As a fan of the Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego games as a child, I was pretty excited to hear that they’d brought her back as a Netflix series with companion books. I thought this book was fine, but not great.

We start with Carmen mid-heist, being observed by Interpol. She successfully pulls off the heist and gets on a train, where she runs into someone from her past. Intriguing, yes. Then, we get 100 pages of flashbacks to Carmen’s time in school. While I understand this is a necessary set up for future stories, it wasn’t that interesting. The writing was dry. Carmen’s life at VILE’s academy for up and coming thieves was fairly predictable. And the flashbacks dragged on. I wanted to know what Carmen was doing now and why, not what she had done/how she was trained. Eventually, we caught back up to present day, then promptly flashed back to where we had left the school story part of this.

Middle grade readers will probably enjoy this book more than I did. The school story side of it is intriguing and pitched the right way will definitely draw readers in. However, the beginning is misleading and leaves the reader a bit disappointed to hear so much of Carmen’s past and so very little of her present. I’m hoping that future books will be more engaging. Like I said, the book was fine, but not great.