STORM: The Infinity Code

Okay, this is hard to imagine, but combine the Artemis Fowl books with three kids wanting to do something good. You get STORM: The Infinity Code. It has the same tone as Artemis Fowl, very smart and clever. Oh, and instead of money deals, these kids actually want to save people and cure AIDS.

I really didn’t expect to like this book. First of all, the cover made me think that it wouldn’t be a book that I would enjoy at all. There are three kids, standing in a “I’m so cool” position, and four flies with white rings around them. Oh, yeah, and there are about a thousand 1s and 0s on the cover, which doesn’t help my number averted brain. I didn’t read the back cover, either, so I fell into that huge category of people who judge a book by its cover. I usually don’t… just with a pile of now fifty books to be read accumulating since November, I sometimes do only glance at a book.

Will’s father was killed, and his mother has gone back to Russia to visit her Mother. She sends Will to London, leaving him with her friend Natalia. Will is a loner, a genius going to the best school in England, and has nothing to occupy him. So he returns to his inventing that he started in Dorset. He gets to his school early to test his Rapid Ascent, a device that scales buildings at three feet per second.

Gaia, the strange chemist in his classes, watches him while he climbs the school, and invites him to a group of kids trying to change the world, STORM.

I was drawn in from the start, and some parts simply made me want to yell. I wanted to know what happened to Will, Gaia, and Gaia’s friend Andrew so badly. Young does a very good job of putting emotions into words. And this book wasn’t all spy/action feelings, either. Both Will and Gaia lost a parent, so their worlds are very different and they act like children who lost a parent.

I really applaud STORM for being a clean YA book. When it arrived, I thought it was a kid spy adventure, but as I read it, I realized that it is a YA book that just doesn’t feel the need to throw curse words out every other line (I never read those books). It’s a bit odd to find a action book aimed for teen boys, just because most teen boys unfortunately don’t read that much. Some advanced middle grade boys and girls will love STORM. I can’t wait to read more by E. L. Young.

Oh, and I just found out that E. L. Young is a british author whose STORM series have already been published in Great Britain. There’s four of them so far.

Comes out March 13th, 2008 (The day I get my braces off!)