People's Republic

February Sometime

People’s Republic by Robert Muchamore

First of all I have read all of the original CHERUB series and loved it! I started reading the prequel series about how CHERUB came into existence and found that it wasn't my cup of tea.  I now intend to read all of this sequel series beginning with People's Republic.

The only problem with having read so many of Muchamore's books is that I knew by halfway through the book what was going to happen next. 

Okay so I'll stop with the suspense now.  CHERUB is a secret organisation run by the British Intelligence Service.  Thee use children because they are able to slip underneath the suspicion radar of adults.  Through the children CHERUB is able to infiltrate some of the World's toughest terrorist groups.  The agents are taught to be manipulative to befriend their specified 'target' in order to get information out of them.  

People's Republic follows the protagonists Ryan Sharma, a CHERUB agent, and Fu Ning, a Chinese student.  

At the start of the book these two people had never met before. 

Ning, as she is called,  is a student living in China who has dodgy adoptive parents.  Having never known what her adoptive parents did for a living it comes as a shock when her adoptive mother Ingrid makes them flee from the country to Kyrgyzstan due to her father being captured by the police over human trafficking.  While in Kyrgyzstan Ning and her stepmother were tortured by Leon Ara

Ryan is sent on a mission to infiltrate the Aramov Clan.  The majority of the Aramov Clan resides in Kyrgyzstan but one relative lives in California.  Ryan is sent to California to pursue this link to the Aramov Clan.  

 The first half of the book was giving the reader the background information on who Ryan and Ning are.  By about halfway through the book I could guess that something would happen on Ryan’s mission and that he would end up meeting Ning.  

While it was annoying that I had figured out the ending of the book before I had even made it halfway through the book it also left me feeling intrigued because I wanted to see how the author would write the rest of the book.  

Muchamore's writing style doesn't change throughout the CHERUB series' and it is because of this that I get the feeling that I wasn’t the only one of his previous readers that figured out this book as they read it.  While I am used to his style of writing he still manages to keep me on the edge of my seat and leaves me wondering what will happen next.  His books are fast paced and he doesn't ramble on about nonsense that doesn't help the story progress.  How he continues to write many different missions and any two missions are never the same I am not sure.


Picture:
People's Republic (CHERUB) n.d., photograph, Amazon, accessed 13 April 2012, <http://www.amazon.co.uk/Peoples-Republic-CHERUB-Robert-Muchamore/dp/1444906879 >.