Lily Sparks: Teen Killers Club

In her debut novel Lily Sparks takes readers to the Teen Killers Club camp, where they learn to be the best assassin they can be:

Signal was often seen as the weird outcast Goth from the trailer parks for most of her life. When she is convicted of the brutal murder of her ex-best friend Rose, it is discovered she is a Class A: the most dangerous and manipulative within the criminal profile. This designation means that she has no chance to appeal her conviction or any chance of parole. She will spend the rest of her life behind bars. When she is given a chance to avoid prison for the rest of her life, she signs up for a secret program: Teen Killers Club. Here she meets other teens who are also Class As and it is clear she does not fit in at all. This raises the question, Did she actually kill Rose? Signal has more immediate problems on her hands before she can figure out what happened the night of Rose's murder, she has to survive camp and there are people and forces that do not want that to happen.

I really enjoyed this book, I did not want to put it down. It was a lot darker than I thought it would be and was a refreshing take on the train teens to be assassin books. This is a camp set book but instead of learning how to tie knots, scratch that they probably learned how to do that, they receive tasks of best way to dispose of a body and some are better than it than other. Additionally, they are not all the same, each has a different set of skills and skill sets that can be used to kill people so it was nice that the characters are not redundant of each other.

This is a group of misfits for sure but some how they all complement each other and lets be honest some stereotypes are mixed in there as well, but I think some of this is society perception especially around Signal with er Goth look, I mean how can she not be a killer unless she is a Goth. But as the story continues the stereotypes are broken down and something new has appeared, the Class A type of people. Although that all the people within this group are Killers, they have killed before, you still feel for them as you find out their backstory and who they killed. You begin to root for them as this is their chance at a second life as a class A there is not other option for parole or appear of your convictions.

Signal stands out amongst the rest of the Class A as the "camp". If you know anything about the psychopathy scale of any kind, you can clearly see that does not have a lot of the traits needed to fit. She is pretty naive (especially towards boys, but she has been incarcerated for most of her teen years so this is to be expected), squeamish towards blood and well tried to be everyone's friend or help other people at camp without something to gain for herself. And it is this lack of fitting in that leads to the mystery of the book, if Signal did not kill Rose then who did? I can honestly say I did not figure the mystery out in this book, you go back and forth between people and even Signal herself. It was an interesting well thought out mystery, and once again I DID NOT FIGURE IT OUT (craziness here).

I could have done with the whole love triangle aspect, but at least in this case it did not take away from the overall story and actually had a purpose. I cannot think of how Sparks could have achieve the type of loyalty between the members of the love triangle without it being love based, it's just not my favourite aspect that you often in YA and New Adult books.

One aspect that is not quite explained in the book is why it was decided to have people classified along a psychopathy scale. I mean there are people high up in a corporations that would test as a class A as described in this book, and it did not seem like these people were affected by the classification. However, this could be due to class, money and power, not sure, it not completely defined here. Additionally, the teens talk about how some people want all Class A's rounded up, maybe that is a plot for a different story?

I was Wowed to find that that this was Sparks' debut novel as the writing was great, the plot interesting and the character really fleshed out. This book was unexpected and one that I highly recommend that you pick up especially if you are fans of New Adult Mystery/Thriller genre. Cannot wait to read the next book that Sparks releases

Enjoy!!!!

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