Customer Reviews

Evil Genius

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Identity is a theme central to many YA books, however multiple award-winner Jinks comes at it from a slightly different angle than most in her latest novel. Thirteen year old genius Cadel Piggott lives in Sydney (Australia) with his distracted parents. Unfortunately, his advanced intellect makes it hard for him to understand how other people think, and he has no social skills. Bored out of his skull, Cadel quite naturally gets into some mischief (in this case some computer hacking). As a result, he's taken to see a psychologist, who, refreshingly, treats him like an adult. In a twist straight out of Joseph Campbell, the psychologist reveals that Cadel is in fact the secret son of incarcerated international arch-villain Dr. Darkkon. Fortunately for Cadel, the psychologist is Dr. Darkkon's agent and has been put in place to act as intermediary (and indoctrinator).

Cadel's brilliance and innate arrogance are played to, as he is told that his true father is working on a plot for world domination. Dr. Darkkon is sick of dim-wits running the show, and wants Cadel at his side to help him in this scheme. Toward that end, Cadel's progress through high-school is accelerated, and soon he's left that unhappy experience behind (with a parting gift of both physical and social wreckage), and is enrolled at the Axis Institute. A facade of higher education, its chemistry classes are all about poisons, art classes are about forgery, and the computer classes all about hacking. Cadel joins a class of freaks and geeks recruited from all over as prospective sidekicks or useful tools for Dr. Darkkon's plans.

So far, so good. Cadel is a cold character and while the book is obviously somewhat tongue-in-cheek with the arch-villain and the Evil U, Cadel's underlying melancholy is all too real. However, to his own astonishment, Cadel starts to develop -- gasp -- empathy! This theoretically springs from an online relationship he builds under false pretenses as well as the mysterious deaths of his classmates, but it feels rather arbitrary and inorganic to the story. Before long, Cadel finds himself playing a dangerous game of deception, trying to escape his father's evil plans for him and trying to connect with his online correspondent. This results in all kinds of machinations whereby he has to play the Axis Institute faculty off of each other. However, the instructors are never really developed in enough relief to make Cadel's complex maneuverings come to life. At a certain point I stopped caring, and just kept reading, confident that it would all work out in the end.

Indeed, about halfway through this massive book, the momentum runs out, and what had been a fairly enjoyable ride starts to get tedious. Cadel's eventual redemption is all too obvious and all too slow in coming, and the complex plots he weaves aren't particularly compelling (although they do fulfill the YA trope of the kid who outwits his teachers). And when Jinks attempts to up the tension and stakes at the end, it never gets that exciting, as the ending kind of peters out in a rather banal climax (which also happens to leave the door wide open for sequels). All in all, there are a few nice ideas here and there, but it's just too much of a slog to recommend.

Cadel Piggott isn't your typical kid. For one thing, he's extremely gifted intelligence wise. And for another, he's the son of the evil Dr. Darkkon, who is being held in prison for various crimes.

When Cadel's adopted parents take him to see a psychologist following Cadel's attempts to illegally hack into various computer systems, Cadel falls under the influence of Dr. Thaddeus Roth. Unknown to his adoptive parents, Roth is actually part of Darkkon's league of evil and instead of helping Cadel with his issues, Roth is helping Cadel embrace his evil side and learning how to be the evil genius his father desires.

The first half of the book, focusing on Cadel's meteoric rise through each grade and his problems relating to his classmates is the stuff of sheer genius. Cadel's use of psychological manipulation of his classmates, teachers and anyone else he comes into contact with is purely delightful. Seeing how Cadel figures out how to disrupt traffic patterns in his first attempts at evil plots is wonderful, but the real stroke of genius is Cadel's opening an on-line dating service to draw in unwitting victims and to raise money (Cadel keeps the would-be suitors separated geographically so they don't become any the wiser that it's a scam).

It's once Cadel graduates and decides to attend Axis University, a school set up by Darkkon for the training of evil geniuses, that the book becomes a big bogged down. The middle section, dealing with Cadel's various studies and the characters encountered there, doesn't really move as effortlessly as the first third. Thankfully, things pick up in the final third of the novel with Cadel begins to piece together that things might not necessarily be what they seem. The last hundred or so pages are pure action, with revelations coming quickly and plot twists galore.

I opened this book not expecting much, but boy was I wrong! I haven't been so pleasantly surprised in a long time. The characters were entertaining and complex, the plot was just long and interesting enough to hold my attention for a few hours. Usually I don't buy books and just borrow them from the library, but I found that I was checking this one out so often to reread it that I just bought it! This book is definitely one you can read again and again! Amazon is about $0.04 cheaper than Borders or Barnes and Noble, though, so you can get it there to avoid shipping costs. I also highly recommend the sequel, Genius Squad, and can't wait for the third book (Genius Wars) to come out!

Evil Genius, by Catherine Jinks, is a fresh and clever young adult novel written about a misunderstood child prodigy.

Cadel Piggott is a genius, especially with computers. When he gets into some trouble with the law at the age of seven, he foster parents take him to a psychologist who helps him discover his full potential. And eventually tells Cadel that his real father is none other than the villainous Dr. Phineas Darkkon.

Cadel's psychologist encourages his family to send Cadel to the Axis Institute. But the college is more than it seems. Also known as the Axis Institute for World Domination, it's actually a higher learning center for students who want to study from one of the three schools of Deception, Destruction, and Organic Distortion (also known as Applied Arts, Environmental Science, and Biomedical Science). There is even a fun website that you can visit to find out more about the institute and it's students and faculty. When Cadel's classmates begin dropping out (and dying) one-by-one, he begins second guessing his decisions. And the more secrets and evil that he uncovers, the less he likes who he has become.

Evil Genius is full of incredibly unique and creative characters. When I first began reading this, Cadel seemed to be the antithesis of Harry Potter. But Cadel actually has more depth to his character. And this is no story for smaller children. There are many deaths, though none are graphic. This is marketed to 12 years and up, and I agree. But a warning that the book is lengthy, with plenty of technical jargon, that I tended to skim over.

With more twists and turns than the Los Angeles freeway system, Evil Genius is a wonderfully surprising treat for all fans of great literary supervillains and those striving for world domination.

Cadel Piggott doesn't really fit in. His genius IQ and his peculiar obsessions seem strange to his classmates. He's not a malicious child, but his boredom drives him to challenge himself by hacking into computers and designing intricate pranks. It doesn't help that his parents are constantly busy and don't spend any time with him. The only person who really seems to care about Cadel is Dr. Thaddeus Roth, his psychologist. Thaddeus even encourages Cadel's obsessions and pranks. As Cadel gets older, Thaddeus gradually starts to reveal why he's interested in the boy -- he wants to enroll him in Dr. Phineas Darkkon's special school: The Axis Institute for World Domination.

Evil Genius, the first in a series of novels by Catherine Jinks, starts out with a delightfully mischievous sense of humor as we watch Cadel studying traffic patterns and bus schedules so he can play clever tricks on his classmates and teachers. The first part of the novel is fascinating and amusing and this lasts for about 100 pages (out of 500) because there's a long build-up before Cadel goes off to Dr. Darkkon's school.

However, as soon as Cadel gets to the school, the tone of the novel shifts abruptly and becomes incredibly dark and disturbing. I suppose it's not surprising that the teachers and students at the Axis Institute are hateful, treacherous, and murderous, but Jinks' tone had been much lighter until that point and the sudden shift to shocking and dreadful was incongruent with the first 20% of the novel. I had been chuckling happily with my kids until then and I knew that Cadel would be going off to Dr. Evil School, but based on the cover art and the first 100 pages, I had assumed that this would be a rather light treatment of such an institution. Wrong! Once we got to school, I felt like I'd suddenly been slammed into one of Cadel's firewalls.

This shift in tone was an issue for me, but that's not Catherine Jinks' fault. There's no rule that an author can't abruptly change the tone of her novel, and it's even possible that my misunderstanding of the tone was influenced by the audio version I was listening to (which is wonderfully narrated by Justine Eyre). Other readers, especially if they're warned, will probably welcome the shift.

But I had another issue with Evil Genius. Toward the end of the novel, at which point I passionately hated almost every character in the book, the plot twisted and flip-flopped and did all sorts of strenuous acrobatics which made the horror drag on much longer and more confusingly than it needed to. It was torturous.

However, there were some bright spots peeking out of the darkness of Evil Genius. The writing and character development are excellent. Cadel's relationship with a girl he gets to know over the Internet is perhaps the most touching YA relationship I've ever read. Also, Jinks gives us some things to think about in Evil Genius. For example, she shows us that our own negligent or even well-intentioned actions can have consequences that make our behaviors seem evil to others.

Catherine Jinks set out to do something original and unexpected in Evil Genius, and she accomplished that. Most of my experience with Evil Genius was unpleasant, but that's due to my personal taste, not to Ms. Jinks' skills.

I absolutly adored this book! It kept me interested from page 1.Just when you think you know what is happening,everything changes before your eyes! Lots of plot twists, leaving you longing for a sequal! A must read!

Cadel is just your average boy, or is he? No, Cadel is a hacking genius! For his hacking his adoptive parents are worried and take him to a theripist. But, Cadel soon finds out that his theripist isn't just a theripist, but the key to his destany as an evil genius. Full of twist and turns, Catherine Jinks keeps it exciting the entire time, and shows the good side of evil. A truely amazing piece of work.

I came across this book accidentally while looking for something else. The title caught my eye because IMO there aren't nearly enough books with evil main characters. The book takes the main character from evil megalomaniac to empathic human in its 300-ish pages, and makes the struggle believable. I plan to read the sequel and the third in the series as well. I can't wait to see what happens to Cadel Piggott who proves that it's not so bad to be bad.

I bought this book knowing almost nothing about it or its author, and unexpectedly found it almost impossible to put down. Of course, I am an adult, and not a "Young Adult", so officially my review shouldn't count, but here it is anyway. I was captivated by the young hero, and enthralled by his experiences with a therapist who teaches him to indulge his own exceptionalism and introduces him to an entire university of narcissistic evil doers. It's almost like Harry Potter enrolled in a Hogwarts of evil. Since I knew little about the book when I began it, I first thought that Cadell Piggot, the young computer genius, might have Asperger's, and be struggling with those obstacles to social development. However, the book never goes down that road. This is a book about self discovery by a growning young genius who just happens to find himself running with the bad guys. And he, and the reader, has a lot of fun while he explores this side of himself, and ultimately begins to develop his own moral compass. I think this series is going to be a smash hit, and probably, soon a major motion picture.

And by the way, some of the reviews have compared this book to Artemis Fowl, so I just thought I'd let other readers know that I am not an Artemis Fan...and that in my opinion the Evil Genius books are much more engrossing and have a lot more to offer. The Harry Potter comparison is more apt, in that in Harry P you discover the art of magic and the fun of boarding school,and in EvilGenius you explore the art of computer technology and evil doing while exploring a bizarre college campus.

The Australian setting is not crucial to the plot, but I expect that in the books to come the location down under may plan a bigger role in setting the scene for this exploration of evil doing.

I have a little bit of trouble deciding what age group of young readers the book is appropriate for. Many characters in the book are completely amoral, and there are discussions of odd viruses and killings that are probably too gruesome for the tweens and possibly even early teens. But older teens and their parents will be glued to the page. Enjoy!

Cadel Piggot has been adopted by two clueless parents who don't know how to handle their super genius child. After getting caught hacking, Cadel is sent to see Dr. Thaddius Roth. Through Dr. Roth, Cadel meets his father, a jailed famed criminal, and is slowly corrupted and trained in how to commit crimes without being caught. Cadel's life changes dramatically when he enters the Axis Academy, a college for evil, at age 14 and as his relationship deepens with someone he has met online through one of his schemes.

This novel's strength lies in the slightly absurd world that Jinks has created and in her various amoral characters. The resolution of the book manages to be both slightly predictable and full of unexpected twists. Unfortunately, the book does drag during it's final third, and a major character transformation is not fully earned. However, this book's inventive world and funny and unique characters will leave readers hoping that there will be sequel.