Mind Games - Review

Mind Games (Mindjack Origins, # 1)

By: Susan Kaye Quinn

Published: May 2nd 2012

20 pages

Genre: YA, Science Fiction, Fantasy

Source: Publisher via NetGalley (Thank you!)

( Goodreads | Amazon )

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Goodreads description--Raf, a regular mindreader, is in love with Kira, the only girl in school who can't read minds. Raf struggles to keep his thoughts about her private, but secrets are something that only zeros like Kira can keep. As he works up the nerve to ask Kira to the mindware Games, his friends have other games in mind for him.

(Mind Games is a short story prequel to the novel Open Minds. It is the first in a planned series of shorts told from the point-of-view of characters in the Mindjack universe.)

So how do you review a prequel novella to a series you haven’t read yet? Hmm… Well first let me give you a little bit of backstory. I won Open Minds in an Armchair BEA giveaway back in 2012? I think. Maybe 2013. Either way, I’ve had it for a while and just haven’t gotten around to reading it. Browsing NetGalley one day, I zoned in on this novella by Susan Kaye Quinn thinking that it was the same book as the one I’d won. I really wasn’t paying attention at all. And since I already owned this book (or so I thought), I figured scoring it for review would be liking killing two birds with one stone. It would push me to read and review it sooner if it was a "review" book, but it would also improve my NetGalley ratio since this is a book I knew I was going to read one way or the other. Well when I finally started Mind Games I noticed that I was flying through the book even though Goodreads showed it was 300+ pages. That’s when things started to feel fishy. I went to Goodreads and searched “mindjack” and saw two different entries. One for Mind Games and one for Open Minds. This just goes to show you how little attention I was paying. I knew they had different covers, but I figured this was just a re-release. Publishers do that all the time, right? Oh silly me. And that’s the backstory for my relationship with this novella.

All of that being said, I feel like Mind Games was a good, but extremely brief introduction to this Mindjack world that Susan Kaye Quinn has created. Everyone can read everyone’s mind. CREEPY. And annoying. Can you imagine someone being inside your head all the time? All day long? And not just one someone. Every someone. A witness to every thought you ever have. The good and the bad. Except well…the one person you’d actually like to know what you’re thinking.

In Mind Games Raf is our narrator. He’s got this huge crush on his best friend Kira. And well Kira happens to be the only one in their school who can’t read minds. Not only is that extremely rare, but it singles Kira out as a target for ridicule. She’s different. And we all know that everyone else fears the different. Of course, everyone is going to fear the one girl who can keep her thoughts to herself. What kind of crazy thoughts is she thinking? This takes the idea of “what does so-and-so think about me” to a whole new level. Having a huge crush on Kira like Raf does, he wants to protect her. But his “protection” comes in a way that Kira just might not appreciate.

All in all, I’m intrigued by this world and these characters. And I’m ready for more. I predict that it won’t take me another two years before I dive into Open Minds (ha!). Without knowing much more, and with Mind Games only being 20 pages long, I just don’t feel like I have a lot to base my rate on, so I’m going with 3.5 Stars. I liked it. I want to know more, but it’d be pretty hard to blow me away in 20 pages I think. Have you read Mind Games? What did you think? Let me know!