Review: Nobody by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Nobody by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Release Date: January 22^nd, 2013

Number of Pages: 400

Publisher: Egmont USA

Source: ARC from MM Publicity

GR - Amazon - BD - Indigo

There are people in this world who are Nobody. No one sees them. No one notices them. They live their lives under the radar, forgotten as soon as you turn away.
 That’s why they make the perfect assassins. The Institute finds these people when they’re young and takes them away for training. But an untrained Nobody is a threat to their organization. And threats must be eliminated. Sixteen-year-old Claire has been invisible her whole life, missed by the Institute’s monitoring. But now they’ve ID’ed her and send seventeen-year-old Nix to remove her. Yet the moment he lays eyes on her, he can’t make the hit. It’s as if Claire and Nix are the only people in the world for each other. And they are—because no one else ever notices them.

Nobody was the kind of novel that left me changing my mind every few chapters about how I felt about it. I think that’s why I ended up thinking it was simply okay. It doesn’t mean it was bad, far from it. There were just too many things that stopped me from really getting lost into the story. Even if there were some really great moments (my favorite has to be with the bookshelf. It made me smile and it made me like Nix a little more than I had until that moment.) Still, these high moments really didn’t make up for the little things that got on my nerves.

One of the things I really didn’t get was Claire. I wanted to like her as a character, I wanted to feel something for her, but I ended up just disliking her for falling for the guy that just tried to kill her. I mean; I can get over the fact a main character suddenly falls for a total stranger if there are redeemable things about him later. I can deal with that. Still, a girl falling for a complete stranger who tried to kill her not long before? I have to say, that’s a turn off for me. And yes, I can get that nobody really saw her before, that no one paid any attention to her. Yet, I just can’t believe in the timing of their love. Nix, I could understand the way he was, I could believe the way he acted, but when it came to Claire, I couldn’t.

When I was talking about timing previously, I meant that things happen way too fast. They are trying to take down an organization that kills people, and they seem to be able to do it in a matter of days? I can’t even define how long the time period for the story was, since it was something like a couple of days, when my mind tells me it should have been way longer than that. That really annoyed me, and I think that’s why I didn’t like the novel as much as I thought I would. The premise sounded really interesting, and I think if it had taken them longer to fall for each other, and for them to succeed, it would have been a book I would have totally loved.

In the end, this book wasn’t a Hit for me, but it still wasn’t a Miss. I’ll definitely check out Jennifer Lynn Barnes other books in the future. Nobody didn’t completely work for me, but I think it will please many readers, especially if you don’t mind that kind of insta-love.

About the Author:

Jennifer Lynn Barnes is the author of the popular Raised by Wolves series. A former competitive cheerleader, teen model, and comic book geek, she wrote her first book at the age of nineteen. She just completed her PhD in developmental psychology at Yale University and has returned to her native Oklahoma to teach at the University of Oklahoma.

Her Website

Her Twitter

You can still enter to win both a Hardback of Nobody HERE