Review: Mind Games by Kiersten White

Publisher: HarperTeen
Published: February 19, 2013
Pages: 254
Source: For Review from HarperCollins
Rating: 2.5 Stars

Fia was born with flawless instincts. Her first impulse, her gut feeling, is always exactly right. Her sister, Annie, is blind to the world around her—except when her mind is gripped by strange visions of the future.

Trapped in a school that uses girls with extraordinary powers as tools for corporate espionage, Annie and Fia are forced to choose over and over between using their abilities in twisted, unthinkable ways… or risking each other’s lives by refusing to obey.

In short: Mind Games by Kiersten White was too underdeveloped to reach its full potential.

If the majority of the book blogging community tells me a book and author are good and well worth the read, I listen. Such is how Paranormalcy by Kiersten White came to be on my TBR. While I haven't actually had the time yet to read Paranormalcy, it was made evident to me that Kiersten White has a talent for writing fun and engaging stories. So when the opportunity arose to read Mind Games, I was very eager. And who wouldn't be? Kiersten White had shown again that she can come up with entertaining concepts with her assassinating-sisters-with-superpowers storyline. But while I found the premise of Mind Games to be very exciting, my first experience with Kiersten White's writing wasn't ideal.

Told through alternating and indistinguishable first person points of view between sisters Fia and Annie, as well as alternating past and present time periods, I found Mind Games to be pretty confusing at times. The sisters have the same random and scattered kind of voice that was difficult to differentiate. The flashbacks take up a considerable portion of the book and seemed to be largely unnecessary and lacked any real cohesion to the plot at hand. I am a bit conflicted about Kiersten White's writing. It was incredibly disjointed and while I thought that worked quite well as a reflection of Fia's deteriorating mental stability, it wasn't the nicest to read. More often than not, it was just annoying.

I was excited to read a book where the main relationship would be based on the sisterly bond between Fia and Annie. The problem was, while we were told time and time again that the sisters have such a strong bond and would do absolutely anything to protect each other, I saw little actual evidence of that in Mind Games. On the romantic side of relationships in Mind Games, there is a love triangle and it was as lacklustre and unnecessary as most love triangles are. I wasn't really a fan of the characters themselves either. Like I mentioned earlier, their narratives were pretty indistinguishable from each other and I never formed any sort of connection with either of them. If there had been more differentiation and more development in their characterization however, I think I could have come to like them as I can see potential there.

And that's the thing: I could see a lot of untapped potential in Mind Games. The plot would have been pretty awesome had it been more fleshed out and not relied on all those unnecessary flashbacks. The characters' abilities were actually really interesting, but I don't believe they were used to their full potential. At 250 pages - a good chunk of which were the aforementioned pointless flashback scenes - I believe Mind Games was too short and sorely underdeveloped. I read in an interview with Kiersten White that she wrote the first draft of Mind Games in nine days and - very sorry to say this - but it kind of showed. I'm still committed to trying out Paranormalcy at some point though and I hope I respond more positively to Kiersten White's writing then!

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