Children of the Lost

Started by SDLagent, May 08, 2010, 07:28:36 PM

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Hardy Boys UB Fan

Quote from: tomswift2002 on February 14, 2011, 07:52:38 PM
I finished Children of The Lost a few days ago---and really I have no inclination to pick up Lost Brother and continue on in the story.  Sure the book didn't end with one suspect being arrested and the author having to think of a contrivance to continue the story, like all the other trilogies have ended in their first book, but the author made the book end on an overused cliff-hanger in the Undercover Brothers series---murder. 

Plus, as I've mentioned in the past, with Children of the Lost I found that Frank and Joe  have become very stagnant characters in this series in comparison to their counterparts from the Original Continuity and the Casefiles continuity.  When I recently read The Borderline Case, even though I hadn't read the Casefiles in order in over a decade and I hadn't read the Casefiles in order before the book, I found that the Frank and Joe in that book had a history with crime fighting that you didn't need to read any other books to know that Frank and Joe had solved other cases by themselves and with the Network and the boys knew how to handle the situation in a way that showed that they were mature enough to be on the mission, but at the same time they still had that vulnerability about them because they were teenagers (who couldn't age).  The Frank and Joe of the Casefiles and Original Continuity had a 3-dimensionality about them that is not evident in the Undercover Brothers Frank and Joe.

In The Children Of The Lost, sure I had not read an Undercover Brothers book completely since March of 2010,  I found that the Frank and Joe who were presenting themselves too me were very 1-dimensional and could easily be replaced with another character who had a different name.  These Hardy Boys were very timid and almost scaredy cats who seemed to have very little knowledge about investigating anything, and were more interested in being "journalists" that are along for the ride in order to tell a story, and nothing more.  And with the books written in the first-person you exepect to have a more personal story about the boys, but I really felt like I was watching a play behind a theater curtain, where when it was lit you could see right through it, but when the lights are turned off it's just another curtain.  And the Frank and Joe that were presented seemed to be the type of tertiary character where you are maybe given enough information to learn that they have a wife or husband, but once the character leaves the scene,  that's it for that character. 

Rating for The Children Of The Lost: 4 out of 10.

I liked it! :)