#robert muchamore

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read The Recruit by Robert Muchamore (2004)?

yes

no

I didn't finish it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onJun 16

[frajer-00]

art trade for @/idore14 on instagram, if you like CHERUB check em out

[peachy-keen22]

I love Percy Jackson, okay. And I’ve never read Harry Potter, I found J K Rowling’s writing so fucking boring and that was before she was terfing everywhere.

But my child/teen book series was Cherub and there is something that hits different about loving James (the protagonist) and him like him just being the worst and loving him anyway.

Also Robert sends the abusive parents to prison and James does actually get punished for bullying (Ms Rowling could never)

[semper-legens]

119. The Killing, by Robert Muchamore

Owned: No, library Page count: 306 My summary: James Adams is on another mission. Sulking from an outburst that left another agent injured, he gladly accepts anything that’ll take him away from campus for a while. He’s on the tail of a car dealer who has come into a suspiciously large amount of money, but what he finds could prove a wider conspiracy. One that even the cops are implicated in... My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

Ah, CHERUB. You confuse the hell out of me. This book was no different from the others in being not the kind of thing I can turn my brain off for, because the politics of it are dodgy enough that I have serious questions. I hate to sound like a broken record with this series, because the same things just keep cropping up again and again and again, but it bears repeating that this series is juuuuuuuuuuuuuust on the verge of copaganda. Which is impressive, given that this one is the one where the cops are doing the crimes.

But first, James’ arc. It’s really hard to miss what the character development is meant to be for James this go-around. It starts when, in a sulk from Kerry breaking up with him, James beats the shit out of some other kid for no reason and then is all ‘woe is me’ when all of his friends blank him for it. Yeah, that’s what happens when you beat up someone for no good reason just because they got in your way. Idiot. So James has to learn to control his temper and not lash out at others. The thing is, though, the narrative is focused a little too much on his self-pity. I get that we’re not necessarily supposed to think James beating that kid up is good, but we’re expected to keep sympathising with him as the everyman main character. And I just can’t sympathise with James. He’s too volatile, a little scary, and largely unrepentant for the bad things he does. I’m not sure he even really learns his lesson. I don’t like it!

So let’s talk crooked cops. James encounters the crooked cop of this piece, Michael Patel, when he slams James’ head into a car during an arrest for no real reason. It later turns out that Patel totally killed a kid and was helping the car dealer in a heist. I...question the decision to have the only confirmed cop character who is a person of colour be the one who is crooked and working with the Bad Guys, and also the lack of perspective on what makes a bad cop. Granted, I’m writing this well after the BLM movement’s existence, but it’s not like police violence wasn’t a Thing in the mid-2000s. Patel is just shown as being Bad. We don’t see him justifying his own actions as Stopping The Bad Guys in the way that real bad cops do. There is a moment where our good cop character closes ranks around him initially, but she does a 180 after looking into Patel’s record and learning that he is, actually, Bad. No sense of all cops closing ranks around murderers even when they know they’re murderers. As is becoming the norm for CHERUB, the morality is just a little too black and white for the complex situations they’re covering.

Which is saying something when the climax of James’ mission is him and the other agents manipulating the emotions of Patel and the car dealer so they’d be at each other’s throats and let slip a confession. I dunno, this kind of cop work never sits right with me, the idea of near-gaslighting someone just so that they will confess their crimes next to a microphone they don’t know is there. But of course, Patel and co are Bad People, so James and the others are narratively justified for anything they do to stop them. Obviously.

Next up, an airman is potentially executed for a crime that never occurred.

[queer-cosette]

Are the cherub books you've been reading the ones about the ophans becoming spies?? I loved those books

Yes! the ones by Robert Muchamore! The Killing is probably my fave, followed by Maximum Security!!!! I first read them when I was about 11 and have most of the First Wave books (I think up to The General) but gave up three-quarters of the way through The Fall bc I found James was being too much of a dick :(

[mountain-ash-and-rusted-iron]

spoiler alert - a new oc

for a fandom that im pretty sure is non-existent lmao

did any of y’all ever read the CHERUB series? it was about like teen spies in the UK. They were being recruited by the govt, very unethical, all between ages ten-eighteen, they had a coloured shirt system to denote hierarchy and super secret agent skill level, the main character was a kid called james adams

(and he was mostly a dipshit, but hey, late 90s/early200s standards for teenage boys were very low, im willing to forgive that one)

[a-shutthefuckup]

I started the cherub book series not knowing there were books previous to Ryan's story

Granted I don't think I care enough to go and read them all, but a heads up would've been nice

[reinekes-fox]

So I started rereading one of the CHERUB books and one thing I really hate about them is James cheating! I could puke, whenever he cheats on Kerry and then just whines. 

Was that necessary? Is that normal for teenagers? I have no clue, but I absolutly hate it.