I'm giving this three stars instead of four because it has no ending! Read my review at Gator Book Chomp.

4.5 ★ Kudos for a cliffhanger ending! Cannot wait to read next instalment ☻

A very exciting book, with unexpected twists. Eli and Malik and 28 other children live in a small town called Serenity. Everything in Serenity is perfect, there are no poor people, no homelessness, or unemployment. Everyone is honest, and good, not like the outside world. Or so it seems, first Randy, then Eli, discover that the adults are lying to them, nothing is what it seems, and the children are really prisoners in the town. I am already waiting for the next book in the series...

Actual Rating: 4/5 (Rounded up)
Kinda posted this late. Don’t remember much about the book but I love the characters and the concept. Amazing sci-fi utopia vibe!

This was recommended by my little cousin and I was pleasantly surprised.

Not fair to rate when we only made it through 8 chapters, but the kids and I both had a hard time following the story and remembering who each of the characters were. I was intrigued by the mystery but not enough to keep reading for now.

Korman, Gordon. Masterminds. Balzer & Bray, 2015.

Eli lives in the remote town of Serenity, where no one does anything wrong and there's never any crime or any problems. Even the streets are named for peaceful things: harmony, amity, etc. One day Eli and his friend try to ride out of town to explore the desert, and Eli is assaulted with throbbing pain. He's taken by helicopter to the hospital, and his friend is whisked away to his grandparents' home out of town. Before he leaves, Eli's friend leaves him a message: "There's something screwy with this town." Will Eli be able to figure out what is screwy here, and can he do it before he or the other kids in town suffer the consequences?

This book is part mystery, part action-adventure. Because the town is so squeaky-clean, there's no violence or profanity to worry about, but there's plenty of intense mystery as the kids try to work through what's going on. This book would make an excellent classroom or library read-aloud, and will be an easy one to book talk to my patrons. Strongly recommended.

Recommended for: middle grade
Red Flags: none (seriously; a kid gets in trouble for taking too many donuts, but that's about it)
Overall Rating: 5/5 stars

Read-Alikes: [b:Poop Fountain!|23847811|Poop Fountain! (The Qwikpick Papers Book 1)|Tom Angleberger|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1419525495s/23847811.jpg|43457850], [b:What We Found in the Sofa and How it Saved the World|16089515|What We Found in the Sofa and How it Saved the World|Henry Clark|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1352312033s/16089515.jpg|21892953], [b:The Mysterious Benedict Society|83369|The Mysterious Benedict Society (The Mysterious Benedict Society, #1)|Trenton Lee Stewart|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1342715444s/83369.jpg|80497]

A group of middle school kids in an idyllic small town in New Mexico discover they are actually clones of criminal masterminds, being raised in a "perfect" contained environment without crime or even exposure to words like "murder" but surreptitiously watched, recorded, and evaluated by the adults they think are their parents and teachers, looking for evidence that criminal behavior is innate or learned.

Definitely the first in a series, this book ends at the beginning of the "real" story, as some of the kids have escaped their hometown of Serenity and have reconnected with a non-cloned friend at a boarding school in Colorado.

Great adventure-type middle grade read. Putting this on the Olive read-aloud list when she's a bit older.

Read this as one of ten award nominees that our teens have to read this summer. The book was very slow to get started, I was bored for the first half. But once the characters found out what was going on, I thoroughly enjoyed it and want to read the second. I will be recommending it this summer.