The Conspiracy of Us
Sixteen year old Avery West has grown up with only her mother at her side and has always wondered about her father, who left them before Avery was born. Little does she know that her father is part of a secret society, called the Circle of Twelve, that basically runs the world, and that Avery herself is the key to an ancient prophecy. That means that if people were to find out who she really is, she’ll either be swept into her father’s world and forced into a marriage she doesn’t want, or she’ll be killed by an opposing secret society by the name the Order. To take charge of her own life, Avery has to search for clues about the past and the prophecy all over Europe in the hope of finding something that can give her the chance to live her life the way she wants to and not as a pawn.
It didn’t take long for me to feel that this book is very unrealistic. Generally, books are fiction and fiction is made up, imagined worlds. Some books are about space travel or worlds that don’t even exists, but The Conspiracy of Us is set in, what I believe is, our day and age. Yet somehow this book was more unrealistic than stories about jumping between parallel dimensions. It wasn’t even the secret society that bothered me, or the conspiracy theories, but the characters and the choices they made, especially Avery. I lifted my eyebrows and frowned at the book numerous times because I just didn’t buy what she did, or how she thought, or the way she reasoned.
At the start of the book, Avery agrees to go with a guy she just met, who also just threatened her with a blade, all the way from Minnesota to Paris to find out something about her father’s family. She’s in a room full of people when the guy, Stellan, brings his knife out, but Avery doesn’t want to “make a scene” by raising her voice and bring attention to them which seems rather backwards to me. She then flies across the Atlantic without knowing anything about Stellan or Jack, a new guy in her school who Avery learns only came to her city to find her for the people he works for, one of the Twelve familes, blindly choosing to trust them when it comes to finding her family. When in Paris, Avery learns that her family isn’t actually there yet but will come in the day after, so she spends the night with the family Stellan works for. After that follows two incredibly crazy days where Avery is at Prada, the store closed solely for her shopping trip, and is almost killed before she decides to go with Stellan and a few other teenagers from the Circle families to Istanbul for a night of clubbing but ends up chasing clues for a mystery with Jack while being chased by people from the Order, yet again coming to kill her. Throughout this Avery stays extremely calm, acts way above her age only to turn around and be extremely childlike the next second. Everyone, especially the Order, seemed to know everything about Avery before she herself did and I can only wonder where that information came from as well as how they knew where she was at all times.
Avery is sixteen and at times I accepted her rash and naïve behavior as something a sixteen year old would do (although I can’t stop thinking that, in this day and age when we’re taught as children to never get into a stranger’s car, it’s mighty weird that Avery thought it okay to fly to another continent with someone who pulled a knife on her five minutes earlier). The next minute, however, I found everything she did to be wrong in every sense. Not something a sixteen year old would do, or think, or assume. It’s like she can’t decide if she’s a child or a grown-up. The whole feeling of the book was childish, and I know it’s supposed to be a YA book, probably for teenagers around sixteen themselves, but it was much more immature than other books in the same age-range that I’ve read before. Flying across Europe in private jets, being chased around by assassins at every corner, trying to solve a puzzle that has apparently gone unnoticed for hundreds of years… and all the killings and all the death right and left – and no one who truly seemed to care one bit. On top of it all, the idea that Avery, sixteen, would be forced into a marriage is ridiculous. I accept that the people in the Circle could put a gun to her head and force her to say yes, but I can’t accept that it would be legal for a sixteen year old to get married, no matter what secret society she belonged to.
There’s a love story as well, between her and Jack, which also seems very rushed. They’ve known each other for a week, or a few weeks, there wasn’t much detail about this, but the entire book only spans across three days and that’s when their love story truly kicks in. It’s very insta-love, very serious and real – the way it is when you're a teenager, and always with this heavy knowledge of it being wrong and that Jack, working for one of the twelve families in the Circle, could be killed if anyone found out about him and Avery. That’s another part of the book that seemed unrealistic – the extreme power the families had, especially over their employees, like Jack. They can be killed right and left for small wrongdoings and while I suppose that’s the life in a powerful secret society, it was written and told in a way that made it hard for me to believe.
I could go on and on about all the unrealistic aspects of the book, like the fact that characters reacted very mildly to death in general, which I found strange, or that Avery was extremely naïve when it came to who the Circle was, what kind of people they were, but instantly accepted that she’s the key to the prophecy very early on, without any real proof. It felt like a lot of things happened in the book because it was convenient and while it’s like that in most books, it’s not supposed to feel that way. I'm not supposed to know that it all was meant to happen this way, I'm supposed to be so caught up in the story I won't even notice the author behind it. I was very aware of Hall in the shadows of this novel. The writing felt rushed as well, with very little details about surroundings and landscapes – except when it was convenient of course. Sometimes I had to go back and reread parts because it felt unclear and I never really felt connected to the characters and their quest.
All in all, it wasn’t a very good book. It all felt like something I’ve read before, especially the characters, and the story was at once too complicated and to unrealistic to do anything for me. The wait has, alas, been in vain. I can’t help hoping that the sequel will be better and I still feel like I want some more answers before I completely give up on Avery’s story so I might just continue with the next book anyway, but if I'd known all I know now before I picked this one up I would've stayed away from it.