroying the world through their inventions that contain hidden weapons and yet they can’t even kill the teenage spy that just walked into their mansion. Why? Because they’re too busy with their monologue to shoot Alex directly in the head. Or, if they aren’t giving a speech, they’re too busy trying to kill him in the most contrived manner they can think of, like throwing him into a tank with a shark without even checking to make sure that he doesn’t have any weapons or tools on him that he could use to escape.

#3: The Plot

The plots of the Alex Rider books aren’t original in the slightest. While the first book was okay because it could’ve been its own stand-alone novel, despite how fanfic-y it was, the other books were boring as hell because it felt like they were copy and pasted from every spy movie ever. I had seen the same story played out on screen, I just read the same story a few days ago in the first book. Why are we doing this again? The plots of these different books were so similar that after a while they just started melting into one another, so every book felt like Deja-vu, even when there was a plot twist here and there.

#4: The Plot Twists

The plot twists were so telegraphed that you could see them from a mile away, in part from bad, illogical writing, and also from the plot essentially being the same from book to book with minor changes.

#5: The Action Scenes

The action scenes were okay, but also suffered from bad dialogue and very contrived plot devices. I swear, whoever is giving Alex all of his gadgets is from the magical land of plot propulsion because without them, the book would be three pages long. Though if the villains were better, the series would also be shorter.

All in all, though I can see how this series might appeal to tween/teen boys, it’s not that great.

Until next time,

M.J.