If you have a just turned teenager, in search of a thrilling read, but not quite ready to dive into regular thrillers (or maybe it’s you not quite ready to expose your fledgling to the sex and violence of so many novels, thriller or not) then the Cherub series is the perfect bridge from children’s fiction to the grown up world.
A wonderfully believable scenario is created here – orphan kids are hand-picked to becomes part of a special espionage group of 11-17 year-olds. A hectically full-on training worthy of the SAS prepares them for their missions in the real world, infiltrating terrorist groups or drugs organisations or whatever modern criminal world is the current mission.
The best thing for me reading them as an adult is that the characters are fully drawn and real. Despite being highly trained and skilled in martial arts and so on, these kids are dealing with all the usual teenage traumas and rites of passage. James, the main character has a volatile relationship with Kerry, his first girlfriend, so that you have to read the books in order, to keep in touch with whether they are going out with each other or are no longer speaking and going out with someone else in the group of friends.
Just be warned that these books really are meant for teens not for younger kids. There is a lot of violence – not too graphic but violence none the less, and snogging in the early books when James is 12 or 13 does progress in the later books to the 16 yr olds sleeping together, again not graphic. The language is free of the f-word but a fairly realistic cleaned up representation of tough kids talk.
All in all the twelve books in the series are a great read, very compelling and have been passed around the adults in this family as soon as the 13 yr old was done with them.
The Recruit (Cherub #1)
Class A (Cherub #2)
Maximum Security (Cherub #3)
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