The Innocent Assassins by Pema Donyo

The Innocent Assassins by Pema Donyo
Release Date: 14th June, 2014
Publisher: Astraea Press
Source: Author
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There are three rules to staying an assassin at the corporation of Covert Operatives: (1) your parents must be deceased, (2) your contracts must remain confidential, and (3) you must be under the age of eighteen.

After a murder mission goes awry a month before her eighteenth birthday, Covert Operatives assassin Jane Lu finds herself caught by the federal government and forced to spy for the CIA while remaining in Covert Operatives. Once her spying mission is over she will be allowed to live a civilian life without facing criminal consequences, a life she's only dreamed of having.

As Jane leaks information to the CIA, she uncovers secrets with enough power to both destroy Covert Operatives and her own boyfriend, Adrian King, who's next in line to be CEO of the company. When her identity as a double agent for the CIA is discovered within Covert Operatives, she must decide where her allegiance, and her heart, truly lies.

This book was bad, just really, really bad. Like so bad I didn’t even make it to the halfway point before I started skimming. I was honestly tempted to DNF, and that might have been the better decision rather than seeing this book through to the predictably terrible end.

The plot is something weak about a school/company that employs kids under the age of eighteen and trains them up to become assassins. After the age of eighteen they either graduate out and live a normal life or become ~executives, because in this book eighteen is like middle age or something. I don’t even know.

Anyways, the assassins basically take out anyone they’re paid enough to kill regardless of who the victim is, which relates to the moral crisis the main character goes through in the space of about two paragraphs. But ignore all that stuff because this book is really a Romance, and a rubbish one at that. The main character, Jane, and her boyfriend, Adrian, go through tedious breakups and makeups, discuss sex in weird, inappropriate settings, want to get married and have children, and Jane loves him like, so much. He’s so hot apparently that Jane can’t stop thinking about him ever so we get a constant narrative of how ~amazing Adrian is, and how he’s such a ~good kisser etc. etc. At one point Jane gets interrogated, and keeping in mind she’s supposed to have been trained for this from the age of like seven or something, doesn’t focus on anything except her internal crisis over Adrian. Super fun.

There’s also a love triangle because of course there had to be one. Tristan is a cop because that’s not a cliché at all; Jane then spends a lot of time mooning about Tristan versus Adrian ad nauseam. Jane has no personality outside of her love interests, and whatever decision she makes are clearly related to or are about the guys in her life. I didn’t exactly have high hopes from a book with a hilarious oxymoron for a title but what I got was not good. Not good at all.

There is no plot, the writing was awful and the characters were a joke. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone.