Okay, that’s not true at all. I know very little about the Lion Game. This book is only 157 pages, and it could have used a few more. A lot is packed into those pages. It starts out well, but then it feels like a snowball gaining momentum down a hill, and I’m not sure I followed everything in the second half.
Although I do know this. See exhibit A, our heroine, Telzey:
She is 15. FIFTEEN. Way to go, 1973!
Anyway. Telzey has psi powers. She’s able to telepathically connect with and control other people, and she does the latter with a cavalier entitlement that bothered me a bit. On an outing in a national park with some friends, she brushes minds with a fellow psi, who gets his kicks hunting humans with his psychic, teleporting “mind hound” in empty areas of the park. She overpowers him super-duper easily, locks away his memories so he won’t hurt anyone else, teleports his beastie into a mountain (VERY cool), and then joins up with Psychic Services to hunt down the people who supplied the creepy dude with the mind hound.
All that part was exciting and fun. But when she joins the psychic FBI, basically, it just goes full speed ahead and she’s the best they’ve ever seen and she gets a page of training and then she’s assigned to infiltrate some weird space station with two different races (but not really) of psi-powered giants fighting each other, and there are portals and aliens and fighting according to codes and complicated plans to take over the secret section of the station where nobody knows the giants exist and WHAT. First of all, Telzey being SO GOOD and so calm and so accomplished right away was a bit much. I kept thinking of Harry Potter, and how he saved the world a zillion times as a teenager, but he had help, and occasionally freaked out, and hit some snags or whatever. Telzey’s just like, doo de doo, gonna waltz in here and stop this war, ha ha, you didn’t even know I’d taken over your mind, on to the next obstacle, done! She’s never worried, or frazzled, or outgunned, or anything.
And B of all, I totally missed some threads about what the hell was going on with the giants’ civil war and the secret portal stations and what exactly the goal of everything was. That could be the fault of the reader, though, and I just couldn’t keep up. And the mind hounds were pretty wicked.
All in all, a fun ride, but possibly could have used some slowing down and spacing out of plot points. Or I should’ve been taking notes.
(Sorry, Dad. I’d still read more of her!)