Review: Michael Vey

The Prison of Cell 25 by Richard Paul Evans (2/5)

Michael Vey suffers from “great premise, poor execution” syndrome. I really love the idea behind it, that there are these kids who were changed by science gone wrong. I love seeing magic given a scientific basis. It could have been a great book, if not for the mediocre writing. It felt very childish and flat to me. We were told very directly that characters (usually Taylor…) started crying, with no emotion attached to it.

“Hearing this made her heart ache. Taylor began to cry.”
“Suddenly a painful, high-pitched squeal tore through Taylor’s head. She started crying.”
(and two pages later) “Taylor tried to keep from crying.”

One of my personal dialogue peeves popped up a few times as well, though it was worst in one scene and didn’t annoy me quite as much from there on out. I hate it when characters say each other’s names constantly when they’re talking to each other, and there’s this one scene with Michael and his mom that had me ready to throw in.

“Michael, I know it’s not easy being different. I don’t blame you for feeling this way. It’s just that most people can’t understand your special gift.”
“You think this is a gift, Mom? It’s not.”
“Michael, don’t say that.”

Michael, Michael, Michael…. She says his name seven times in this conversation, and he says “Mom” just as many. No one does that.

Then there’s the conversation between Michael and his mom about what gift Michael should give Taylor for her birthday. Mom says, “Trust me, we’re all the same. We like clothes and jewelry. And flowers.”

Excuse me?

The story did get more engaging toward the end, when things actually started happening. I felt like the plot didn’t really start until about a third of the way through the book, when his mom gets kidnapped (that’s right, folks, it’s in the blurb and it happens over 100 pages into the book). Honestly, I couldn’t tell you what happened in those first 100 pages. Not a whole heck of a lot.

The characters were also uninteresting to me. They felt like stereotypes without much depth, and while I didn’t hate any of them, I didn’t get attached either. Apathy is almost worse than hate somehow. Michael is the small, weird kid that gets bullied a lot because he can’t defend himself (in his case because he can’t reveal his powers). Ostin (who by the way it felt very weird that they made a big deal about people calling him other cities in Texas? Austin is not an uncommon name) is his overweight best friend who I think was supposed to offer some comic relief, but I wasn’t feeling it. Taylor is a cheerleader, the prettiest, most popular girl in school. I’m okay with meeting characters who fit certain cliches, as long as you delve deeper or, even better, subvert the trope. This book just… didn’t. As a very character-driven reader, boring characters knocks off a full two stars for me most of the time. The most interesting character was the villain, who I will give Evans props for. He’s wonderfully awful.

This book might have been helped a little by aging down the characters and placing it firmly in middle grade instead of trying to call it YA. The characters felt like they were in middle school most of the time anyway.

Overall, I was just bored with the characters and the slow start. The Prisoner of Cell 25 had a lot of potential, but it didn’t follow through for me.