Mind Games (Mind Games, 1)

I read this book on my iPad and love it a lot that I wanted tp purchase a hard copy. Love the author and it's one of her books she wrote in the beginning of her career. It's about twins each with extraordinary powers of their own and finding out that the people who are supposedly taking care of them are actually using their powers for their own agenda.

Book was very hard to read in my opinion.They introduce too many characters at once and the setting changes every chapter making it very difficult to follow.Book looked intriguing But was disappointing.

Went in circles and hard to follow at times...it would go back in time suddenly to explain what was happening now.

Ohhh Kiersten White. I have hard such great things about you. I mean, I have read one of your books but that doesn't count because it was the second book to the Paranormalcy series... Mind Games was kind of ehhhh. I liked the characters, the plot and backstory was pretty good but this story needed more action and could have had a lot of potential for a longer story. The story just ended and I feel like it could have been much more. I understand the author might have purposely cut the story short but it just wasn't something I liked.

Like I said, I liked the characters. Fia and Annie are sisters. Fia has perfect instinct and Annie is her blind older sister who can see the future. I can't really say too much about both characters without spoiling too much. A metaphor I can say about these sisters is that Annie is Fia's proxy. (If you don't know, in Alex London's book Proxy, a Proxy is someone who takes the punishment of their Patron, the person who is committing these bad deeds.)

This is the part that just dragged down my rating because I felt as though this book was cut short. The book ends and I basically imagine about tons and millions of things that could happen after that part. Maybe the author meant for the part to be imagined by readers but honestly, I read a story to know what happens, not to make up a version of my own. (ie. The Giver) This book had so much potential! Fia had planned to do something right before the book ended and I was just so disappointed how Kierstan didn't keep writing on about this story. I really like the plot and the backstory to how Fia and Annie end up the way they are. I loved this world with all these cool abilities the characters had. Other than that, I also found this book was a bit uneventful. Based on the previous pages I had read, I had expected this book to have more fight scenes, to have more near death experience, more action in general!

One thing that also bumped down the rating a bit was how much I just couldn't keep up with the POV changes. 4 perspectives: Fia past, Fia present, Annie past, Annie present. That was waaay too much for me to keep track of. It got a little overwhelming due to how many people I had to keep up with. It is kind of like letting loose 4 animals that each other. They run around and you cannot control them! I would have preferred it if there were flashbacks instead of "Then" POV chapters.

I gave this book 3 stars because I thought the book ended too quickly, the events were a bit boring and the amount of POVs were a bit overwhelming. I still liked the characters and backstory though!

Full review: http://next-page-please.blogspot.com/2015/05/lets-talk-mind-games-by-kiersten-white.html

Bought it for a friend and she like it

I was surprised by how much I didn't like this book. I was looking forward to reading a good book with a strong female assassin lead, but this is most definitely not that book.

Fia and Annie are sisters who attend a special school. Annie is blind and the school offers her all the top of the line teachings for blind children. Fia tags along because her sister is all she has. Fia soon learns that the school is not what it seems.

Fia starts to do "jobs" for the school because they threaten her sister's life. She wants to run, but she can't leave her sister so she keeps committing these crimes for them to keep them happy. I will say that Fia didn't act her age. As I was reading I felt like she was 12 years old.

Many things went wrong with this book. I feel like there is no real connection between Fia and Annie. Fia claims to be unable to leave Annie behind, but she goes to Europe to party and have fun for months at a time and doesn't even think of her sister. The repetitiveness was annoying. The side notes needed to deleted. They were annoying, childish, and they broke the flow of the story.

I also feel like 99% of the book were flash backs, the story was barely hinted at. Almost like this book was just a history of their lives before the story gets started.

The whole thing was bad. I didn't want to finish it, but forced myself to. I have no desire, what so ever, to read the next book.

Review originally posted on The Book Addict's Guide

Call me shallow, but looks matter. I mean, I totally judged this book by its cover. I LOVED the cover for this book (all the blues and purples and pinks – gorgeous) so admittedly, the cover drew me in initially and once I started to read more about it, I was super intrigued by the description! I love a good paranormal thriller so MIND GAMES quickly became one of my most anticipated reads for early 2013. Sadly, that was where the excitement ended as well.

MIND GAMES was really hard for me to get into. It’s a very fast-paced book and also somewhat shorter in length (only 237 pages) so it was quick to read and honestly, if it hadn’t been… I’m not sure I would have finished it. I really didn’t like reading from Fia’s point of view (also, did not like “Fia” as a nickname for Sofia, but that’s just my weird names hang-up) although I understood it.
Fia has natural instincts, incredibly so that she’s virtually always able to make the right decision without thinking and just trusting her gut. In order to keep the psychics and the mind readers of the book in the dark, Fia relies almost entirely on her instincts and doesn’t interrupt her thoughts at all, so the reader gets a sort of stream-of-consciousness POV from Fia at all times. While I understand it, it was difficult to read at times because I felt like I was reading the author’s stream of consciousness and not Fia’s. The whole style of her POV felt unfinished to me and it took away from the book instead of adding something special to it.

The book alternates between Fia’s POV and her sister Annie’s. Annie is much easier to read and understand because she kind of only relies on her mind. Even though she’s blind, she has the uncanny and ironic ability to “See”: she has visions of events in the future as if she can see them happening herself. Annie is much more put together and definitely less scarred and traumatized then Fia so I was able to follow her story much better.

Besides the alternating POVs, the story also switches back and forth between present day and the past, which normally I’m fine with, but it was a little too much in MIND GAMES. I had to follow “Monday night, Tuesday morning, Wednesday afternoon” in present day but also jump around from “Ten years ago, five years ago, three years ago” in the past. I just felt like it was all over the place and not terribly hard to follow but just enough that it took me out of the story for a second to put together the pieces of the timeline, adjust, and then jump back in. It felt like an interruption of the book instead of adding additional information.

That all being said, the plot didn’t knock me off my feet either. The concept was great and something really interesting, but going back to what I said earlier, the whole book just felt rushed all the time. I felt like details didn’t get explained, the past didn’t connect to the present well, and the characters never really got developed. I think it may have been worth it to add a few extra pages of explanations and character development to really hook the reader in and I just felt like I was really, really missing that.

Put all those elements together and add Fia’s annoying tics (tapping and repeating everything in threes “tap tap tap” “hate hate hate” “go go go” — can you tell I hate repetition in books?) and you have one disappointed reader. I was really sad that this book wasn’t what I thought it would be. All of the things that were different about this book felt like a weight pulling it down instead of letting the book shine and carry the reader through.

And the ending!?! That was really, really, (I’m pulling a Fia here), REALLY disappointing and did not make any sense to me whatsoever. I know MIND GAMES is a series. I don’t think I’ll continue on.

The thing about Mind Games is that I was terribly detached to all the characters right from the start. If I made any connection with any of the characters, it would have to be James. He actually had a compelling "backstory," and he actually had normal, human feelings, unlike Fia and Annie. For one, Fia really doesn't have a personality. Or if she does, it just describes her as one word—crazy. She's legitimately crazy. And her sister Annie isn't much better. Annie might not be crazy, but I'm certainly not crazy about her.

Right off the bat this book caught my attention, but within 20 pages, it lost it. I thought Adam was going to be an interesting character to read about, but he wasn't present for the majority of the novel. The idea of Fia being trained from a young age to assassinate people and then choose not to assassinate a geeky teenage boy over a dog is ludicrous. (Fia sees Adam petting a dog on the side of the street, and she decides to not kill him. Like what?)

Enough about the characters. The world-building/writing is a whole other matter. For one, as a reader you're thrown into the plot unexpectedly. At first, that worked toward the book's advantage, instantly showing the reader action. But as the book went along, the lack of world-building really irritated me. I never really knew what was going on. I picked up on certain aspects of the novel, but it took the entire 237 pages to figure out the majority of the plot. And it took me a good 30-50 pages to figure out that Annie was blind.

Also, the writing was enough to get me to groan. Fia did things three times. Three. Freaking. Times. She tap, tap, tapped and pop, pop, popped. Yeah, well, she drove, drove, drove me insane. OH, YES. And Annie had NO REGARD for her sister whatsoever. Annie was always talking/thinking about how she loved her sister, but she didn't really show it. In my mind, Annie was holding Fia back unknowingly.

I really don't know what to say about this book, because there really isn't much to say. After 50%, the plot got really slow and somewhat meaningless. I felt like it was a gigantic prologue, especially with the constant flashbacks. I would've been semi-okay with the flashbacks if they actually moved the plot along, but the thing is, the flashbacks did nothing for the novel, which once again lowered my rating for the book.

Despite my two star rating, I didn't dislike this book, but I didn't like it either. I don't really have any strong feelings toward it (okay, maybe strong feelings toward snapping Fia's fingers off if she tap, tap, taps them one more time, but that's beside the point); I'm pretty neutral about the whole book. I won an ARC for Perfect Lies, so I'll be reading the next book, but it's not high on my TBR. I wouldn't really recommend this book unless you're looking for a quick read and don't mind not feeling anything for the characters/plot/world-building.

I really enjoyed this book. It was the first book by White that I have ever read and I found that I liked it a lot. The idea was original and the characters were all wonderfully developed. My only complaint was that it was a little short and I wish there has been a little more in the way of describing the high action scenes, which there were so many of. Even now as I’m trying to come up with things to talk about this book, there are just so many.

The way that this story is told is through both flashback and shots of what is currently happening. The book only takes place over the last 2 days, but White uses flashback from various points of the last 7 years to show how these two sisters got to where they were. I found this technique really effective as I puzzled out what was going on and why they were in this predicament. We are first introduced to Fia who seems to be dangerous and broken. Really, you just want to fix everything that is wrong with her and give her a real chance at life, but alas, she is stuck where she is. I think that Fia showed a lot of signs that she had PTSD, and it just makes you more angry at the people that put her in this position. Even though Fia is really sad and broken, I quite liked her and rooted for her to do well. She was funny in parts in her attempt to thwart the Seers and Feelers that controlled her life.
I did not like Annie, Fia’s sister. I felt that although she clearly loved Fia, she did nothing good for her. Every time Annie tried to do something that she thought helped, she only managed to make the situation worse for Fia. Even if she tried to be selfless, she really was just a selfish person who was just made more problems for her sister. Even as you look back into the flashbacks, it is clear that Annie was more trouble than Fia. I admired both of their willingness to go down for one another.

I really liked James too even though he was a lot older than Fia. I think the hardest part of this book was trying to figure out everyone’s ages in proximity to one another. We were given clues like that James was in college when Fia was 14 and that there was an incident with a puzzle when Fia was 5 and Annie was 7. Eventually it was easy to figure out how everyone related to the other. I liked that even after so many hard years, Fia was still compassionate for helping people she didn’t know. She could have very easily have let people die, but instead, she fought to keep herself human and from spiraling into a mess like she had before.

I’m looking forward to the next book because Fia and Annie were sneaky and clever as they tried to outsmart the system. I’m eager to see what Keane is really trying to do with an army of Seers and Feelers. There are so many details that I can’t wait to see come out as we learn more about the relationship between the sisters and how everything is going to turn out in the end.