Stormbreaker
#1 in the Alex Rider Series
Ian Rider, Alex’s uncle and only living relative, has just died in a car accident. At least that’s what the police say. Alex is immediately suspicious. The reports say that his uncle wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, and Ian Rider always wore his seat belt. Alex soon finds out that his suspicions were correct. His uncle was actually a secret operative for a government organization called M16. They are basically spies whose mission is to protect England.
M16 offers Alex the chance to finish what his uncle started. The security of their current mission has been breached. Ian Rider’s cover was blown, and he was assassinated. M16 believes that Sayle Enterprises is up to something. The only way they can investigate is to send someone in that Herod Sayle will never suspect, and who would suspect a fourteen year old spy?
Alex gets a crash course in espionage and is quickly thrown into a mission more dangerous than anyone ever suspected. Alex has no choice but to succeed. The very future of England is at stake. There’s no time to ask for help and not a second to lose.
A fellow teacher once told me that while award winning children’s books are mostly character driven, the books that children really love are plot driven. Stormbreaker is a perfect example of a plot driven book, and it is proof positive that I am in no way an eleven year old boy. (Ha!) But seriously, if I fall in love with a book it is usually because of the characters, and I am never going to love a book that is all about the action. Anthony Horowitz has an incredible talent for writing suspenseful scenes. There seems to be a thrilling, life-threatening situation every five to six pages in Stormbreaker. But I it reminded me of the final battle scene in Return of the King. It was exciting, yes. But why did it have to be so long? This is what was going on in my brain while watching that scene, “Fighting, fighting, fighting….Ooh! There’s the cute elf! Fighting, fighting, fighting….Hey! There’s a girl fighting in disguise! Good for her! Fighting, fighting, fighting….” What I am trying to say is that the action stuff can only hold my attention for a short time. I need to get to know the characters, to feel their emotional struggles, and to care about what’s happening to them. Case in point, Saving Private Ryan had a lot of action, but it had plenty of character development too. It kept me engaged. I didn’t feel like I knew much about Alex Rider at all. I kept reading in a “How’s he going to get out of this one?” sort of way, but I was never really engrossed by the story.
I found the plot pretty farfetched at times too. Like Percy Jackson (The Lightning Thief) and Robert Langdon (The Da Vinci Code), Alex Rider has an incredible ability to escape death. That’s to be expected in an action-hero type story, but I find that it gets old when it happens over and over and over again. Alex does receive some training, and he suspects that his uncle was preparing him to become a spy someday (or at least to be able to protect himself). But Alex seems to be some sort of “spy savant.” He just happens to know things that an average fourteen year old would never know. Yet he’ll accidently tell “the bad guy” his real name when he’s undercover. It just didn’t seem very consistent to me.
Stormbreaker is not the kind of book I would have loved as a child, and I don’t appreciate it much now either. With that said, I have taught some “tweenagers” that would have devoured every one of the Alex Rider books. Tween boys (from ages 9-13) would most likely love these books. If you are a teacher or a parent with a reluctant reader, give these books a whirl. They are action packed, and they’ll keep the pages turning (if you like that sort of thing). Books in a series are also great for reluctant readers. To date there are nine Alex Rider novels. That’s enough to keep a tween boy reading for quite a while. As for me though, I think Stormbreaker will be my first and last Alex Rider novel, unless I find out there’s a cute elf in one of them. ;-)
