A YA Thriller Heist review
I really liked this heist book. Most of the YA novels I read I don’t like or I feel meh about. This book had me trying to contact the author and wanting to know what else she’s written. It’s not a surprise that Netflix made a movie of it (I have not seen the movie and don’t intend to. Books are always better).
I enjoyed the careful characterization throughout, but two characters made me think and feel. Dakota is everything to everybody and does everything, but she realizes that she’s wearing a variety of masks. Maybe hiding behind them. How true that is of every high school student! Who is Dakota? Is she the sum of what her parents want her to be? Is she a schedule that imprisons her? I felt for her.
Benny’s type of character I’d seen before in YA novels: the token Black kid in a sea of white faces. But I used to live in Philly, and Benny seemed like a kid from the neighborhood. He asks his uncle to help him get a car for the heist. That uncle and garage seemed realistic to me. As did Benny’s frustration at being the poor kid, the kid having to keep up appearances, the walking-the-social-tightrope kid.
The setting of the heist felt clever to me and Ludwig freshened up the tried-and-true plot with fun variations. How do you get a United State Mint operation to produce a “mistake” coin—then get it to stop producing coins once the computer goes into a loop? Ludwig knows her Philadelphia, and for those of us no longer living in Center City, Northeast Philadelphia, or North Philadelphia, the book is literally a ride down Memory Lane.
The novel is not perfect. That ending! That’s a lot of welding or solder, whatever they were doing. And the ending felt like it would never end. The book is very talky. I didn’t always sympathize with the rich kids and their problems (which made me look forward to the next Benny-narrated portion).
But, overall, I thought this was a successful heist story and a quality Young Adult novel, a rare coin in the YA Thriller piggy bank that’s stuffed with counterfeits. If you’re interested in the genre either because you love heists and/or, like me, you want to write one, you need to read this book.